New Coptic Catholic leader receives Pope's approval

Vatican City, Jan 18, 2013 / 03:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI approved Bishop Ibrahim Isaac Sidrak as the new Patriarch of Alexandria of the Copts in Egypt, granting him "ecclesiastical communion.''

The former Bishop of Minya was elected during a Synod of Bishops of the Coptic Catholic Church in Cairo, which lasted from Jan. 12 to16. As part of the election, his rank was raised to archbishop.

The 57-year-old will replace Cardinal Antonio Naguib, aged 77, who resigned on Jan. 18 after suffering from partial paralysis and undergoing brain surgery.

The Vatican hopes his appointment will see more collaboration with Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II, who began his patriarchal ministry in Egypt just two months ago.

And the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, including the heads of the Roman, Melkite, Maronite, Syrian, Armenian and Chaldean Rites, all offered a formal welcome to the new leader.

"The international press has called you a 'young patriarch,'" they said in a letter dated Jan. 18.

"We are sure that with this 'youth' you will be a point of reference within the Council of Oriental Catholic Patriarchs and the Ecumenical Council of the Churches and for the Church of Egypt," they added.

Archbishop Sidrak was born in Assiut, Egypt, and studied philosophy and theology at a Coptic seminary in Cairo.

He was ordained a priest on Feb. 7, 1980 and incarnated in the Eparchy of Assiut.

He served two years in the Church Michael the Archangel in Cairo before moving to Rome where he received a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University.

Archbishop Sidrak returned to Egypt where he taught theology at his seminary, the Patriarchal Seminary of Maadi.

He was elected Bishop of Minya in 2002 after working as rector of the seminary and as secretary general for the Coptic Catholic Church's office for catechetical teaching.

The Egyptian is the second bishop of Minya – an area south of Cairo holding one-fifth of the country's estimated 200,000 Copts – to be elected patriarch.

His ministry as bishop was marked by his efforts to help farmers and people in need, regardless of their faith, through increased social and charitable activities in the villages of the diocese.

The Coptic Catholic Church was established in 1824 and there are five parishes in the United States and in Canada.

Egypt now has two heads of Churches – Archbishop Sidra and the Coptic Orthodox leader Pope Tawadros II.

Over 10 percent of Egyptians are Copts, which makes them the largest Christian minority in the Middle East.

The Orthodox and Coptic leaders will surely be discussing the saftey of Egyptian Christians, which became a topic of concern after President Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood Party and radical Salafis took up power in the country.

Christians also fear that the recently approved constitution will fail to protect them.

And in theory yes, Rome was simply part of the old Empire the Byzantines wanted back, but that was their perspective. In practice Rome was never fond of Byzantine rule and strove against it even when it could barely take care of itself. Besides, Byzantium hardly held Italy long enough to be of consequence before the Germanics took a good chunk of it right back. The reality is the whole time Rome was scheming with the Franks and other Germanics to sweep aside the Arians, take Italy, and form something out of the old Western Empire clear up to the point where Pope Leo found his man in Charlemagne.

hmmm...true -- and the reason was not religious, but socio-linguistic leading to political

The turning point could be put as the reign of Flavius Heraclius Augustus in 610 AD when two things happened:

Islam -- sweeping away Antioch and Jerusalem and Alexandria and making it a Rome versus Constantinople fight
In 620 he changed the official language of the Empire from Latin to Greek

The latter was a big hit. It was logical for Heraclius as most in the East spoke Greek not Latin. But just a few years later, NO ONE spoke Latin, while in the West there were fewer speakers of Greek. Net-net, the two sides just didn't understand what the heck the other was arguing about, especially over intricacies like homousis etc.

by 700 AD, the fact was that these were not speaking to each other, and the Western Patriarch's problems -- the Arians, the Magyar, Viking, Saracen, Slavic etc. invasions -- were ignored by the East. The Pope had no choice but to seize on a suitable political power and that's why he chose the Franks

That’s why I termed it a vassal state, as it constantly chafed against Eastern Roman rule, as did the Germanics and Slavs as a whole. This is evident by the fact that at the first opportunity, the Latin church jumped right in with the Frankish Holy Roman Empire, a New Rome essentially where it would be the head church inside a real empire that would both crush it’s rivals the Arians and rival Constantinople. They even tried to expand that concept to the Slavs with the newly Christianized Bulgarian Empire to put the Byzantines against a two-front threat.

True enough about the part until the Bulgars

the Bulgars were ALREADY the second threat to Constantinople, and remained so even after their conversion to Christianity. They remained like so until the Magyars came

Then the second Bulgar Empire was another threat to the reduced Byzantine Empire, but were crushed by the Turks

In light of that, I guess at the end of the day I look at it this way - the Latins can assert and pound the table about their supremacy all day, but no one is listening. History just doesn’t jibe with their story

Firstly, I'm a Latin, and secondly, NYer is a Latin but attends an Eastern Catholic Church. Neither of us (and incidently neither does Pope Benedict or Pope John Paul II) talk about 'supremacy' - at the Papal stage that is acknowledged as wrong. And you can see this in the funeral of Pope John Paul II when the Patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churchs were the ones leading the coffin -- because this returned to the idea of the Patriarchs as equals with the Patriarch of the West as the first among equals

That view is the view of the present Pope and is permeating all in the West and that is why relations between Catholic and Orthodox and Orientals and Assyrians are warmer and warmer.

