1.The sanctuary of the Conversion of St. Paul in Tabbalé-Damascus
Historical overview
Saul was born in Tarsus around the year 8 AD. When he was a boy he lived in Jerusalem at the school of Gamaliel. As a young man, he took an active part in the martyrdom of St. Stephen. Saul considered Christianity an intolerable heresy. After having obtained a licence from the religious authorities of Jerusalem, he set off for Damascus to arrest the Christians of the new community or, rather, the companions of the Protomartyr who, after his martyrdom, had fled to that city. After travelling for about a week, when close to the walls of the city, he was struck by the light of Jesus the Risen who invited him to no longer persecute Him in His disciples. Blinded by the divine light and taken by the hand, he entered the city as a convert. Saul’s conversion is considered one of the greatest miracles that Grace has ever worked in a man. Since then, the Road to Damascus has been a symbol for the instantaneous change of one’s personal projects towards more sublime ideals.
But where exactly, near Damascus, did the Vision take place? Local tradition is not unanimous and offers various places: some say it was in Daraya (14 km. west of Damascus); some in Merjisafra-Kiswe, 17 km. away; others say that it was on Tell Kawkaba, 18 km. away, where the Crusaders later built a chapel dedicated to St. Paul. But the majority of scholars believe that the most probable place was el-Tell, also called es-Sakhra (in our Memorial), which is 700 metres south of the Oriental Gate. Pilgrims from the 6th century (the anonymous man from Piacenza), the 8th century (St. Willibald) and the 16th century (Antonio da Cremona), to mention only a few, speak of the great monastery of St. Paul, standing more or less on this spot, where they would go in pilgrimage. The last witness is the pilgrim Mislim (Les Saints Lieux, 1875) who wrote that in el-Tell there was a church in ancient times and he himself saw the remains of twelve columns that had fallen to the ground, lying in the same direction.
In the north-west corner of the garden of the Memorial to St. Paul, there is a small prominence 80 cm. high, with a flat surface of 4 m., 50 cm. wide and 15 long.
Below the prominence there is a grotto which has been used for worship since time immemorial.
The place is called el -Tell or es-Sakhra (the Rock) or simply St. Paul’s Grotto.
The prominence and the grotto have remained intact over the centuries in the middle of a farming area. The faithful of Damascus have deemed this place a Pauline sanctuary, confusedly recalling the place of the Vision and the place where the Apostle is believed to have stopped to rest during his hasty flight, immediately after his tragic escape in a basket lowered from the city walls.
The low prominence could be considered a small piece of the Roman road, or the “Royal road”, that from the Oriental Gate in Damascus headed south, branching off at Dar’a, with one road going towards the Decapolis, Petra, Aqaba, and with the second towards Scythopolis and Jerusalem. This was the road that the Jews of the diaspora of Syria and Mesopotamia took when they went to Jerusalem.
According to the parish records of Bab Touma, we can see that in 1861, the year after the massacre of the fraternity of Bab Touma, people were buried around the Rock, and it was called the “Catholic cemetery” or the “Holy Land Latin cemetery” or even “St. Paul’s cemetery”.
2. The Chapel built in 1925
Just before 1925, the authorities of Damascus marked out the plots of Christian cemeteries in the area; the Latin parish had a plot of 2000 square metres located about 60 metres west of the Rock, which since then has been the cemetery for the Latin parish of Damascus. A chapel was built in the old cemetery, near St. Paul’s Grotto, with the help of the Salim Khalata family (in 1925).
The Rock, the Grotto and the garden were surrounded by a wall and all the property was reserved for the sanctuary of the Conversion of St. Paul, which is believed to have been a destination for pilgrims. This property was given a guardian to take care of it and open the door to visitors. Tourist guides, like Fr. Barnaba Meistermann ofm and others, have included the Chapel and its surroundings in visits by tourists, providing documents that prove its authenticity.
The community of the parish of Bab Touma goes in a procession to this spot on 25th January every year, the feast-day of the conversion of the Apostle and a Holy Mass is solemnly celebrated with the people and pilgrims.
The Grotto has always been well looked after and embellished. In 1953 a stone was laid in Latin and Arabic which reads: Locus Traditionalis Conversionis Sancti Pauli Apostoli.
3. The Memorial to St. Paul
On 4th-6th January 1964, His Holiness Pope Paul VI visited Jerusalem where he met Athenagoras, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and they exchanged a fraternal and historic embrace, the first after nine centuries of separation. In April the same year, the Pope decided to start a project in Damascus to commemorate that embrace, so that with the protection of the Apostle Paul, progress could be made along the road of ecumenism with effort and prayer.
