Muslim Officer Arrested a Priest Live on Altar Then Jesus Appeared
My name is Nabil Hadad.
I am from Beirut, Lebanon.
I now live in Dearbornne, Michigan.
And I need to tell you about the worst thing I ever did and the greatest thing that was ever done for me.
Because those two things are connected in a way I still cannot fully explain except to say that Jesus Christ does not let go of the people he has chosen.
Even when those people are the ones putting handcuffs on his servants, I want you to understand from the beginning that I was not a confused man or a weak man or a man who stumbled into doing bad things by accident.
I was trained.
I was committed.
I believed with absolute certainty that what I was doing was right and necessary and holy.
I was an officer in the state security unit in Lebanon that operated under heavy influence from Hezbollah and its political allies.
My specific assignment for several years was to monitor and suppress what my supervisors called destabilizing religious activity.
In practical terms, that meant watching churches, watching Christian community leaders, watching anyone whose religious influence was growing in ways that the political power structure around me did not control and did not approve of.
I put handcuffs on a Catholic priest named Father Ilas Room in the middle of a Sunday morning mass.
The church was packed.
The congregation was watching.
He was standing at the altar in the middle of the consecration.
The most sacred moment in the Catholic mass.
The moment when the priest holds up the bread and the wine and declares them to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
And I walked down the center aisle in plain clothes with two other officers.
And I arrested him in front of everyone he served.
The congregation was screaming.
Women were crying.
Old men were standing up from their pews with their arms out as if they could stop us with their bodies.
Children were hiding their faces in their mother’s clothing.
Father Ilas did not resist.
He set the chalice down on the altar very carefully.
He looked at his congregation with an expression of deep calm that made absolutely no sense given what was happening to him.
He held out his wrists and I put the handcuffs on him.
I walked him out of that church in handcuffs and I did not feel a single thing except the satisfaction of a job being done correctly.
That was who I was and what Jesus did with a man like that is what I am here to tell you.
I was born in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a neighborhood that most people outside Lebanon know only as a Hezbollah stronghold.
In my world growing up, it was simply home.
It was the streets I played in as a child.
It was the smell of my mother’s cooking coming through the window.
It was the sound of the call to prayer from the mosque at the end of the block mixing with the sounds of traffic and music and the ordinary noise of a crowded urban neighborhood living its life.
My father was a man named Hassan Hadad.
He was a mid-level official in one of the civil administrative structures that his buller runs in the southern suburbs.
Not a fighter, not a military man.
He managed community services.
He oversaw the distribution of food assistance and health care access and educational programs in our area.
He was proud of this work.
He told us regularly that Hezbollah was not just a military organization.
It was the only structure in Lebanon that actually took care of the Shia poor.
He said the Lebanese government had abandoned the Shia for decades.
But he said Hezbollah had stepped into that absence and filled it with real services and real dignity.