Here Is Where the Need of a Fortnight For Freedom Is Real

The Mar Elias Monastery in

Bethlehem--Christians in the

Near East are in great peril

I want to post these selections from a United Press article by Bassem Maroue that was posted several days ago to make us more aware of the pressing concern for the safety of Syria’s Christian minority.  By and large the “Arab Spring” has been a disaster for the Christians of the Near East and American foreign policy is not helping them—to the contrary the suffering of Christians in Iraq is directly traceable to the policies of the Bush administration and the support of the Obama Administration for the “pro-Democracy” movement in Egypt is destabilizing the situation of the Coptic Christians there.  (For more information on Christians in Islamic countries see entries for December 24, 26 2011,  March 20, 21, 23, and June 7, 2012.) 

Christians, who make up about 10 per cent of Syria's population, say they are particularly vulnerable to the violence sweeping the country of 22 million people. They are fearful that Syria will become another Iraq, with Christians caught in the crossfire between rival Islamic groups.

"What is happening in these neighbourhoods pains our hearts," said Maximos al-Jamal, a Greek Orthodox priest who is still in Homs. He says about 90 of the civilians in two besieged Homs neighbourhoods are Christians, down from thousands who lived in the area before the uprising began.

"Before we were staying here to guard our homes but now the situation is unbearable," one Homs resident told The Associated Press by telephone, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals by both sides of the conflict.

He said he feared the rebels want to keep the Christians trapped in the city as a bargaining chip while the army's bombardment and ground attacks on the city intensify. Syrian Christians have largely stuck by President Bashar Assad, fearing the strength of Muslim hard-liners in the uprising against his rule.

Several mediators have made an urgent appeal to evacuate the Christians who they fear could be targeted for their religion. Syrian Christians don't have to look far for an example of brutal treatment. Hundreds of thousands of Christians fled Iraq after their community and others were repeatedly targeted by extremist militants in the chaotic years after Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster.

The Christians, who are trapped in Homs' Hamidiyeh and Bustan Diwan neighbourhoods, include four children under the age of 10. There is barely any electricity or running water, telephone lines are unreliable and they are forced to hide in shelters during daily shelling. 

Al-Jamal said that many Christians from Homs are coming to his office in the city to get marriage or birth certificates to apply for visas to leave the country.

"If Syrian Christians get visas from other countries, I say more than 70 per cent of them will leave," he said.

 For what you can do to help, contact the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. (Paste this into your browser: http://www.cnewa.org/home.aspx?ID=26&pagetypeID=12&sitecode=HQ )

The Coptic Church Today

A Coptic monk visiting with
faithful at his monastery on the
roof of the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher in Jerusalem

The Arab Caliphate invaded Egypt in 639 and from that time on Egypt was ruled by Muslims, yet for many centuries the majority of the Egyptian people clung to the Christian faith.  The main instrument that the Muslim rulers used to influence its subjects to convert was the jizya, a tax levied on non Muslims to remind them of their inferior status under the law and also a means of putting the burden of taxation on the Dhimmi or non-Muslims.  The jizya may have been a burden but it was not without benefit—as the Dhimmi were not subject to conscription into the military. And in some places, among the Palestinians for example, Christians were proud to pay this tax and saw it as a sign of spiritual integrity that their religious faith was not for sale.  In regards to Egypt, it is a testimony that as many Egyptians as did remained faithful to the Christian faith—between ten and thirteen percent of the population. 

     Despite popular Christian mythology, especially of the pseudo-evangelical sort, Islam has not made it its policy for there to be outright persecution of Christian or Jewish minorities in Islamic states.  The Arabian Peninsula, by the decree of the Prophet Muhammad, is restricted to Muslims and religions other than Islam are proscribed today in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  And it is forbidden everywhere in the Islamic world for a Muslim to convert to another religion.  For the most part, the philosophy has been that intermarriage, and in particular the marriage of Muslim men to Dhimmi women, as well as the social disadvantages of not being Muslim will eventually persuade Jews, Christians, and others to accept Islam.  And so in Egypt, over the almost fourteen centuries since the Islamic invasion, the vast majority of people have accepted Islam.  But not the Copts and they are very proud of their independence.  

      The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have triggered a negative reaction among many Muslims.  The “Crusade” language used by the previous American administration and the anti-Islamic rants of the religious right have sparked the resurgence of a militant Islam.  Oppressive regimes such as the Sadam Hussein Regime in Iraq and the Hosni Mubarak Regime in Egypt feared militant Islam and kept it at bay.  The overthrow of those regimes, rather than spawning democratic movements, has energized radical Islam. Unqualified American support for Israeli policies, especially in regard to the Settlement Movement, has also awakened a sense of Islamic solidarity especially among those Muslims of Arabic language and culture.  Indigenous Christian communities in the Near East and North Africa have felt the consequences of this.  Since the fall of Mubarak in Egypt the Copts have been put in an especially difficult situation with many violent outbursts against Coptic Churches and communities.  The more traditional harmony between the Muslim and Coptic segments of Egyptian society are giving way to more politicized and polarized antagonism. 

