December 11, 2024 at 10:38 a.m.
‘EXACTLY WHERE I NEED TO BE’
Sitting in his office at the Jesuit Refugee Service in downtown Beirut, Father Daniel Corrou, SJ, talks about the growing humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, as the sound of drones flying overhead could be heard in the background.
It is an unsettling buzz that people have gotten used to, much like the explosions that have happened in and around Beirut, the byproduct of the Israel-Hamas war spilling into the southern part of Lebanon due to Hezbollah joining the conflict in solidarity with Hamas. The conflict — which was halted by a recent ceasefire — had sent thousands of migrants and the poor north in search of a respite from the violence and destruction.
“There is a tension that comes from a drone flying overhead,” said Father Corrou via Google Meets. “That is pretty much constant, and this is a very safe neighborhood. There was an attack just a few hundred meters away from here. There was an attack a few days ago at a place that is a kilometer from here, but it is very close to where several of our staff live.”
In a wide-ranging interview with The Evangelist last month, Father Corrou, who is the regional director for Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in the Middle East and North Africa, talked about his upbringing in Saratoga Springs, his calling as a Jesuit, and what the future holds for a country Saint John Paul II called a “message of freedom” while Pope Francis referred to it as an “oasis of fraternity.”
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Father Corrou grew up in Saratoga Springs after moving from Syracuse, and he and his family were parishioners at St. Clement’s Church on Lake Avenue.
“I would say our family was involved in the church, but I wouldn’t say super involved,” he said. “We were regular Mass goers; my parents were on parish councils at different times. I was an altar server and we had a wonderful experience. The Redemptorists there were great guys.”
His family instilled in him “a very good, healthy responsibility that we had been given gifts and those were to be used wisely for the good of the world.”
By traveling overseas frequently, in what he described as typical American tourism, it set the stage for a life of “living off balance” and “out of your comfort zone.” The thoughts of service and a spiritual life started to take shape at Le Moyne College, the private Jesuit institution in Dewitt, N.Y., on the edge of Syracuse.
“Both the Jesuits and the lay folks were really informed by Ignatian spirituality, the Jesuit charism of the school,” he said. “I always point to three things, one (being) a very careful attention to intellectual depth. We weren’t running away from the questions of the life of the mind, but that intellectual depth had to be connected to a deep commitment for social justice and the concerns of the poorest in society and the real structural injustices that we are living in.
“It couldn’t just be activity for activity’s sake. It had to include spiritual depth. … In that creative tension was something that I found there that really (stoked) what had been embers for a long time. I didn’t enter (the Jesuits) right from Le Moyne, but that was where the idea, really as an adult, of taking my faith seriously (took shape).”
He graduated from Le Moyne in 1994, then spent two years as a Jesuit Volunteer teacher in Micronesia, before returning to the states and earning a master’s in theological studies from Harvard. While working in campus ministry at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., the idea of being called to the Jesuits was taking hold.
“It was always brewing but the idea was that I wanted to be a lay person of real depth and capacity, and at that point the institutional, clerical life didn’t seem like a place to do real work,” he said. “It was more of a constriction. Over time, those questions started to melt away a little bit, and (I had the) sense that this was still a calling and I could respond to that and have it not be about wanting institutional pride and honor and glory and all the things, good and bad, that come with the titles. This was a real call of service.”
He entered the Jesuits in 2007, was ordained a Catholic priest in 2017, and served at St. Francis Xavier Parish near Union Square in New York City. It was while he was doing his regency with the Jesuits — a two-to-three year period during formation when Jesuits work in a full-time ministry and live in community — that he got his first taste of the Middle East. Generally, Jesuits work at a high school or parish but Father Corrou told the provincial he wouldn’t mind working in a non-English speaking country. He had a background in Spanish, which he said remains poor at best, but the provincial at the time suggested the Middle East, specifically Syria.
“I said, ‘Yeah, why not.’ We ended up deciding in November of 2010 that I was going to be sent to Damascus,” he said. “In the words of the Jesuits here in the Middle East Province, Syria was the most stable country.”
But he never made it there as the Syrian Civil War exploded in March of 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government and pro-democracy movements, interspersed with non-state actors, that swept across the Middle East. In Syria, over 500,000 were killed during the conflict and nearly seven million people were displaced, including over one million in neighboring Lebanon. As an American, Father Corrou couldn’t get into Syria, so he spent the next three years helping with the initial JRS response with the refugees in Beirut.
“I arrived here in 2011 and the war had started in Syria, but refugees didn’t leave until about 2012 or 2013. So I remember very distinctly, there was a six-month window when a million-and-a-half people entered Lebanon,” Father Corrou said. “Lebanon is a country of four to five million, literally a quarter of our population. You just saw people everywhere; every open space, every abandoned garage. That was a real moment.
