Journey Back to Eden.pdf - St Mark Coptic Orthodox Church Chicago

76 DECEMBERtween Alexandria and Cairo. Several hours along on our journey,we took a road which veers off to the left and started our way tothe Monastery of St. Bishoi.Once we arrived there, His Holiness invited me to attend Vespersover which he was to preside in the papal residence adjacent to themonastery. After we prayed Vespers, I was taken to a hospitality roomwhere I had supper. The only other guest there was a Coptic nun.After the supper, the Pope sent for me and took me for a walkthrough the desert, near the perimeter of the monastery. As wewalked, His Holiness spoke to me of his vision for ecumenical relations.Here, he told me that well-catechized high school studentswould be capable of resolving the difficulties between the Catholicand Orthodox Churches, except that history, politics, and ambitionhave forever clouded the issues that need to be agreed upon. “Thefaith is simple; a child can grasp it. The true Church is so simple inits unity of love in Christ.”Nevertheless, he said, he has anxieties about Catholicism inthis respect: with which Catholicism should he reconcile? Fromwhat he has read, there are now several voices claiming to representthe Catholic Church, even about essential matters of doctrine.So how could he speak about a union or intercommunion betweenhis Church and the Catholic Church when that might cause membersof his Church to be scandalized or confused? They mightimagine that he was negotiating with irreconcilable forces. I gatherthat he considers some of these “voices” to be irreconcilable withwhat he considers the true nature of the Catholic Church.At any rate, I began to understand, not so much from what hesaid, as from the gravity of how he spoke, that if the CopticChurch were in some way aligned with worldwide Catholicism, itwould suffer the great disadvantage of being reckoned as a foreignChurch in Egypt, rather than a national Church of Egypt. Thereare already enough difficulties, the Pope said, in being the nationalChurch of a Christian minority in an Islamic world. But to be a“plant” of a foreign, Christian power (Rome) would profoundlycompromise the safety and integrity of his Coptic people. Yet thePope spoke of their ecumenical relations, Coptic and Catholic, orCoptic and Islamic, with the greatest delicacy, perhaps from hisyears of cultivating the practical arts of religious diplomacy.No, he said, Orthodoxy must find union first. First, the OrthodoxChurches must discover their oneness. They must recover