From the Internet: 20 September 2023
The assassination in Berlin this morning of Pope Linus II has been a great shock to the
world. This Pope, who had transformed Roman Catholicism in a generation, was shot with a
single bullet from the revolver of a Jewish fanatic who reproached the Pope for his
repeated calls for justice for the Palestinian people.
Pope Linus II, his civil name George Zakiyah, was born in an impoverished Aramaic-speaking
village in western Syria on St. George's Day, 6 May, 1945. Though his parents, Youcef
and Myriem, were Orthodox by faith, they were forced to bring up their only son as a
Catholic, since at that time this was the only way in which they could obtain schooling
and medical care. Of humble peasant background, George showed himself to be a very
able pupil and with the help of a scholarship he went on to study Modern Languages at
the University of Damascus, on graduation studying theology at the Gregorian University
in Rome. In 1963, aged 28, George was ordained, working as a parish priest in the
Lebanon, mainly in Beirut. In 1988 he was appointed Catholic Bishop of Damascus, where
he showed great diplomatic abilities which may well have resulted in his appointment as
a Cardinal only six years later in 1994. At this point it seemed as if his already
distinguished career were over and he would eventually retire into the ecclesiastical
obscurity of the Middle East. However when Pope John-Paul II died and a divided Catholic
Church could not agree on a successor, this young and obscure Arab Catholic Cardinal
was elected Pope of Rome. This surprise-choice was in fact a compromise. To
traditionalists it seemed a safe bet to elect a non-European and a non-American,
appointed Cardinal by the conservative John-Paul II. To liberals he seemed a good
choice to represent the Third World since he was young and came from an oppressed
minority. Only the State of Israel disapproved of his surprise election. Surprise
increased when the new Pope refused to take the name 'John-Paul III', as all had
expected, and instead took the name Linus II after the first Pope of Rome, Linus I,
consecrated by St. Peter. Indeed the new Pope's choice was the first of many, symbolising
a radical departure from what had gone before and a genuine return to the Early Church.
Indeed Pope Linus II took as his slogans: 'Return to the first millennium to go into
the third millennium' and 'Turn the clocks back a thousand years to put them forward a
thousand years'. And these phrases did indeed set the pattern for his whole 'episcopate'
- as he called it. Traditionalists and liberals alike were stunned by Pope Linus' call
to cast aside all the 'errors', as he openly called them, amassed by the Roman Catholic
Church during the second millennium. Pope Linus' first symbolic act, to drop Latin as
the Vatican's official language and replace it by English, shocked many. Even more so
when he pointed out to them that Christ had never spoken Latin, but Aramaic, the Pope's
own mother-tongue, and that if Christ returned, he would not speak a dead language such
as Latin. But this was nothing compared to his next act, which was to allow married
men access to the priesthood. For the first time in over 900 years married Catholic
priests were officially allowed to celebrate the mass. But the Pope's third act shocked
traditionalists even more. Admitting that his predecessors had been mistaken in their
dogmatism, Pope Linus stated that as Pope he had nothing to say about the use of
contraception, declaring that this was not a dogmatic question, but a pastoral one,
and that it was up to Catholics to act in this domain according to their consciences
and their confessors' advice. He himself, he said, could see cases in which there was
no alternative to contraception.
In the furore but also popular acclaim that followed these actions, Pope Linus' fourth
action, to return to traditional Trinitarian Theology and spirituality by outlawing
the 'filioque' and removing it for ever from the Catholic Creed, passed almost unseen,
except by the Orthodox Church. But it was in fact this act which has led to the
extraordinary spiritual renewal which the Catholic Church has witnessed in the last two
decades. The realisation that much that had previously passed for spirituality had in
fact been psychic fraud was perhaps the deepest change in all of Pope Linus' radical
episcopate. Certainly it led to the decanonisation of several previously popular
Catholic 'saints'. At this vital point, in February 2002, it seemed as though the
Catholic Church would break apart into traditionalists and liberals. The situation
was saved, however, when in spring 2002, Pope Linus stated his clear opposition to
priestesses, cremation, the changing of the date of Easter, condemning freemasonry
and reinstating into the calendar several Saints, such as St. George, the Patron of
Palestine, St. Catherine, St. Barbara and St. Christopher, who had been rejected at
the Second Vatican Council. Traditionalists were so pleased by these moves that it
seemed that they were almost ready to forgive the Pope for his former apparently liberal
stance. In fact such actions were to typify Pope Linus' whole episcopate. Thus in 2003
when he moved out of the Vatican, which he turned into a 'Musuem of the Renaissance',
abandoning his status as a political leader and abolishing the Vatican as a State,
he appalled traditionalists but pleased liberals. But in the same year when he called
on Catholics worldwide to renew their prayer-life, calling for monastic renewal and
calling all Catholics to weekly fasting and regular confession, both of which they had
almost wholly abandoned, the opposite occurred. In particular his restoration of the
forty-day Lenten and Advent Fasts, of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays and of the
eucharistic fast shocked liberals, but appeased the traditionalists.
