And now I beseech thee, lady,
not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee,
but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.
2 John 1:5
"It was a typical day at the shrine around what many believe is the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem’s Old City. A Greek Orthodox choir sang inside a room facing the baroque structure. But the voices 
“Sometimes they punch each other,” Farah Atallah, a church guard wearing a fez, observed with a shrug.
Mr. Atallah is a seasoned witness to the rivalries among the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities that jealously share — and sometimes spar over — what they consider Christianity’s holiest site, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Amid the rivalry, the unsteady 206-year-old structure, held together by a 69-year-old iron cage that honors the keystone of Christianity, the tomb from which Christians believe Jesus was resurrected, is an uncomfortable, often embarrassing symbol of Christian divisions, which have periodically erupted into tensions. In 2008, monks and priests brawled near the shrine, throwing punches and pulling one another’s hair.
But in recent weeks, scaffolding has gone up a few feet from the shrine in the gloomy shadows of the Arches of the Virgin, the first step in a rare agreement by the various Christian communities to save the dilapidated shrine, also called the Aedicule, from falling down.
The March 22 agreement calls for a $3.4 million renovation to begin next month, after Orthodox Easter celebrations. Each religious group will contribute one-third of the costs, and a Greek bank contributed 50,000 euros, or $57,000, for the scaffolding, in return for having its name emblazoned across the machinery.
Alarmed by reports that the shrine was at risk of collapse, the Israeli police barricaded it for several hours on Feb. 17, 2015, throwing out the monks who guard it and preventing hundreds of pilgrims from entering.
The message was clear: Fix it, or else.
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| From the "Really" File |
Two women from the Eternal Sacred Order of the Cherubim and Seraphim, in Nigeria, wearing matching blue dresses and head scarves, walked shoeless into the Aedicule, crossing the Chapel of the Angel, with its walls of elaborately carved marble and proclamations in Greek. They bent through the low door into the Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher, where, under oil lamps, two white marble slabs denote the location of Jesus’ rock tomb.
The two women fell to their knees, raised their arms in supplication and fervently whispered prayers. They wiped their hands and photographs of children on the slabs.
Another day, a line of Indian Muslims squished against South Korean tourists, Indian nuns and Arab-American Christians stretched past the Chapel of the Copts, a room attached to the back of the Aedicule, where a monk guarding the site was engrossed in his smartphone.
Beside the mosaic is a ladder owned by Catholics, who will not move it. It is next to an Armenian-controlled walkway of a few feet leading to the Aedicule, where non-Armenian priests in vestments may pass, but not stand, because that would suggest they are challenging Armenian control.
Pope Francis met the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, at the Aedicule, to promote unity." NYT
REALLY?
