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The Roman Catholic Church in Lebanon is part of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. There are about one million two hundred thousand Eastern Catholic Catholics in Lebanon, the majority of who are not Latin Catholics, but instead follow a number of different rites of the Catholic Church - mostly Maronite, but also Melkite and non-native to Lebanon Catholic rites like Armenian, Chaldean, and Syriac. Catholic Church constitutes one of the largest Catholic churches in the Middle East. The "Land of the Cedars", as Lebanon is known, is the only one in the region where Catholics play an active role in national politics. Besides the President of the Republic (which, by the Constitution, must be a Maronite Catholic), there are in Lebanese Parliament 44 seats to Catholics out of a total of 128 seats. Catholics are also well represented in the government and in the public. Until the sixties Catholics were also the major component of the population and represented 43% of all Lebanese. Nowadays they are 26% of the total population, being Maronites 21% and Melkites 5%. ==Recent history== Muslim and Christian communities coexist in the country for centuries. Cohabitation was sanctioned by a National Pact in 1943, which created a democracy based on religious communities. The country became a good example of religious and ethnic coexistence. But that lasted only a few decades. The larger communities, Christian and Muslim, were upset by the long civil war that raged between 1975 and 1990. The religious geography of the capital Beirut was redrawn: 65,000 Shiite Muslims abandoned their neighborhoods, and Nabaa chout; from interior regions, in contrast, to the capital flowed 80,000 Maronites and Druzes.〔(Riccardi, The century of martyrdom, Mondadori, p. 304. )〕 As a result of the Civil War, West Beirut was progressively abandoned by Christians. Also, a mass exodus fleeing saw tens of thousands of civilians, including Christians, Druze and Sunni Muslims. Not enough internal upheavals, during this period, tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees entered the country. At the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Christians, by majority, were discovered minority. Today Muslims are asked to review the National Pact agreement of 1943. For Christians there is the danger to pass from the status of full rights community to minority status. In 1995 it was held a Special Assembly of Bishops for the Lebanon, convened by Pope John Paul II in Rome. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Roman Catholicism in Lebanon」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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