Founders

Grégoire Haddad was also, as mentioned, prominently known as Greek Catholic archbishop of Beirut, where he pursued a very personal and controversial ecclesiastic vocation. His thoughts and religious actions focused on humanizing the church, questioning centuries-old traditions, and creating new religious practices, all of which ended up by removing him, by the patriarch, from the archbishopric of Beirut, though Vatican authorities did not detect any wrongdoing incompatible with the catholic faith.

In the context of his beliefs, Grégoire Haddad has also been an advocate of Christian-Islamic dialogue, both from a religious point of view as well as from a societal perspective in the Lebanese context. He participated in many conferences in Lebanon and abroad around this topic.

In the same line of action, Grégoire Haddad established in 1998 the ‘Civil Society Movement’, a political group which called for a regime not based on religious affiliation, both on the political scene and in personal and social matters.

These facets in Grégoire’s life and actions may seem to outside observers as separate vectors with no close relations among them. But for him, they were not only related, but serve, each from an angle, exactly the same and only cause that he fought for all his life: the cause of man, “the only absolute value after God”, as he used to say in his religious writings, elaborating further: Our objective is the “Development of human beings, every human being and all of human being (all their sides: physical, spiritual, economic, educational, etc.).” This is also the ultimate motto of Mouvement Social.