Summary
The monastic confraternity established as the ruling authority of the Church of Jerusalem, with the Patriarch as its head and its monks as the institution’s basic human capital, through which Greek dominance of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem was reproduced (‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), PDF p.50).
Details
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Under its structure the Patriarch had almost absolute power over the institution, monks automatically bequeathed their properties to the Brotherhood, and parish priests were not members (PDF p.50).
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In the Khourys’ Survey as reported by Papastathis, Germanos (1537–1579) established the monastic structure of church operations via the Brotherhood’s creation and engineered his successor’s election, institutionalising a patrimonial system of power transition; Paisios (1645–1660) limited Brotherhood membership solely to monks of Greek origin, and Dositheos (1669–1707) excluded any non-member from election as bishop or patriarch (PDF p.54).
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The Greek Brotherhood is held in Chapter 1’s apparatus to have constructed the so-called Pact of Omar, in the view of the other denominations and the large part of the academic community, to protect its position against the Latins and the Armenians (PDF p.53).
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The Brotherhood opposed the Khourys’ Survey, contributing to its poor circulation (PDF p.55), and its member presided ex officio over the ecclesiastical court (PDF p.58).
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In the Greek narrative reported by Papastathis, the Brotherhood is the agent and representative in Jerusalem of the Hellenic race in its totality, which owns the shrines: the shrines’ owner is the “Hellenic race in its totality, having as its agent and representative therein the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre” (Kallistos Miliaras, as cited PDF p.60-61).
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In the Memoirs §19, after the Mandate authorities stopped Greek state interference, the schools were back in the hands of the Brotherhood, which cut the teachers’ salaries by half and, in Khoury’s words as summarized, went back to its corrupt ways — the step that led Khoury to resign from the Patriarchal schools for the government education system (PDF p.111); in §21 the Brotherhood exerted all its power to lay obstacles in the path of the Khourys’ History, leaving the authors with piles of unsold books (PDF p.112-113).
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Khoury’s Memoirs voice his campaign against ‘the Patriarchate and the men of the Brotherhood’ in pamphlets ‘until they became truly tired of me’ (PDF p.116), their opposition to his ecclesiastical-court reforms because the court ‘used to bring in money’ to some of them (PDF p.119), and their joining the Haifa executive committee to block the 1932 Conference of Orthodox Arab Priests in Ramallah (PDF p.119-120) (‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954)).
Related pages
‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Arab Orthodox Movement, Niqula Khoury