Pope Shenouda III seems to have gone into seclusion as a protest against the mistreatment of Copts in Egypt. From the BBC, with thanks to JJP Mackie:
Tensions flared during the last three weeks over fears that Christians were being forced to convert to Islam.At least 34 Copts were arrested during a demonstration in Cairo and sectarian violence also erupted in Upper Egypt.
"The seclusion of His Holiness the Pope will continue until he reaches a solution [with the government] that satisfies his conscience to the problems related to the Copts," the pope's secretary Bishop Armia told Reuters news agency.
Other Church sources have been quoted as saying he will not resume his duties until the authorities release those people arrested in Cairo.
Controversial case
The generally calm relations between the authorities and the Coptic minority - which makes up 5-10% of Egypt's population - became strained over the case of priest's wife Wafa Constantine.
Government officials had said Mrs Constantine, 48, wanted to convert to Islam but was being prevented from doing so by her family.
Rumours that she had been abducted and forced to convert began circulating among Copts, sparking angry protests outside Cairo's St Mark's cathedral.A number of police and worshippers were injured in protests where stones were allegedly thrown and arrests were made at demonstrations deemed illegal.
The clashes and a sit-in at the cathedral ended when protesters were told that Mrs Constantine was back under the Church's protection.
"The patriarch granted her his mercy and assured her that she remained in the Church," the pope's office said.
Last Thursday, Egypt's prosecutor-general said that Mrs Constantine had gone to police saying she wanted to change her religion, but had decided to remain a Christian after meeting Church officials.
'Discrimination'
Also this month, police said they had arrested 25 people after sectarian violence erupted in the Upper Egyptian village of Munqateen.
Police were reported to be keeping Muslims and Christians apart after three Christian-owned shops were set ablaze, Christian homes were stoned and police cars were wrecked.
Bizarre
Under Sadat Pope Shenouda -- or perhaps it was his predecessor Shenouda II (I can't remember)--also, for a time, went into seclusion. The Copts are the original inhabitants of Egypt. What is left of Coptic art far outdoes in beauty, though not in monumental impact, the only other thing in Egypt worth seeing -- the pre-Islamic tombs of the pharoahs, and the Sphinx.
Many of those who consider themselves Arabs are, in fact, the descendants of Copts (just as the Pakistanis are simply the brainwashed descendants, some bearing a "Sayeed" in their often arabized names). Would that some of them, now persecuting Copts, were to come to their senses, and regain some interest, and sympathy for, their pre-Islamic ancestors, who at some point, in the slow asphyxiation or outright persecution (there is in the British Museum a Persian miniature that shows a mountain of Coptic skulls, apparently from some Muslim victory, real or imagined, that had even been heard of, and celebrated in painterly fashion, in distant Persia).
But if Shenouda goes into seclusion, other Christian prelates have felt forced to take more dramatic gestures -- even to sacrifice their lives. One wishes here to recall the suicide, not a suicide-bombing, but a lone protest of Bishop John Joseph, back in 1998. Does everyone remember that act, or Bishop John Joseph? It shouldn't be forgotten -- not quite yet.
It is, in a way, so memorable not because of its impact but because it had so little impact. There is a poem among her Stikhi k chekham ("Verses to the Czechs") by the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva, which begins with a newspaper clipping, from a Czech newspaper, about a single officer and twenty soldiers, who were on the border when the Germans came marching in. The officer, leaving his soldiers behind, went forward on his own, to meet the Germans -- to fight the Germans. The newspaper account read: "Sud'ba ego neizvestna." ("His fate is unknown.") And Tsvetaeva makes a poem out of it, and keeps repeating the line: "Dvadtsat' soldat, odin' ofitser" ("Twenty soldiers, and one officer.") The point to the poem is that, while the Czechs could not actually go to war against the overwhelming forces of the Wehrmacht, and it was hopeless and helpless to stop the Nazi aggression, at least that one soldier went forward to sacrifice himself, and "voina -- vsyo zhe byla." (("There was a war."). Bishop John Joseph protested, seemingly as futilely.
Here is an excerpt from a story about Bishop John Joseph in an Asian despatch by Choong Tet Sieu and
Shahid-ur Rehman / ISLAMABAD
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IT WAS A PASSIONATE gesture in a land where passions often run high. For Catholics such as Bishop John Joseph, it is a mortal sin to take your own life. But on May 6, the 65-year-old Pakistani clergyman went to the courthouse in the town of Sahiwal, 700 km south of Islamabad, and shot himself in the head.
What drove him to pull the trigger was the court's decision last month that a young member of his Faisalabad diocese, Ayub Masih, must die for sullying the name of the Prophet Muhammad. What prepared him for his desperate act was despair at the increasing abuse of blasphemy laws in mainly Muslim Pakistan. His action was "the only effective answer to the ever-growing violence which surrounds us," the bishop declared in a suicide note that called for the laws to be repealed.
His death has drawn fresh attention to laws introduced in 1986 during the military rule of President Zia ul Haq, and later amended during Nawaz Sharif's first stewardship as prime minister on recommendations by religious courts. Penalties currently range from three years' jail for insulting the holy persons of Islam, to life imprisonment for showing disrespect to the Koran. Anyone who defiles, directly or indirectly, the name of the Prophet faces a death sentence.
Critics say the blasphemy charges are increasingly being used to settle scores and to bludgeon submission from adversaries in land disputes. And Christians, who form about 2% of Pakistan's 140 million population, are among the victims. Most are poor - many hold dirty, lowly paid jobs - but they live on prime sites historically attached to mission schools and churches. Over the past two years, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has reported seizures of Christian-settled lands whose occupants were accused of blasphemy.
Khalid Anwar, Pakistan's minister for law and justice, concedes there is abuse. "There is no doubt that people, for personal reasons, file false cases. And judges are under great pressure not to acquit the accused," he says. Some jurists have even been warned that they and their families will be harmed if defendants are released. The result: convictions based on flimsy evidence. In other cases, human rights advocates point to verdicts driven more by political exigency than by ensuring that justice is done."
Tsvetaeva's poem -- it begins, for those who want to look it up, with the scene ("Cheshskij lesok, samij vesnoi....Den' i mesyats, vershiny, ekhom, den' kak nemtsy vkhodili k chekham....)--immortalized that unnamed officer whose fate was unknown.
Bishop John Joseph needs to be remembered in the same way. Perhaps no one will bother to write a poem about him. So let's erect a monument to him in memory, right here.
It's quite sad Bishop John Joseph did not choose an alternate form of protest, like perhaps publishing an essay about what he was going through philosophically. If he would have been tried and/or executed, he would have the same fate, with more impact and a higher profile. Also, he would not be in the unfortunate circumstance of ending his own life.
That said, I can admire that he was a man of conviction who obviously saw his surrounding society for what it was. Were more to be as clearheaded, perhaps positive change could come from within in a more widespread fashion.