The Custody of the Holy Land offered His Holiness the Pope the sanctuary and the garden of the Conversion of St. Paul. The Pope urged the architect Italo Viesi to design a sanctuary that would give the idea of a tent, the symbol of meetings. The design was built by the engineer Farid Awad. All the decoration of the church was done by Italian artists, who prepared bronzes, stained glass windows and mosaics with a high artistic value. The whole complex, church and adjoining house, was inaugurated on 23rd June 1971.
In 1969, an agreement was made between the Holy See and the Custody of the Holy Land, which opens with these words: "The Holy Father Pope Paul VI has supervised the building of the Memorial of St. Paul to honour the memory of the Apostle of the People in the traditional place which, near Damascus, recalls the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, and where there stood a modest chapel. Running the Memorial has been offered to the Franciscans of the Holy Land and they have willingly accepted…"
Since then a Franciscan priest and a community of nuns (today there are three nuns from the Franciscan Missionaries of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) have lived there. Their many works, as well as the service of the church, includes accommodation (Casa Nova), a charitable dispensary, catechism and a nursery school for 70 small children.
The Memorial received the historic visit of Pope John Paul II on 7th May 2001, when the Holy Father pronounced a significant speech.
The late Fr. Marco Adinolfi ofm wrote a paper on the Memorial in 2002 where he discussed the various themes of the sanctuary with skill and devotion.
4. The new chapel of the sanctuary of the Conversion of the Apostle
It was inaugurated on 29th June 2008, the day that started the jubilee Pauline year of the second millennium of his birth.
The new chapel incorporates the whole sanctuary of the Vision: the prominence and the Grotto and offers the possibility of celebrating Holy Mass in the sanctuary in the presence of about one hundred worshippers.
When the large church of the Memorial was built, the sanctuary of the Grotto remained almost in the background. Then, in recent years, the Grotto has suffered from a seepage of water, both from the external road and on the side where the garden is. For a few years, there had been thoughts of covering the whole sanctuary and renovating it so that groups of pilgrims could celebrate the Eucharist there.
In 2005 Fr. Michele Piccirillo ofm, President of the Custody’s Commission of sacred art, was appointed to design a new layout of the sanctuary worthy of the decoration and beauty of the sanctuaries that had been entrusted to the Custody of the Holy Land for centuries. Fr. Michele, together with the architects Luigi Leoni and Chiara Rovati of the Father Costantino Ruggeri ofm Sacred Art Research Centre of Pavia, Italy, planned a design that incorporated the whole of the sanctuary.
The first job was to reorganize the side on the road to prevent the seepage of water. For this reason, a 5m. deep ditch was built along the Sanctuary, building a wall to separate the Sanctuary, using cement covered with tar.
Then, having obtained the approval of the Custos (…) and permission from the local authorities, work began to build the design of the above architects, appointing the local engineers Pierre Track, to supervise the works, and Mouhsen Zedo as contractor. The works continued beyond the scheduled period (almost a year and a half) but it was not an easy job, as it was not standard building, but several different unforeseeable elements came into play, which were at times almost incompatible with the general plan of the design. Nevertheless, on 28th June 2008, the project was fully and totally completed and the next day it was inaugurated and open to worship and visits by pilgrims.
The Grotto: the lateral surfaces were covered with hard stones to prevent the continuous dismemberment and to give a sense of antiquity to the whole. The old cement floor was replaced by old stones, from the floor of a house from the beginning of the last century in Kafr Dubbin. The altar, the lectern, the seats for the celebrant, the concelebrants and the altar servers at the Mass are blocks of stone, which are hewn or planed only in the upper part (cf. the photo). At the back, the marble bas-relief representing the fall of Saul during the Vision, which belonged to the 1925 chapel, has been put back. The ceiling of the grotto root has been left in its original state, as has the flat surface of the promontory as it is considered a section of the Roman road where the Vision took place.
On the two sides of the prominence, at the back, the two marble stones (taken from the 1925 chapel) have been placed and the emblem of the Franciscan Order and of the Custody of the Holy Land has been sculpted on them.
Facing the grotto, six tiered steps in a semi-circle have been built, which can seat more than one hundred worshippers. There are now also two small sacristies under the tiered steps.