“And for the next couple of years, there was a very real threat that ISIS and some of the other Al-Qaeda groups were trying to cross into Lebanon. We have a retreat house on the Lebanon-Syrian border. I was doing my retreat there, and you could look up the Beqaa Valley and I could watch a battle going on. It was basically Hezbollah fighting ISIS, and they were having this battle. It was a meditation on hell basically. That was a very stark moment.”
After his ordination, Father Corrou returned to Lebanon in 2019 to help coordinate the JRS response to the Syria and Iraq refugee crises and has been there ever since.
The Jesuit Refugee Service - built on the principles of dignity, solidarity, participation, compassion, hospitality, hope and justice - has been operating in Lebanon since 2013 and has helped refugees with education, mental health and psychosocial support. (Photo courtesy of Jesuit Refugee Service)
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The Jesuit Refugee Service is a Jesuit work founded by Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ — then superior general of the Society of Jesus — in response to the millions of Vietnamese refugees leaving their war-torn country in the 1970s. Since then, Jesuits have opened offices around the world to assist refugees in emergency spaces and, in 2000, JRS was officially registered as a foundation of the Vatican City State. JRS’ values are built on the principles of dignity, solidarity, participation, compassion, hospitality, hope and justice. They are a registered 501(c)(3) non-governmental organization (NGO) and will work with refugees regardless of race, gender, religion or politics. Father Corrou explains that the Jesuits have been in modern-day Lebanon and Syria since the mid-1650s. The parish near his office, St. Joseph’s, is part of a university the Jesuits founded 150 years ago, and the building is from the Ottoman Empire. In the region, in which refugees have been present for decades, the work of the Jesuits was typically academic and there was not a JRS presence in Syria until 2008, assisting Iraqi refugees, and in Lebanon until 2013. As head of JRS in the Middle East, Father Corrou and his team assist refugees with education, mental health and psychosocial support.
“We are in places where we know that there is significant need, and I will admit that the locations are less clearly defined here in Lebanon than in a lot of places. It is basically when you go to places of high concentrations of very poor Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese, the need is obvious,” Father Corrou said. “As an NGO, we would work with general vulnerability criteria. So we would welcome, particularly, students into the schools who might not have space in another school, or who need extra help in their studies.”
In a country which has the highest percentage of Christians in the Middle East (with Roman Catholics a distinct minority among the Maronites, Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Syriac Catholics and Syriac Orthodox), Father Corrou leads JRS from Monday to Saturday, but has another role on Sundays.
“I am the pastor of a Roman Catholic parish here, an English-speaking Roman Catholic parish, that is also a Jesuit work, a work of the province, that is something that has been here for 50 or 60 years,” Father Corrou said. “The majority of the people that come to Mass on Sundays are migrant workers. They are from Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, all throughout Africa, the Philippines. Those that come to Mass would be Roman Catholic.”
In addition to the traditional pastoral, catechetical and sacramental work of St. Joseph’s Parish, it also includes a migrant center which welcomes all. They have space for Buddhists to pray and Muslims to gather. They also host a weekly cricket league and tournaments.
The Israel-Hezbollah conflict, which lasted 14 months, and destroyed large parts of Lebanon, including these badly damaged buildings in southern Beirut, was halted by a ceasefire on Nov. 27. (OSV photo)
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This multi-ethnic, multi-religious country of such promise always seemed to be on St. John Paul II’s radar. In 1985, he wrote a letter to the United Nations expressing concern for the Christian population. In a 1989 letter to Catholic bishops, he called Lebanon “more than a country; it is a message of freedom and an example of pluralism for East and West.” And in 1997, he made his first visit on May 10, celebrating a Mass in downtown Beirut for more than 300,000 people.
“John Paul II captures it well, saying that Lebanon is the message. He came here right after the civil war, and I think when Lebanon is working, it is the very message of what we need to be talking about,” Father Corrou said. “The construction of the modern state of Lebanon was a collection of minorities. A wonderful mix of Druze, Sunni, Shiite, Maronite, Melchite, other Christians, and other religions as well as a mix of ethnicities, Arab, Kurd and Armenian, all of them Lebanese. So everyone is a minority, there’s no majority block.
“It is the land of misfit toys. You have all these little communities and when it is working, they all acknowledge that ‘I am not the majority. I am better living with you than in my own little enclave.’ When it is working it is the very message of what we are about, a multi-religious, multi-ethnic society that can actually do the very real work of living together,” he explained. “When it is not working, it completely falls apart and you see multiple civil wars and inter-sectarian tensions that we see here.”