      Several months ago when first planning to do an entry on the plight of Coptic Christians I visited a Coptic Orthodox Church and spoke with several lay leaders of the congregation.  (I would have like to speak to the priest but no offer was made to introduce me; I suspect the laymen with whom I was speaking were anxious to get their opinions across rather than the views of a more official spokesperson.) 

      Unlike the Palestinians with whom I have spoken who feel that it is the Israelis who are squeezing them out of their ancestral homeland, encouraging them to emigrate and begin new lives elsewhere, the Copts with whom I spoke are blunt in saying that the cause of their suffering is Islam.  In this they are not unlike the Chaldean Christians—Iraqis—who also feel that it is their Muslim neighbors who are squeezing them out of the lands on which they have lived for millennia.  The Coptic men with whom I spoke that day pulled no punches in their blaming Muslims for the suffering of their ancient community.  For more information and (I believe) balanced views, I suggest you contact the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.  http://www.cnewa.org

Origins (and Origen) of the Coptic Church

The Cathedral of Saint Mark in Cairo, Seat of the
Patriarch and Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church

In our last entry I wrote about Pope Shenouda III and how the Coptic Orthodox Church emerged out of one of the five great Patriarchates of Christianity, the Patriarchate of Alexandria which traces its origins back to the Evangelist Mark. 

     I want to look a bit at the Coptic Orthodox Church because it is one of the Christian Communities of the Near East that is in grave danger today.   Blog entries of December 24^th and 26^th spoke of the Palestinian and Iraqi Christian communities and I had always intended to get back to the Coptic Christians of Egypt but there is so much happening these past few months to comment on that I haven’t had the chance to do an entry on the Copts. 

      In the ancient world of Greek and Roman culture, the first three centuries of the Christian, or Common, Era, Alexandria—situated on the Mediterranean coast at the Nile Delta was the great center of learning where Philosophers and scientists met and exchanged idea.  The philosophy of the day was neo-Platonism and it was in Alexandria that Plotinus, probably the most influential of the Neo-Platonists studied.  In addition to the Greek and Roman pagan philosophers, it was also a center of Jewish studies, having a huge Jewish community. Some scholars think from the evidence of certain medical and scientific knowledge available in Alexandria that there may have been Buddhist monks from India in Alexandria.  That is not as farfetched as it may sound because we know the trade routes took sailors and merchants down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to Indian ports. There was an ancient synagogue dating to this era in the city of Cochin in Kerala. Christians gravitated to Alexandria as well, Alexandria becoming the catechetical center of ancient Christianity with Clement of Alexandria, Athenagoras, and Origen all teaching there.  At the time of the Council of Nicea it was a priest from Alexandria by the name of Arius that had triggered the heresy of Arianism which the Council was called to correct, but it was also a Patriarch of Alexandria Athanasius who led the opposition to the heresy.  Indeed Athanasius is the personification of Christological orthodoxy. 

     It was only in the fifth century at the time of the Council of Chalcedon the Church of Alexandria (and several other Oriental Churches) could not agree with the Churches of Constantinople and Rome regarding the precise way in which Divinity and Humanity are each and both characteristic of Jesus.  This is a complicated issue—far more complicated than I want to get into here and far more complicated than I need to get into here—and so let us just say that while agreeing that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, they differed on precisely how that should be explained.  

      While it may seem a bit trivial to us, or at least while we may see that there is essential agreement and the disagreement is more a matter of definition, it was a serious enough difference that the Chalcedonian Churches (Rome and Constantinople) no longer shared Eucharistic fellowship with the Churches that did not accept the doctrine as defined by the Council of Chalcedon (451). 

Egypt was part of the Byzantine Empire and the Imperial Court ascribed to the Chalcedonian formula—consequently the Emperor made life very difficult for the Christians of Egypt who rejected the Council’s doctrines.  It was a case of Christian persecuting Christian and ultimately it undermined the place of Egypt in the Empire.  In 639 when the Arab armies came into Egypt, the loyalty of the people to the Emperor in Constantinople had been weakened by these religious disputes, empowering the conquerors to take Egypt into the Caliphate without much resistance.  While initially the vast majority of Egyptians remained Christians, over the next six centuries through intermarriage and for economic advantage most of the Egyptian population had become Muslim.  Today between 10 and 12 percent of the Egyptian people are Coptic Christians.   More on this next time.

There's another Pope?

Pope Shenouda III, Patriarch and
Pope of Alexandria,
+ March 17, 2012

  So the Pope died this Saturday past.  Well, not that pope—but the Pope of Alexandria, Pope Shenouda III.  Who knew there were two popes?  Pope is, or at least was, used by some village priests among the Greek Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor and various islands in the Aegean Sea.  While this was common in the days of the Ottoman Sultanate, the persecution of Asiatic Greeks by the Ottomans and the destruction of most of those communities in the 19^th century along with the modernization that has come to Greece with its independence from Turkey have made this title obsolete.  The title survives chiefly for two of the five Great Patriarchs of Christendom—the Patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt and the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome.  The title has been used for the Patriarch of Alexandria since the time of Pope Heraclas of Alexandria in the middle of the third century. By comparison, for the Roman Pontiffs, “Pope” is somewhat of a modern affectation as the Bishops of Rome have used the title only since John I in the second decade of the sixth century.  The Greek Orthodox claimant to the Patriarchate of Alexandria also makes claim to the title, asserting that as an Orthodox (i.e. Chalcedonian) Christian he is the authentic heir to the See of Saint Mark.