You forget about the first split over the veneration of icons, coming out of the second council of Nicaea. After that the Latins and Orthodox pretty much de facto go their separate ways, capped by Pope Leo crowning Charlemagne as Imperator Romanus.

And no, at the point, at least on the surface, they weren’t hostile, but the division was there, and had been there since the Lombards. It just widened over time due to various events, but in reality Rome had always sought it’s own destiny over the other churches. In many respects the Latins did what the Protestants did centuries later vis a vis Constantinople.

Which is fine in my book. They were the proper church at the time to win and organize the Germanic tribes in Western Europe out of paganism, even if they had their missteps and corrupt Popes. As far as the current, I have great respect for Popes Benedict and John Paul II. They do and did tell it like it is.

I only have a problem with those Latinophiles that seem to want to rewrite history to make Rome the dominant church since Christ, when clearly they were not for centuries, in principle or actuality.

I recommend reading "PHILIP JENKINS - THE LOST HISTORY OF cHRISTIANITY" -- some excerpts

About 780 AD, the bishop Timothy became patriarch, or catholicos, of the Church of the East, which was then based at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (in modern day Iraq). He was then 52 and lived on into his nineties, dyuing in 823 AD.

At every stage, Timothy's career violates everything we think we know about the history of Christianity -- about its geographical spread, its relationship with political state power, its cultural breadth, and its interactions with other religions. In terms of his presitge, and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day , much more influent than the Patriarchs in Rome and Constantinople -- Perhaps a quarter of the world's Christians looked to Timothy as both spiritual and political head.
.....
Well into the Middle Ages, the Christian strongholds of the Middle East included such currently newsworthy Iraqi cities as Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk, while Tikrit -- hometown of Saddam hussein -- was a thriving Christian center several centuries after the coming of Islam.
Focusing on the Asian, Eastern story of Christianity forces us to jettison our customary images of the so-called Dark Ages. From Timothy's point of view, the culture and learning of the ancient world had never been lost...
The Church of the East still thought and spoke in Syriac, and its adherents continued to do so for several centuries afterward. As late as the thirteenth century, they still called themselves Nasraye "Nazaarenes". Monks and priests bore the title rabban
..
To appreciate the scale of the Church of the East, we can look at the list of hte Church's metropolitans -- that is, of those senior clergy. in england, the medieval church had 2 metropolitans: York and Canterbury. Timothy himself presided over nineteen metropolitans and 85 bishops. Just in Timothy's lifetime, new metropolitan sees were created near Tehran, in Syria, Turkestan etc. Arabia had at least 4 sees and Timothy created a new one in Yemen. And the Church was growing in southern India
Timothy reported the conversion of the Turkish great king, the khagan, who then ruled over much of central Asia. He mentioed in 780 AD how :in these days the Holy Spirit has anointed a metropolitan for the Turks, and we are preparing to consecrate another one for the Tibetans"
The Church operation in Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian and Chinese
....
When Timothy died in 823, he had every reason to hope for his Church's future. The new caliph was friendly to Christian clergy and scholars, and although some ordinary Christians were drifting toward the new faith, there were few signs of any ruinous defections. Even if conditions under Islamic rule ever did become difficutl, the Church of the East had plenty of opportunities to grow outside that realm, with all the new conversions in central Asia and china, and the continuing presence in India.
Any reasonable projection of the Christian future would have foreseen a bipolar world, divided between multiethnic churches centered respectively in Constantinople and Baghdad. Timothy would hprobably have felt little hope for the future of Christianity in western Europe. Already in Timothy's last days, Charlemagen's vaunted empire was fragmenting, and falling prey to the combined assaults of the pagan Norsemen and Muslims Saracens. In the century after 790, ruin and massacre overtook virtually all the British and Irish monasteries that had kept learning alive over the previous two centuries, and from which missionaries ahd gone out to evangelize northern Europe. Spain was already under Muslim rule, and southern Italy and southern France seemed to follow. In 846 Saracens raided Rome, plundering the Basilica of Saint Peter and the tomb of Peter.
Latin Europe's low point came soon after 900 when, within the space of a couple of years, areas of central France were ravaged in quick succession by pagan Vikings from the north, Muslim Moors from the south and pagan Magyars from the east: Christians had nowhere left to hide. Perhaps history would ultimately write off the Christian venture into western Europe as rash overreach, a diversion from Christianity's natural destiny, which evidently lay in Asia. Europe might have been a continent too far

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