Paolo Siniscalco e le antiche Chiese d’Oriente

The purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss the contribution that Paolo Siniscalco made to the Christian East, in particular to the ancient Oriental Churches that did not adhere to the Council of Ephesus or to that of Chalcedon. These are churches that still exist today, witnesses of an ancient and original Christian tradition, handed down in contexts of ecclesial lacerations and social conflicts, which today risk disappearing due to marginalization and in some cases persecution. Paolo Siniscalco dedicated his attention to these ancient and declining Christianities as a historian, with the collaboration of specialists in individual languages and cultures, which materialized in two volumes (2005 and 2016): but in his pages we can also sense his passion as a Christian for those ancient churches, his hope for the return of the Christians to the Near and Middle East and for their contribution to the social growth of those societies, and his emphasis on idea of coexistence among people of different religions in which the value of citizenship is the foundation of living together, more than the religious faith or the ethnic ideologies.