What would a Catholic Near East look like?

To keep up with this theme we seem to have going on at the moment- what would the Levant and Egypt look like if they were part of the Catholic communion? I'd suggest that the best POD to achieve this are the Crusader states getting a near ASB set of lucky breaks, and being able to consolidate Egypt as well as Syria and Palestine. If anyone has any better ideas though...

So, what would the near east look like today if it were more than 50% Catholic in its religion?
 
The Maronites in Lebanon never really broke relations off with the Church in Rome, while the Roman Curia pretty much reciprocates this by recognizing that the Maronite tradition is part of the larger Catholic Church.

I'm guessing that in TTL, we would have the Coptic and Syriac traditions flourishing in the Near East instead of being overran by Islam. And since we have two more traditions to counterbalance the dominant Greek and Roman traditions, perhaps we wouldn't have the Great Schism that occured in 1054.

If you do want a POD during the Crusades, I don't think that the Roman Church would impose their traditions on the Maronites, since they are already loyal to the Pope. We may see a situation similar to Western Ukraine in the present day, were the people practice the Greek tradition, but still remains loyal to the pope.
 
I think that they would assume many cultural mores and faults people associate with Islam today, especially if the region gets artificially divided and tipped against itself as in OTL.

People would be having debates about how "inherently violent" Syriac-Maronites were, and yes, there would be Protestant-Orthodox trolls advocating their genocide as well.
 
It might depend on how politically unified the place is - if the Kingdom of Jerusalem remains/becomes (depends on interpretation) the over-arcing overlord of the other autonomous states, and this develops into a centralised monarchy, slowly swallowing up neighbouring emirates etc then the official church will be that of a large realm. There will be a variety of dissenting churches, but these will by-and-large cohabit pretty well.

But if the polity fragments (or remains fragmented) then some of the smaller states could well undergo a religious reformation (as happened with the German states) and internicine war between different versions of Christianity would be more common

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
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