Jerusalem, Then Rome

As the procession of churchmen wound slowly through Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, the elderly, bespectacled Anglican prelate stopped before the Roman Catholic altar, knelt and murmured a brief prayer. He also knelt before the two other altars in the three-sect church: the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox. Flashbulbs popped and newsmen recorded the fact, for the prelate was none other than the Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, 73, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the Church of England. Dr. Fisher was in the Holy Land on the first leg of a twelve-day Middle Eastern pilgrimage that will climax this week in Rome in a "Christian summit meeting" with Pope John XXIII, the first meeting since the 14th century of a Roman pontiff and an Archbishop of Canterbury.

In his whirlwind, two-day tour of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Dr. Fisher was honored by Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox patriarchs, Coptic and Maronite prelates. Anglican bishops, a Lutheran provost, an Ethiopian abbot, Franciscan monks, a Moslem sheik. But even the tensions of Israeli-Arab politics could not disturb the Primate. Before a crowd of 1,000 people, Bethlehem's Mayor Ayoub Musallam called on the archbishop to look carefully at the "plight and situation of the Arab refugees, our brethren who are still living in tents, huts and caves." Expertly sidestepping Ayoub's entreaty, Dr. Fisher answered: "What can I say? The troubles here and around the world have my deepest sympathy, but I have no power, no authority to right the evils of the world. Only Christ can put them right."

Both churches and mosques were on the archbishop's itinerary. Guarded by two black-uniformed kawases (attendants) armed with scimitars, he toured Jerusalem's mosques, wearing large sheepskin overslippers. Then the Primate walked up the Via Dolorosa on the route where Christ had climbed to Calvary.

Spice, meat, and candy vendors were herded behind their rickety counters to let the archbishop and his party pass. "A bit difficult sightseeing this way, isn't it?" said Dr. Fisher. The archbishop entered the three-sect Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Greek, Armenian, and Roman Catholic priests fought for his attention. "It is very hard to compress eternity into only a few moments," said the archbishop, as the organ began pealing God Save the Queen. (The organist was a Belgian Catholic who had no idea what else was appropriate for an Anglican churchman.)

An indefatigable sightseer, the Primate toured the Garden of Gethsemane, where he plucked an olive branch from a tree alleged to have been planted before the birth of Christ, and viewed the Dead Sea Scrolls. Near the town of Nablus, Dr. Fisher, fortified with a strong dose of stomach salts, drank freely from Jacob's Well. (The archbishop, said his staff, was holding up well under the rigors of the Middle Eastern diet.) He looked at the ruins where Salome danced, saw the site where John the Baptist was beheaded. At the River Jordan, the archbishop refused to be totally immersed, instead dipped his foot in the waters.

But the archbishop's most symbolic encounter, before he moved on to Beiru and Istanbul, was with Roman Catholic Monsignor Alberto Gori, Roman Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem. Referring to his forthcoming meeting with the Pope, Dr Fisher told Monsignor Gori: "There are moments when I realize why divisions are transcended even while they exist." Replied the monsignor hopefully: "The ice has been broken."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.