Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/200

SYRIA, THE LAND OF LEBANON Banias continued to flow in from that country as long as Butrus lived.

In 1897 the highest ecclesiastics of the Greek Catholic Church gathered in solemn convention at Serba to elect a new patriarch. Butrus Jureijery was the people's choice; but the odds against him seemed overwhelming. He was too active and too honest for the hierarchy. The Turkish government was inimical to him, the powerful Jesuit order fought him, the papal nuncio objected to his nomination, and the bishops, almost to a man, opposed him.

For once, however, the Syrian peasants defied their ecclesiastical lords. Word was sent to the convention that its members need not return to their dioceses unless they cast their votes for Butrus. So, in spite of government, Jesuits, papal nuncio, and the wishes of the very electors themselves, the enterprising bishop of Banias became "Patriarch of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and the Whole East," and, subject to a hardly more than nominal allegiance to the Vatican, the supreme head of a great church whose five million adherents are scattered throughout the Near East from Hungary to Persia and from the Black Sea to the upper Nile.

He had been elected as the "People's Patriarch," and such he remained. A religious and political autocrat, with every opportunity and every precedent for using his office to enrich himself and his family he remained poor and honest to the end. This means [ 158 ]