The Syrian: Hilarion Capucci and The Priceless Ransom

The year is 1983. Just outside Beirut, on Highway 51 to Tyre, three masked men bring a Mercedes sedan to a halt. The driver of the car is shot dead; its owner, 63-year-old, Joseph Khouri, is tied and blindfolded and taken hostage. Despite next-to-nonexistent systems of communication in war-torn Lebanon, within two hours, news of the murder and abduction reaches the Vatican. One of the pope’s top men in the Middle East, the Archbishop of Tyre, Joseph Khouri, is being held for ransom. The money demanded is sizeable; the time given for payment, three days. In Rome on business, a young American priest has just been told of the Beirut kidnapping and is called upon to help save the life of his old friend, Joseph Khouri. Fr. Charles Murr is pushed to soliciting the aid of a man whom most Churchmen – very much including the kidnap victim himself – had treated with disdain for over a decade. Yet now he is perhaps the only man in the world in a position to save Joseph Khouri. That man is Hilarion George Capucci, “The Archbishop of Jerusalem in Exile.” Capucci and Murr were housemates and friends since the mid 1970’s. This story is one of altruism, of personal fortitude – and, no doubt, though it will sound strange to the unbeliever – of Christian heroism; not Khouri’s, not the Vatican’s, not Murr’s, but that of Hilarion Capucci, one of the most misunderstood and underestimated men of our times.

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