As a general criterion, the aim was to preserve the whole area of the grotto and the prominence in its original state. Only the stonework has been added to give the complex the appearance of a grotto. The tiered steps and everything else are all new, as are the smooth white stones.
The external walls: they form the most original part. It is a large irregular square, built with stones in the same style as the facing of the inside of the grotto, combining it with areas built using dark aluminium and glass which illuminates the area with natural light. As for the roof, it has been built using relatively lightweight synthetic material to offer protection from the rain and isolate from the cold and the heat. In addition to the external walls, there is an extension of about 1.5 metres which protrudes upwards, giving the whole complex a certain elegance and the symbolism of a sheepfold.
This is accompanied by an album of photos which will make this description easier to understand.
As mentioned above, after having built the large church in 1971, the grotto was almost left in the background. To create a link of continuity between the Sanctuary and the church, an area has been created like a sort of square with an impressive monolith (25 tons) on which the scene of the fall from the horse has been sculpted. This has created a certain union and continuity of the Sanctuary and the church, which faces the grotto, and the grotto in the main façade, the eastern one facing the church. The sculptors of the great monolith (the maestro Vincenzo Bianchi, assisted by his team) aimed to create from the beginning of the square of the church, at the entrance from the eastern road, four other monoliths, slightly smaller and lightly decorated with the figures of Christ and St. Paul, enriched with ancient Christian Syrian symbols, such as the sun and moon spread along a road paved in black basalt stone like the streets in the old parts of Damascus. On the northern wall of the church, parallel with the monoliths, there are inscriptions in the holy languages: the verses of the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9,3-8) describing the Vision in Greek, Latin and Arabic.
Although the work has been long, we are satisfied with the project and believe that a building worthy of a sanctuary of St. Paul has come to the light.
All these building were opened to the public on 29th June 2008, with the solemn blessing of Fr. Rachid Mistrih ofm, representing the Custos. During this ceremony, His Excellency Apostolic Vicar of the Latins and the Apostolic Nuncio read the message that His Holiness the Pope had sent for the inauguration and at the same time they announced here the start of the Pauline Jubilee year.
The whole place is an invitation to visit the sanctuary in a climate of prayer and devotion. Deo Gratias!
Damascus, 30th June 2008
Fr. Romualdo Fernandez ofm
Historical overview
Saul was born in Tarsus around the year 8 AD. When he was a boy he lived in Jerusalem at the school of Gamaliel. As a young man, he took an active part in the martyrdom of St. Stephen. Saul considered Christianity an intolerable heresy. After having obtained a licence from the religious authorities of Jerusalem, he set off for Damascus to arrest the Christians of the new community or, rather, the companions of the Protomartyr who, after his martyrdom, had fled to that city. After travelling for about a week, when close to the walls of the city, he was struck by the light of Jesus the Risen who invited him to no longer persecute Him in His disciples. Blinded by the divine light and taken by the hand, he entered the city as a convert. Saul’s conversion is considered one of the greatest miracles that Grace has ever worked in a man. Since then, the Road to Damascus has been a symbol for the instantaneous change of one’s personal projects towards more sublime ideals.
But where exactly, near Damascus, did the Vision take place? Local tradition is not unanimous and offers various places: some say it was in Daraya (14 km. west of Damascus); some in Merjisafra-Kiswe, 17 km. away; others say that it was on Tell Kawkaba, 18 km. away, where the Crusaders later built a chapel dedicated to St. Paul. But the majority of scholars believe that the most probable place was el-Tell, also called es-Sakhra (in our Memorial), which is 700 metres south of the Oriental Gate. Pilgrims from the 6th century (the anonymous man from Piacenza), the 8th century (St. Willibald) and the 16th century (Antonio da Cremona), to mention only a few, speak of the great monastery of St. Paul, standing more or less on this spot, where they would go in pilgrimage. The last witness is the pilgrim Mislim (Les Saints Lieux, 1875) who wrote that in el-Tell there was a church in ancient times and he himself saw the remains of twelve columns that had fallen to the ground, lying in the same direction.
In the north-west corner of the garden of the Memorial to St. Paul, there is a small prominence 80 cm. high, with a flat surface of 4 m., 50 cm. wide and 15 long.
Below the prominence there is a grotto which has been used for worship since time immemorial.
The place is called el -Tell or es-Sakhra (the Rock) or simply St. Paul’s Grotto.
