Listen to “The Lebanese Message” on BBC

BBC’s John Laurenson’s asks in this edition of Heart & Soul, whether the Lebanese Message, which Pope John Paul II exalted, can survive with the Christian population shrinking due to immigration and war threatening to spill over from neighboring Syria.

Laurenson travels to Lebanon, which he describes as “once a by-word for religious war,” and discovers instead that it is a “country that has been moulded like no other by Christianity and Christian culture.”  Borrowing from the words of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Laurenson calls Lebanon a “message to the world of how different religions can live side by side in a spirit of mutual respect and harmony.”

However, Laurenson also points out the “hopes and fears” of Christians, not only Lebanese but all Arab Christians, who live in a “Muslim sea.”

Listen to this edition of Heart & Soul.