The crowning achievement of Pope Linus' episcopate must however be his calling of
the First Council of Rome, to which he invited not only Catholic bishops, but also
all Orthodox bishops, giving the latter the right to vote on equal terms and greeting
Orthodox Patriarchs as equals. It was at this Council in 2010 that Pope Linus in a
great act of humility condemned the dogma of Papal Infallibility and rejected the
dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. His liturgical reforms which
returned Catholicism to the practices of the Early Church, including his demand that
priests administrate confirmation at the same time as baptism, give infants communion,
that communion be for all under both kinds, the return to priestly celebration facing
the altar, back to the people, the abandonment of the mediæval bishop's mitre in
favour of the earlier form and the rejection of Gothic Architecture as a 'mediæval
aberration' attracted the attention of many. But it was above all the return of Roman
Catholicism to collegiality and the total abandonment of what Pope Linus himself
called 'Papism' that truly stole the world's attention. His nomination of six
Patriarchs for North America, Latin America, Africa, Australasia, China and India
with absolute authority for all Catholics in their jurisdictions has certainly been
the greatest reform of Catholicism since the eleventh century Hildebrandine reforms,
which first introduced compulsory clerical celibacy and enforced papal
authoritarianism. Today the Pope of Rome is merely a venerable figurehead among the
Metropolitan-Bishops of Western Europe and on other continents local Catholic Bishops
now elect their own Patriarchs from their midst, quite independently of Rome.
In the ecumenical field Pope Linus' policies were greeted with enthusiasm by both
Protestants and Orthodox. The former were pleased with Pope Linus condemnation of
the 'grave errors' of the Middle Ages such as indulgences and his decanonisation of
several medieval Catholic pseudo-saints, who had been well-known for their persecution
of Protestants and other dissidents. Pope Linus, perhaps not surprisingly given his
background, drew Catholicism much closer, however, to the Orthodox Church, which he
called 'the source of the true Catholic Tradition'. His decanonisation of 'political
saints', mass murderers as varied as Charlemagne, Josaphat of Polotsk, Andrew Bobola
or Stepinac of Zagreb, was warmly greeted, as was his abandonment of the Uniats and
his call to them to return to Orthodoxy. His condemnation of the previously justified
filioque as 'a profound spiritual error' which had led to 'the spiritual deformation
of Catholicism', together with his condemnations of Scholastic theology as 'mere
philosophy' and his call for a return to 'the values of Patristic theology' as well as
the decanonisations of Scholastic philosophers were just as appreciated. But it was
perhaps above all his categorical condemnation of the Crusades as 'abominable banditry',
and the condemnation of Austrian, Polish and Croat aggression towards Orthodox during
the twentieth century and the direct and indirect responsibility of the Vatican for
the mass-murder of Orthodox in the First and Second World Wars that made Pope Linus
popular among ordinary Orthodox. Nobody will forget his repentance in Serbia and his
insertion into the Catholic calendar of the Serbian New Martyrs massacred by so-called
'Catholic' fanatics, which so outraged the hardline Croat government in 2012. Nobody was
surprised when this was followed in the next year by the inclusion in the Catholic
calendar of all Orthodox saints, including the Russian New Martyrs. Although relations
with the Muslim world were somewhat improved by this Arab Pope's condemnation of the
Crusades, generally links with the non-Christian world moved little during the Pope's
episcopate and with Judaism probably worsened. Indeed it was Pope Linus' reiterated
calls for the return of Palestine to the Palestinians that provoked his assassination
this morning by a Jewish fanatic in Berlin.
Frankly it is difficult to see what will happen now in the Catholic Church. It is hard
to imagine who could possibly replace this head of Catholicism in Western Europe who
condemned the 'errors of Catholicism', calling on Catholics to 'return to the Church'
and who repeatedly called himself 'only a Bishop of Rome'. Since Pope Linus' abolition
of Cardinals, it is now the unenviable task of the Metropolitans of Western Europe to
choose a new Pope. How can this man who has rewritten the history of Western
Christianity ever be replaced? This question remains unanswerable, unless of course it
is decided that there is no need to replace him ... .
More details of the book "The Lighted Way" and where to buy it, can be found on The English Orthodox Trust page of this site.
