If I Were the Pope

I had the chance to meet one of the well informed Copts who lives in Egypt, a leader, an intellectual, and a patriot, who is as concerned about Egypt as he is worried about what has become of the Copts’ conditions in their native land.

It goes without saying that I did not want to miss the opportunity of knowing the true story of what happened in Egypt in the last fateful weeks from such a well informed and trusted source.

As it happened, I confirmed some old facts, and learned some new ones. All in all, nothing really considerably different than what is now well known to anyone who is concerned about Egypt and her Copts except for one fact.

My friend assured me that thanks to the yellow press and its mercenaries and their writings, they succeeded in inflaming the anger of the Moslem mobs by painting an erroneous picture of the Coptic Church and her hierarchy wanting to usurp the Egyptian state of at least some of its temporal power, and assuming the role of a state within a state. As of now, nothing really was new to me. The biggest piece of news, was my friend’s assurance that next time a crisis like Ms. Wafaa Costantine arises, and the Copts barricade themselves in a church, there will be widespread burning of the churches reminiscent to what used to happen in the dark ages.

We all know that the theatre is set for an encore of nay of the atrocities that incited the Coptic youth to barricade themselves in the premises of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Anba Roueiss. We also know that the Egyptian authorities have done nothing but deny the presence of any persecution or discrimination against the Copts, which translates obviously into not doing a thing to even look at the legitimacy of the Coptic claims. And with the obvious state of saturation that the Copts are experiencing, and what is appearing to be a pattern of expressing their anger by barricading themselves in the cathedral, it becomes a matter of time when the episode repeats itself a third time (the first being the Al Naba2 episode) when at perhaps even the spread of a vicious rumor or the actual committal of an atrocious act against the Copts, they will gather themselves again in what they are assuming to be a safe place for them to express their anger, to find themselves and the place they are gathering in torched by the Moslem mobs, perhaps even with the participation of some of the “State Security Police” elements.

Of course we all know that the current “Emergency Law” which rules Egypt does not allow for  more than three people, or so, to gather to express their protest against the authorities. Hence the premises of the cathedral, a sacred place not to be desecrated by the “Security Forces” to be the only site left for the angry Copts to express their collective disgust and anger.

This puts His Holiness the Pope in a dilemma. He can’t refuse the Church as a shelter to his wounded flock, but he can’t also oversee the possibility of criminal and barbaric acts by the mobs hurting his people as they gathered in the sanctuary of the cathedral.

What would I do then if I were His Holiness the Pope? I would warn the authorities of the facts that they created, and ask them to give him a written document indicating what would the Church do next time her children come to her seeking asylum and solution to their problems routinely ignored and dismissed as none existing.