Tottering Sepulchre

One of the sorriest sights in Christendom is the shrine that lays claim to being its spiritual center: Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encompasses the supposed sites of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection. The thousands of pilgrims who seek it out every year find the church little more than a musty ruin. The southern fac,ade is some 6 in. out of plumb, held up by a cat's cradle of iron shorings erected by the British in 1935. Under the crumbling vaulting of the south transept, a scaffold has been put up to protect tourists from falling masonry. The facing of Christ's tomb itself is crumbling; large stones fall from the cornice of the cupola ceiling; leaks abound.

Rights & Privileges. Originally built by Constantine in 356, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed by the Persians in 616 and by the Egyptians in 1009. But more disastrous to the shrine than its pagan enemies have been its Christian friends. Today the church is occupied by six Christian sects--Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite), Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, Abyssinian-- all of them so caught up in denominational jealousies that they cannot agree on repairs or on anything else. They hold their services in spaces as carefully marked as those in a parking lot, and about as large (the areas were frozen by Turkish Sultan Abdul Majid shortly before the Crimean War). The Syrian Orthodox, for example, may worship only in an area extending from the middle of the seventh pillar of the rotunda to a spot marked by a black cross on the right of the ninth column.

The border lines of sectarian prerogatives are patrolled more carefully than most international frontiers. Before Easter, for instance, the Roman Catholics, who claim the privilege of cleaning the outside of the windows, make a demonstration of standing by and watching while the Greek Orthodox--who also claim the privilege--actually do the cleaning. The Armenian Apostolic Church still claims the Chapel of Nicodemus, now used by the Syrian Orthodox, though the Armenians declare they have the keys. At least three violent incidents have resulted--once over the repairing of one of the doors, once over the possession of a closet, once over the chapel's whitewashing.

Collapse Preferred. Since 1947 the Roman Catholics, the Greek Orthodox and the Armenians, the three groups which occupy most of the church, have been negotiating about repairs. The Catholics first demanded a complete restoration of the church, but the Greeks, fearing that restorations would uncover some former Roman Catholic sites that the Greeks had plastered over during a restoration in 1810 and might so endanger their position under the status quo, have advocated limiting all work to "consolidation." The Armenians have built up their own position by playing a balance-of-power game between the other two. A technical bureau in which each of the three groups is equally represented has been set to carry out the repairs if a set of plans can ever be mutually approved. But no one seems very optimistic.

Said a disgusted minister from Ohio last week: "It would be better to let the church collapse. Then all that masonry could be carted away, and a simple, impressive monument could be erected to mark Golgotha and the tomb. That's what I came here to see."

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