@Salibi
@catholic03
@dochawk
@OrbisNonSufficit
For me, this has turned out to be a highly informative thread. I knew nothing at all about the history of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. In fact I still don’t know very much, since I don’t have any books that deal with it and on the internet I haven’t found more than a few isolated scraps of information. If any of you can help to fill in the gaps, I will be most grateful. For a start, I’d like to find out what happened, exactly, on two separate occasions, more than seven centuries apart, that seem to hold the key to all the rest.
The first date is 1099. That was when the first Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Arnulf of Chocques, was elected, according to Wikipedia. But it doesn’t say who elected him. My guess would be all the ordained Catholic clergy then resident in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the formal name of the political entity usually known as the Crusader State. But that’s only a guess. I have no idea what kind of hierarchy, if any, may have been in existence at the time. The Knights Hospitaller, aka the Knights of Malta, also apparently date back to the same year of 1099, and the Knights Templar weren’t constituted as an order until about twenty years later.
And what was the situation of the Orthodox Patriarchate at the time? I found the name Simeon II, who was patriarch from 1084 until his death (or exile?) in 1106. When the Latin Kingdom, or its clergy, chose to give Arnulf the title of “patriarch” rather than “bishop”, it can hardly have been their intention that the two patriarchates should continue to exist side by side. On the contrary, they must surely have been proclaiming that Simeon had been deposed and Arnulf appointed to replace him. Is that correct?
The other date is 1847, when Pope Pius IX sent Giuseppe Valerga to Jerusalem as the first resident patriarch since the collapse of the Crusader State. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Holy Land had gradually become more accessible to European travellers, partly because the Industrial Revolution had brought steamships to the Mediterranean and partly, also, because the Ottoman Empire was seeking to modernize its administration, which included relaxing the older restrictions on travel and on the practice of religions other than Islam.
Among the Christian churches, the Greek Orthodox were the first to take advantage of the new freedom to engage in missionary activity in the Holy Land, soon followed by the Lutherans and other Protestant churches. The Vatican showed no such enthusiasm at first,
[cont.]
