Malphono has a point. Somehow I doubt the many, many Maronites who have lived in South America and Mexico
for several generations now have much use for Arabic outside of perhaps a few scant phrases thrown into their everyday Spanish here and there, particularly at community/cultural events. While I don’t agree at all with the poster who said that the vernacular of Maronites is Syriac (that’s simply not what the word ‘vernacular’ means), I do agree with the idea that Arabic is for Arabs, and any non-Arab identifying person who ended up speaking it through unfortunate turns of history should have the right to reject it without feeling like they’re compromising their cultural identity or background just because others in their community might embrace it (as you might guess, I’ve seen this play out among Copts, too…some are okay with Arabic and being identified as Arabs; in my limited experience, these are a minority, and enjoying Arabic in the liturgy or on TV or whatever does not mean accepting Arab identity). This is even more true in the diaspora, for obvious reasons… (i.e., a Maronite who has lived their entire life in Brazil or Australia because their great grandparents fled Ottoman massacres in the
1860s has about as much direct experience of life in the Levant as the average non-Maronite person, so why should they be expected to perform Lebanese identity via a language that their parents or grandparents might not even speak, or at least not well? Even if Lebanon is a mostly Arabic-speaking country, that’s certainly not the only thing about it that an immigrant takes with them and might pass on to their children.)
There is a lovely passage in Fr. Mark Gruber’s
Journey Back to Eden where he writes about his surprise at being asked to read from the Bible in English during a liturgy presided over by HH Pope Shenouda III at the cathedral in Cairo. Obviously, English is not the vernacular of the people attending or serving the liturgy at that particular location, but Fr. Gruber notes that HH quite enjoys having a foreign, English-speaking clergyman in attendance to proclaim the scriptures to the people – after all, there’s nothing intrinsically “Arab” about the Coptic Orthodox Church or its liturgy, so if you’re going to do it in one foreign language, why not also do it in another, particularly to show the openness of your church and to honor a foreign guest?
I’m no kind of Syriac person, so feel free to discard my stupid opinions, but I think that if the Maronites are not going to learn Syriac, then why not do the liturgy entirely in English for an English-speaking congregation of n-th generation Lebanese-Americans, or Spanish for the same in Mexico, Argentina, etc.? I realize it’s not that simple (it’s not like the Maronites have tons of opportunities to learn their traditional language, precisely because of the vernacularism that has gripped their church), but I think you either care about your heritage or you don’t. It’s not directly correlatable to the Coptic experience (give the Copts another hundred years of being a diaspora, then check back in), but since that’s the one I’m semi-living in, I can’t help but notice that even in my tiny community that is too small to have the Coptic lessons that many larger churches have, our priests still usually spend a bit of time before and after every liturgy going over the hymns with our deacons, and our bishops are sometimes seem alarmingly close to fluent in Coptic. I remember when I first met HG Bishop Youssef, for some reason one of our deacons introduced me by saying “This is Jeremy. He speaks Coptic.” Um…no…no, I don’t. Nobody does. HG lit up and immediately began asking me questions in Coptic, which I of course could not answer. Hahaha. It was very awkward, but the point is: These are people who have not spoken this language natively since maybe the 14th century (later reports of isolated villages where the women still spoke the language in the 17th century all stem from the dubious account of a single European traveler, which is not corroborated by any outside evidence; Arabic was first mandated to be read in the Church alongside Coptic in the mid-12th century by HH Pope Gabriel II), yet they still are quite interested in it and at least seek to learn it well enough to know their hymns and pass it on in a liturgical context. I get the sense that most of the Maronites aren’t even doing that, despite having lost the language at least a bit later, and still having native speakers of modern Syriac-derived dialects in their countries (Lebanon due to immigration, and Syria due to…it being Syria, where the language never completely died), from whom they could conceivably learn the language. I have read that there is no centralized, concentrated effort connected with the Patriarchate to teach the language to the people, so I’m guessing this is a leadership problem and you kind of have to “luck out” to get a priest or a bishop who cares about this issue. Sad. In the COC, Coptic is taught at the Theological School in Cairo, the Institute of Coptic Studies (also in Cairo), any number of Coptic seminaries and colleges throughout the world, and of course in many churches either formally or informally. It might not have brought the language back, and we still only speak it for at best maybe 20% of the average liturgy here at St. Bishoy COC (and Coptic friends in other places have told me that we’re lucky in that regard), but we also don’t have to worry about it going anywhere. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a 7 year old chant “Khen efran emefyot nem epshiri nem pnevnema ethowab…”
Synopsis: There are things you can do to fix this situation, but they’re largely not being done, so I can understand your frustration…still, you should be doing those things, since obviously other people won’t if you don’t.
Some identity, isn’t it? 
