Funky Monks

Somewhere in Jerusalem at the tomb of Jesus....

A bearded Armenian monk in a red and pink robe and a black-clad Greek Orthodox monk with a bloody gash on his forehead are taken away in handcuffs.

Such was the finale to an unsuccessful march to commemorate the 4th-century discovery of a wooden cross that is believed to be the crime scene of Jesus Christ's murder. The skirmish started when Greek Orthodox monks objected to Armenian monks marching without one of their own monks in the procession.

Serafim, a Greek Orthodox monk, was wounded when an Armenian monk punched him from behind and broke his glasses. "We were keeping resistance so that the procession could not pass through...and establish a right that they don't have."

Father Pakrat of the Armenian Patriarchate said that the Greek monks started it.

Countering this affront, the chief secretary of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, Archbishop Aristarchos, denied his monks initiated the violence with the statement, "Did not!"

At the scene of the brawl, Israeli riot police armed with assault rifles stood beside Golgotha where Jesus is believed to have been crucified.

Control of the church is divided among six Christian sects. Not surprisingly, they regularly fight over turf, for instance:

*The Israeli government has wanted to build a fire exit in the church, which regularly fills with thousands of pilgrims and has only one main door, but the sects cannot agree where the exit will be built. Why bother with the safety of God's children? If they burn to a fiery death at least they are in a church, right? That's so Old Testament!

*A ladder placed on a ledge over the entrance sometime in the 19th Century has remained there ever since because of a dispute over who has the authority to take it down. Why doesn't maintenance just put the ladder up and play dumb?

*More recently, a spat between Ethiopian and Coptic Christians is delaying badly needed renovations to a rooftop monastery that engineers say could collapse. Hellish inferno, faulty roof? There is obviously no preservation in Jesus' name.

They say God works in mysterious ways...

These sects' so-called Christian values are literally destroying this ancient church. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is not just any church, this is THE church of Christianity, or of what Christianity has become. If this infighting is going on within the base, what is happening to the branches? It's time for Christianity to save itself. Love thy brother and all that. I think these monks should start with verse nine of the beatitudes:

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.