Serving in a Time of Crisis 

It was 7 p.m. in the Achrafieh neighborhood of Beirut, fifty-four days into the airstrikes, and Daniel Corrou, SJ, was at his desk. Outside, attack drones buzzed overhead. Down the hall, families who had already lost much of what they ever had settled in for another night living in a church. Corrou CSTM’17 is regional director of Jesuit Refugee Services Middle East & North Africa (JRS). In normal times the Jesuit priest’s job is to run an NGO that provides social services, education, and advocacy for ninety thousand of the most vulnerable people in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. Some are refugees of war. Others are migrant workers. In other words, Corrou’s work is always daunting. Last fall, it became a rescue mission.

This past September, Israeli forces launched airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, in an expansion of Israel’s war against the militant group Hezbollah. A ground invasion followed. In addition to being Hezbollah strongholds, many of the targeted areas were home to the migrant communities JRS serves. In Lebanon, Corrou’s home base, JRS works with displaced people from as far away as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Sierra Leone, and from right next door: refugees from neighboring Syria make up almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population. In fact, Lebanon hosts the world’s largest number of refugees per capita, even as 44 percent of the country (per the World Bank) lives in poverty. This puts Lebanon at the center of a global refugee crisis.

As the airstrikes began, hundreds of these migrants left their neighborhoods and made their way to the one place they knew to be welcoming: the JRS building in Achrafieh, which includes offices, a migrant center, and Saint Joseph Church, of which Corrou, in addition to everything else, is the pastor.  

“Father,” they said, “this is the safest place we can be.”

At first, Corrou’s team tried to find beds for them in government shelters. “But only Lebanese were being allowed in,” he said. “The migrants, they had no family, they had no connections, they didn’t speak the language. We realized we had to do something.”

And so, they laid out mattresses and opened the doors. Soon, JRS was sheltering some seventy migrants at a time in the Achrafieh building, and dozens of others in monasteries in the north—women, men, children, families. One Bangladeshi woman had to walk past the body parts of her neighbors in the street as she fled the city of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon. She told Corrou that even if her apartment survived, she didn’t know how she could ever go back after what she’d seen.

Corrou sighed as he recounted this woman’s story. “As the Catholic Church has said very clearly, war is always a failure,” he said. We were on a video call, and he wondered if I could hear the drones. I couldn’t. He said they sound like lawnmowers. He said they fly all the time.

Corrou grew up in upstate New York and joined the Society of Jesus in 2007 at age thirty-four. He moved to Beirut in 2011 for his Jesuit regency, during which he studied Arabic and worked at JRS. He witnessed the Arab Spring protests in the city that year, and he helped start the JRS refugee program in Lebanon to assist the people who poured in after the uprisings in Syria transformed into civil war.

Returning to the US in 2014, Corrou earned his STL degree from BC’s Clough School of Theology and Ministry in 2017, and then served a parish in Manhattan. But he missed the Middle East. “It’s not entirely rational,” he said, “but I knew there was this calling to be with the displaced, to be with refugees.”

Corrou moved back to Beirut in 2019. Since then, Lebanon has faced so much turmoil: political protests, the pandemic, an accidental chemical explosion in the Port of Beirut that produced one of the most powerful nonnuclear blasts on record, an economic crisis, and, of course, the devastating regional war that was precipitated by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel. Then two things happened that changed everything. First, after ten weeks of war, Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement last November. Days later, rebels overthrew the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, ending fifty years of his family’s rule of the country.

“It’s a whole new world,” Corrou said the next time we spoke. “We have great hope.”

With the end of the airstrikes, Corrou and his team developed a plan to close the shelters and help those in them find housing, pay rent, and restart their lives. “They were renting cheap apartments, and those buildings have been destroyed,” Corrou said. “Everyone is looking for a place to live, so the prices are higher.”  

 It remains to be seen how the war’s aftermath and Syria’s power shift will affect the lives of the migrants JRS serves. In such uncertainty, Corrou leans on the Jesuit practice of accompaniment. He asks himself: Where is my neighbor right now? How can I walk with them on their journey? “I draw a line and say, I do not know the future. I exist in the radical present. This is where I meet God. This is where I meet people.”

In tonight’s radical present, the shelter was busy, and the sky was quiet. ◽