The See of Saint Mark—this is what gives Alexandria its importance. 

One of the first places to which Christianity spread was Alexandria in Egypt, most likely being brought back to Alexandria by Alexandrian Jews who had been in Jerusalem that Pentecost and heard the preaching of the Apostles and accepted faith in Jesus as a fulfillment of their Messianic hopes as Jews.  There were strong ties between Jerusalem and Alexandria and Judaism was strong in that ancient Egyptian city with pilgrims regularly going to Jerusalem for the three annual pilgrimage feasts each year.  The See (or Diocese) of Alexandria is usually attributed to Mark the Evangelist, the author of the Second Gospel but it is clear that there would have been a Christian community there from the beginning—the very beginning, making the Alexandrian Christian community perhaps the second oldest only to Jerusalem—Church in Christianity. 

While the foundation of the Church of Alexandria by Saint Mark would be an overstatement of historical fact, the identification of Mark with the Church of Alexandria is from the earliest days.  The patristic sources and Alexandrian legends differ.  The Alexandria tradition puts Mark in Alexandria as early as the mid ‘40’s—just ten years or so after Pentecost.  The patristic tradition which roots the Gospel of Mark in the preaching of Peter claims that Mark was with Peter in Rome until after Peter’s martyrdom in AD 67.  There are also stories of Mark having served as first bishop of Aquileia.  These stories of Mark preaching up in the Venetian lagoons and marshes along the Adriatic are almost certainly spurious but the Patriarchate of Venice claims descent from Saint Mark as the See was translated from Aquileia to Grado and then to Venice when the Archdiocese of Venice was formed from the old dioceses of Grado and Castello. 

In any event, the traditions merge with Mark arriving in Alexandria at some point and leading the Church there.  The cultural and economic prestige associated with this ancient city was certainly as important as its connection with Mark the Evangelist in establishing it as a leading center of Christian thought and practice. 

While we Catholics usually think—naively—of the papacy as dating back to the Apostle Peter and his ministry at Rome, the fact of the matter is that the papacy as we know and would recognize it is the product of a long evolutionary process that is continuing even today.  The Church of the first centuries did not see itself universally as subject to the oversight of the Bishop of Rome.  In fact there was no Church (in our sense) in the early centuries.  There was a communion of Churches, hundreds of local Churches corresponding somewhat (operative word: somewhat) to what we would think of as a diocese.  These churches maintained communion with one another—that is they held each other in mutual respect and love, praying for and with one another, and assisting one another at times of need.  The unity of faith permitted them to share the Eucharist with one another as a sign both of mutual love and conformity of doctrine.  Quite early on, by the end of the first century, an unofficial pattern of leadership among these churches began to emerge.  Rome as center of the Empire began to exercise more and more authority, particularly as Christianity spread out westwards from Rome into what is today France, Spain, England, Ireland, and the western reaches of North Africa.  Antioch and Alexandria, two cities with somewhat different theological traditions but each centers of theological reflection and evangelization—as well as economic (and for Alexandria, cultural) influence began to exercise importance.  Alexandria achieved leadership in the African Church—both along the Mediterranean seaboard and southwards along the coastal regions along the Red Sea.  Antioch’s influence spread eastwards down into what is today Iraq and Iran and beyond into India. When the Emperor Constantine established a new Imperial Capital in Byzantium and named it Constantinople (Constantine’s City), the imperial connections gave its Church and Bishop added importance, great importance.  And finally Jerusalem, always the heart of the Christian world, achieved a prominent respect and honor once Christianity became the religion of the Empire.  By the early sixth century these five Sees became the “Pentarchy” officially recognized both by Imperial decree and Church ordinance as the leading authorities in Christendom—equal in governance but ordered in dignity with Rome first, followed by Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.  Apostolic foundations were ascribed to each of these Sees: Rome claiming descent from Peter and Paul; Antioch from Peter (before he move on to Rome); Constantinople from Andrew, Peter’s elder brother;  Alexandria from Mark;  and Jerusalem from James, brother of the Lord. 

Infighting among the Patriarchs over jurisdiction and honors due as well as some doctrinal squabbles led to a breakup of the Pentarchy.  Jerusalem, due to the pressure of Imperial control from Constantinople, never achieved any real independence from Constantinople but Antioch and Alexandria each dissented from the Council of Chalcedon and their independence led to the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church respectively as these Patriarchs and the Chalcedonian Churches—Rome and Constantinople—parted ways.  Pope Shenouda, as Pope and Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church has sat in the Chair of Saint Mark and served as the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church since 1971 until his death this past Saturday, March 17, 2012.  Future postings will tell more of the Coptic Church and its late Pope.