Legacy

The legacy of St. Joseph of Damascus and the Damascus Martyrs: a named martyr for the Antiochian Church’s great nineteenth-century catastrophe, a patron of the Arab Orthodox diaspora, and a witness that gathers the suffering of the Christian East into martyric meaning. This file traces what the saint has become.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

A Name for a Catastrophe

The first and deepest legacy of St. Joseph is that he gives the Antiochian Church a name and a face for the catastrophe of 1860. The massacre of the Christians of Damascus was the great wound of the nineteenth-century Church of Antioch — thousands killed, a quarter burned, a community scattered (see The Damascus Massacre, July 1860). Such a catastrophe could have remained a formless grief, a dark date remembered as loss. Instead, in Joseph and the Damascus Martyrs, the Church has gathered it into a commemoration — a feast, a name, a martyrdom. The nameless thousands are venerated under the name of their priest; the loss is confessed as witness; the wound is kept, but kept as a martyr’s wound. This is what the Church does with the suffering of its people: it does not forget it and it does not merely mourn it, but takes it up into the communion of the saints (on this transformation, see The Companions in Martyrdom and Martyrdom and Arab Christian Identity).

A Patron for the Diaspora

Second, Joseph has become a patron of the Antiochian diaspora, and especially of the Arab Orthodox Christians of North America — the community that grew from the emigration set in motion by the very upheavals of which 1860 was a part (see The Cult in the Antiochian Church). There is a deep fitness in this. The diaspora that venerates St. Joseph is, in part, the continuation of the community he died with — its survivors and their descendants, carried across the world. In honoring him, the diaspora keeps faith with its origins: it remembers the Damascus from which it came, the martyrdom that marks its scattering, and the priest who stayed with his people to the end. The sibling collection on St. Raphael of Brooklyn — the Antiochian bishop born in Beirut in 1860 to a family displaced from Damascus, who carried the Arab Orthodox Church to America — makes the continuity explicit: Joseph the martyr and Raphael the missionary bishop are the two ends of the diaspora’s founding story (see St. Raphael of Brooklyn).

A Witness Among the New Martyrs

Third, St. Joseph takes his place among the New Martyrs — the martyrs of the modern Orthodox Church, whose memory the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Churches have been recovering and glorifying (the Russian New Martyrs of the Soviet years, the neomartyrs under the Ottoman yoke, and others). His 1993 glorification belongs to this wider movement of the Church’s memory, and it enriches it: the New Martyrs are not only the martyrs of the twentieth-century totalitarianisms but also the martyrs of the older sufferings of the Christian East, of which the 1860 massacre is a signal instance (on the New Martyrs generally, cf. the repository’s collections on the modern martyrs and confessors). Joseph is thus a witness that widens the Orthodox world’s sense of its own recent martyrology — a reminder that the age of martyrs did not end in antiquity, and that the Arab Christian East has its confessors of blood alongside the better-known martyrs of the North.

A Model for Clergy

Fourth, and more particularly, St. Joseph has become a model held up to clergy. The heart of his martyrdom is a priestly act: he did not flee, but took up the Reserved Sacrament and went out to bring the dying the Body and Blood of Christ, and died doing it (see The Martyrdom of Joseph and His Flock). This is the icon of the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11), realized in the concrete terms of a priest’s office. The Antiochian Church holds him up as an example of pastoral fidelity — of the priest who stays with his people in the hour of terror, and who counts the ministry of the sacraments worth his life (Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” biographical account and its devotional use). In an age when the pressures on clergy are of other kinds, the image retains its force: the pastor is the one who does not run.

A Wound Remembered Rightly

Finally, the legacy of St. Joseph includes a lesson about how to remember. The 1860 massacre could be — and sometimes has been — remembered as a charter of grievance, a story of Christian innocence and Muslim guilt, a weapon for present quarrels. The Church’s veneration of the martyrs points another way (see Not a Simple Story). To remember Joseph rightly is to remember the whole truth — the killing and the Muslim rescuers, the tangle of causes, the fidelity of the dead — and to let the memory issue in faithfulness rather than hatred. The martyrs died at the hands of a mob; they were saved, many of them, by Muslim neighbors; their priest had learned his letters from a Muslim scholar. A Church that venerates such martyrs is given, in the very act, a discipline against turning their memory into venom. That, too, is part of St. Joseph’s legacy: a martyrdom remembered in a way that honors the dead without wronging the living.

The sum of it is a saint who has become, for the Antiochian Church and beyond, the named martyr of its great nineteenth-century sorrow, the patron of its scattered children, a witness among the modern martyrs, a model for its clergy, and a school of right remembrance — the priest of the Mariamiyeh who carried Christ into the fire and did not come out.

See Also

References

  • Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” antiochpatriarchate.org. (The martyr and his veneration.)
  • Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” Biographical account. (The saint as model for clergy; the diaspora’s veneration.)
  • Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. (The catastrophe of 1860 and the community it struck.)
  • Scripture: John 10:11 (the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep).