An important meeting with the Greek-Melkite religious community took place in Tire, at the Cathedral of St. Thomas.
The commander of the Italian contingent in Lebanon, Brigadier General Rodolfo Sganga, and a small delegation of West Sector of UNIFIL were able to meet, on the occasion of his first visit to southern Lebanon, Youssef Absi, the Greek-Melkite patriarch of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and all the East.
Youssef Absi was elected head of the community on 21 June by the synod of bishops of the Greek-Melkite Catholic Church and, on 22 June 2017, Pope Francis granted him ecclesiastical communion.
The meeting was preceded by a religious celebration carried out according to the traditional Greek variants of the Byzantine rite, variants thanks to which the Melkites are also known as "Eastern Catholics", "Byzantine Catholics" or "Greek Catholics" and are distinguished from others Eastern Christians since they use Arabic as their liturgical language, alongside Greek.
The Greek-Melkite Catholic Church, which has about 1.700.000 faithful, extends its jurisdiction over all the Catholic faithful of the Byzantine rite resident in the territory of the ancient patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria in Egypt, and over those of the diaspora.