The prominence and the grotto have remained intact over the centuries in the middle of a farming area. The faithful of Damascus have deemed this place a Pauline sanctuary, confusedly recalling the place of the Vision and the place where the Apostle is believed to have stopped to rest during his hasty flight, immediately after his tragic escape in a basket lowered from the city walls.
The low prominence could be considered a small piece of the Roman road, or the “Royal road”, that from the Oriental Gate in Damascus headed south, branching off at Dar’a, with one road going towards the Decapolis, Petra, Aqaba, and with the second towards Scythopolis and Jerusalem. This was the road that the Jews of the diaspora of Syria and Mesopotamia took when they went to Jerusalem.
According to the parish records of Bab Touma, we can see that in 1861, the year after the massacre of the fraternity of Bab Touma, people were buried around the Rock, and it was called the “Catholic cemetery” or the “Holy Land Latin cemetery” or even “St. Paul’s cemetery”.
2. The Chapel built in 1925
Just before 1925, the authorities of Damascus marked out the plots of Christian cemeteries in the area; the Latin parish had a plot of 2000 square metres located about 60 metres west of the Rock, which since then has been the cemetery for the Latin parish of Damascus. A chapel was built in the old cemetery, near St. Paul’s Grotto, with the help of the Salim Khalata family (in 1925).
The Rock, the Grotto and the garden were surrounded by a wall and all the property was reserved for the sanctuary of the Conversion of St. Paul, which is believed to have been a destination for pilgrims. This property was given a guardian to take care of it and open the door to visitors. Tourist guides, like Fr. Barnaba Meistermann ofm and others, have included the Chapel and its surroundings in visits by tourists, providing documents that prove its authenticity.
The community of the parish of Bab Touma goes in a procession to this spot on 25th January every year, the feast-day of the conversion of the Apostle and a Holy Mass is solemnly celebrated with the people and pilgrims.
The Grotto has always been well looked after and embellished. In 1953 a stone was laid in Latin and Arabic which reads: Locus Traditionalis Conversionis Sancti Pauli Apostoli.
3. The Memorial to St. Paul
On 4th-6th January 1964, His Holiness Pope Paul VI visited Jerusalem where he met Athenagoras, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and they exchanged a fraternal and historic embrace, the first after nine centuries of separation. In April the same year, the Pope decided to start a project in Damascus to commemorate that embrace, so that with the protection of the Apostle Paul, progress could be made along the road of ecumenism with effort and prayer.
The Custody of the Holy Land offered His Holiness the Pope the sanctuary and the garden of the Conversion of St. Paul. The Pope urged the architect Italo Viesi to design a sanctuary that would give the idea of a tent, the symbol of meetings. The design was built by the engineer Farid Awad. All the decoration of the church was done by Italian artists, who prepared bronzes, stained glass windows and mosaics with a high artistic value. The whole complex, church and adjoining house, was inaugurated on 23rd June 1971.
In 1969, an agreement was made between the Holy See and the Custody of the Holy Land, which opens with these words: "The Holy Father Pope Paul VI has supervised the building of the Memorial of St. Paul to honour the memory of the Apostle of the People in the traditional place which, near Damascus, recalls the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, and where there stood a modest chapel. Running the Memorial has been offered to the Franciscans of the Holy Land and they have willingly accepted…"
Since then a Franciscan priest and a community of nuns (today there are three nuns from the Franciscan Missionaries of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) have lived there. Their many works, as well as the service of the church, includes accommodation (Casa Nova), a charitable dispensary, catechism and a nursery school for 70 small children.
The Memorial received the historic visit of Pope John Paul II on 7th May 2001, when the Holy Father pronounced a significant speech.
The late Fr. Marco Adinolfi ofm wrote a paper on the Memorial in 2002 where he discussed the various themes of the sanctuary with skill and devotion.
4. The new chapel of the sanctuary of the Conversion of the Apostle
It was inaugurated on 29th June 2008, the day that started the jubilee Pauline year of the second millennium of his birth.
The new chapel incorporates the whole sanctuary of the Vision: the prominence and the Grotto and offers the possibility of celebrating Holy Mass in the sanctuary in the presence of about one hundred worshippers.
When the large church of the Memorial was built, the sanctuary of the Grotto remained almost in the background. Then, in recent years, the Grotto has suffered from a seepage of water, both from the external road and on the side where the garden is. For a few years, there had been thoughts of covering the whole sanctuary and renovating it so that groups of pilgrims could celebrate the Eucharist there.