Along with the civil wars and occupations, people in the U.S. also remember a terrorist bombing at a barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel, including 220 Marines in 1983. In 2020, video of a massive ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut that killed at least 218, shocked the world and badly damaged St. Joseph’s. The country had been embroiled in the Israel-Hamas conflict since 2023 due to Iran-backed Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group, which has sided with Hamas. After cross-border skirmishes for nearly a year, this past September, Israel ramped up its offensive with the intention of defeating Hezbollah. What had started with bombings and battles in southern Lebanon, inched its way north and sent refugees streaming into Beirut. And that sent JRS into action, responding to a new crisis.
“Because of the church and the migrant center, we were the place that migrants knew as a safe place. … On the first night I was with one other Jesuit and some volunteers from the parish here and 150 to 200 migrant workers showed up, most of them we knew and they needed a place to stay,” Father Corrou said.
“It was 10, 11 o’clock at night and we had no options. We had a bunch of small mattresses from our summer camp, and so we just brought out 100 mattresses and put a lot of people in the church building. We still have 70, 80 people living in the church here in shelter because they are migrants and wouldn’t be allowed in any of the official shelters. We have since opened one of our retreat houses north of Beirut as another shelter, and we have two or three other monasteries in the mountains that serve as other shelters because every night that first week another group of 150 would show up.”
Father Corrou has a staff of nearly 230, many of whom have been displaced, including some going to what had been a safer Syria until rebels quickly defeated government forces this month, took over the capital city of Damascus and sent President Bashar al-Assad into exile. In Lebanon, JRS has been working non-stop to assist the refugees on-site and in the field at official shelters.
“It has been really beautiful to see across the board. In my particular office here, it’s beautiful to see the staff is very deliberate, even those that have been displaced and have real concerns about where they are going to get food for their family,” he said. “They are still showing up for work. For them it is a helpful distraction during the day. Our office has a very good feel to it; we eat together and make sure we get coffee and time in the morning to check in.
“We don’t shy away from (reality). I was at a wake service for someone who was killed. We talk openly about that, and do not run away from the reality of that.”
People hug as they stand on the rubble of damaged buildings in Joun village in Lebanon’s Chouf district in the central part of the country. (OSV News photo)
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Although the missile and drone attacks from both Israel and Hezbollah that decimated Lebanon, particularly in the south, have ceased for now, droves of civilians have left the country and those that stay remain with a sense of uncertainty for the future. Father Corrou related a newspaper article that referenced the resiliency of the Lebanese people who have dealt with traumatic wars for the better part of the past 150 years.
“The story was always, even in the civil wars, there would be a major bombing, even in this neighborhood, and the next morning, before dawn, you would have the guy with the cart selling glass to repair their windows until the next battle. There was that sense that you wake up and start all over again,” he said. “The article was saying that that is no longer a part of Lebanon. There is now a despair that I haven’t seen in my time here.
“I love the fact that all of my staff here are Lebanese, and they are smart and capable, multi-religious Lebanese who want it to be a Lebanon that they remember and dream of. But most of their friends have all left. They are highly educated, smart people (who go to) Canada or the United States or France. I worry whether those folks will come back like their parents and grandparents did. So I think that is an open question.
“I do sense for those that do remain there is a string of hope there. I have more concerns about how strong that is, but I do see it.”
And that string of hope remains with Father Corrou. At one recent Sunday Mass, when the church was packed, the shelter was full and a general sense of anxiety hung over Beirut, Father Corrou admitted he finally had time to gather his thoughts during the Communion reflection when the choir, filled with Filipinos, started singing the song “Here I am, Lord.”
“I found myself starting to tear up a bit,” he said. “The church is filled and they were all migrant workers — from Sudan, South Sudan, Philippines — and they were all singing ‘Here I am, Lord.’ I am singing it as well but they are singing it, and they don’t have the passport that I have. They don’t have the insurance that I have. They don’t have the safety of the Jesuit community here, and they are living 40 people to a room in the great hall on the second floor. To say ‘Here I am’ for them is a real statement; that I have come to do your will in a really lousy situation.”
Although the situation has stabilized somewhat with the Nov. 27 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, this conflict — which by some estimates has killed over 3,500 Lebanese and injured 15,000 in the 14 months of fighting — was different from past uprisings in the region, which usually lasted about a month and blew over. That is why Father Corrou is measured when talking about the future.
“I could see this descending into another civil war here and that would be really bad for all of us. I am cautious in talking about the future because we just don’t know what it is and there is a lot of room for the evil spirit to run to despair on that,” Father Corrou said. “So ‘Here I am.’ I am here now, and I am exactly where I need to be. Whether that is a sense of hope, I am not sure, but I know that much.”
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