You may have
seen this story floating around the Internets:
Shenouda, patriarch of the Coptic
Orthodox Church [in] Alexandria who led Egypt's minority Christians for 40
years during a time of increased tensions with the majority Muslim community,
died yesterday in Cairo. He was 88. Shenouda, known in Cairo in Arabic as Baba
Shenouda, led one of the world's oldest churches, which traced its founding to St.
Mark in the 1st century. Shenouda suffered from the effects of cancer and died
of a heart attack yesterday afternoon.
Coptic Christians trace their roots to
the flight to Egypt by Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus.
There was a
time when there were several “popes” in the church, and the church in
Alexandria, Egypt had one of them. The Coptic Church was formed as a result of
the first significant schism of one of the earliest “Apostolic Sees” (Alexandria,
in Egypt; the other two being Antioch and Rome, prior to the “development” of “the
Pentarchy” as it was adopted in the fifth century). The historian Samuel Hugh
Moffett records it this way (“A History of Christianity in Asia” Vol 1, 2nd
ed Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, ©1998):
Constantinople in the last half of the
fifth century was, in effect, ruled by Germans and Isaurians, not by the
imperial aristocracy, and Alexandria felt culturally and politically as well as
theologically superior to such barbarians. When Chalcedon (451 A.D.) humiliated
and deposed the Egyptian patriarch Dioscurus and forced a Byzantine Chalcedonian
patriarch, Proterius (452-457), onto the throne of the great Cyril [of
Alexandria], Egypt exploded, resulting in the first permanent schism of the
Christian church. The Egyptian Monophysites elected a rival partriarch, Timothy
Aelurus, nicknamed Timothy the Cat. This rupture marks the establishment of the
Egyptian church as a separate, independent entity commonly called the Coptic
church, since “Coptic” is the ancient Greek word for “Egyptian.” In 457, the
year that Hiba of Edessa died and was succeeded by a Monophysite, mobs of
Egyptians took to the streets of Alexandria, cornered the orthodox patriarch
Proterius in a church, killed him, and burned his bloody body in triumph (pg
190).
There was a
lot of that sort of thing going on back then.
This was the One True Pope! Memory eternal!!!!
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