In 2005 Fr. Michele Piccirillo ofm, President of the Custody’s Commission of sacred art, was appointed to design a new layout of the sanctuary worthy of the decoration and beauty of the sanctuaries that had been entrusted to the Custody of the Holy Land for centuries. Fr. Michele, together with the architects Luigi Leoni and Chiara Rovati of the Father Costantino Ruggeri ofm Sacred Art Research Centre of Pavia, Italy, planned a design that incorporated the whole of the sanctuary.
The first job was to reorganize the side on the road to prevent the seepage of water. For this reason, a 5m. deep ditch was built along the Sanctuary, building a wall to separate the Sanctuary, using cement covered with tar.
Then, having obtained the approval of the Custos (…) and permission from the local authorities, work began to build the design of the above architects, appointing the local engineers Pierre Track, to supervise the works, and Mouhsen Zedo as contractor. The works continued beyond the scheduled period (almost a year and a half) but it was not an easy job, as it was not standard building, but several different unforeseeable elements came into play, which were at times almost incompatible with the general plan of the design. Nevertheless, on 28th June 2008, the project was fully and totally completed and the next day it was inaugurated and open to worship and visits by pilgrims.
The Grotto: the lateral surfaces were covered with hard stones to prevent the continuous dismemberment and to give a sense of antiquity to the whole. The old cement floor was replaced by old stones, from the floor of a house from the beginning of the last century in Kafr Dubbin. The altar, the lectern, the seats for the celebrant, the concelebrants and the altar servers at the Mass are blocks of stone, which are hewn or planed only in the upper part (cf. the photo). At the back, the marble bas-relief representing the fall of Saul during the Vision, which belonged to the 1925 chapel, has been put back. The ceiling of the grotto root has been left in its original state, as has the flat surface of the promontory as it is considered a section of the Roman road where the Vision took place.
On the two sides of the prominence, at the back, the two marble stones (taken from the 1925 chapel) have been placed and the emblem of the Franciscan Order and of the Custody of the Holy Land has been sculpted on them.
Facing the grotto, six tiered steps in a semi-circle have been built, which can seat more than one hundred worshippers. There are now also two small sacristies under the tiered steps.
As a general criterion, the aim was to preserve the whole area of the grotto and the prominence in its original state. Only the stonework has been added to give the complex the appearance of a grotto. The tiered steps and everything else are all new, as are the smooth white stones.
The external walls: they form the most original part. It is a large irregular square, built with stones in the same style as the facing of the inside of the grotto, combining it with areas built using dark aluminium and glass which illuminates the area with natural light. As for the roof, it has been built using relatively lightweight synthetic material to offer protection from the rain and isolate from the cold and the heat. In addition to the external walls, there is an extension of about 1.5 metres which protrudes upwards, giving the whole complex a certain elegance and the symbolism of a sheepfold.
This is accompanied by an album of photos which will make this description easier to understand.
As mentioned above, after having built the large church in 1971, the grotto was almost left in the background. To create a link of continuity between the Sanctuary and the church, an area has been created like a sort of square with an impressive monolith (25 tons) on which the scene of the fall from the horse has been sculpted. This has created a certain union and continuity of the Sanctuary and the church, which faces the grotto, and the grotto in the main façade, the eastern one facing the church. The sculptors of the great monolith (the maestro Vincenzo Bianchi, assisted by his team) aimed to create from the beginning of the square of the church, at the entrance from the eastern road, four other monoliths, slightly smaller and lightly decorated with the figures of Christ and St. Paul, enriched with ancient Christian Syrian symbols, such as the sun and moon spread along a road paved in black basalt stone like the streets in the old parts of Damascus. On the northern wall of the church, parallel with the monoliths, there are inscriptions in the holy languages: the verses of the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9,3-8) describing the Vision in Greek, Latin and Arabic.
Although the work has been long, we are satisfied with the project and believe that a building worthy of a sanctuary of St. Paul has come to the light.
All these building were opened to the public on 29th June 2008, with the solemn blessing of Fr. Rachid Mistrih ofm, representing the Custos. During this ceremony, His Excellency Apostolic Vicar of the Latins and the Apostolic Nuncio read the message that His Holiness the Pope had sent for the inauguration and at the same time they announced here the start of the Pauline Jubilee year.
The whole place is an invitation to visit the sanctuary in a climate of prayer and devotion. Deo Gratias!
Damascus, 30th June 2008
Fr. Romualdo Fernandez ofm