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Thousands of Christians have gathered in Jerusalem for an ancient fire ceremony that celebrates Jesus' resurrection. In a ritual dating back at least 1,200 years, they crowded Saturday into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christian tradition holds that Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected. During the annual ceremony, top Eastern Orthodox clerics enter the Edicule, the small chamber marking the site of Jesus' tomb. They then emerge to reveal candles said to be miraculously lit with "holy fire" as a message to the faithful from heaven. The details of the flame's source are a closely guarded secret. Roman...

Cairo (Agenzia Fides) - Palm Sunday, celebrated the day before yesterday by the Churches that follow the Julian calendar, saw an exponential increase of Egyptian Coptic pilgrims who have come to celebrate the rites of Holy Week in Jerusalem. According to the Egyptian media, in the current year already at least 5,700 Coptic Orthodox Christians have reached the Holy City, an increase of more than a thousand units compared to the Coptic pilgrims who had carried out a pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Jerusalem in 2015. The growing presence of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox in the Holy City marks...

Around 6,000 Egyptians, almost all of them Coptic Christians, have entered Israel to attend the annual Holy Fire ceremony at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Saturday. There has been a sharp rise recently in pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Egyptian Copts, after the Coptic patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, in effect rolled back a ban imposed by a predecessor in 1980, in the wake of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Tawadros himself visited Israel in November for the funeral of Archbishop Anba Abraham, the Coptic Orthodox Metropolitan Archbishop of Jerusalem and the Near East.
The accession of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi in June 2014...

Let My People Go  Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic EqualityBy S. S. HasanOxford University Press. 320 pp. $49.95.Reviewed by Robert W. ShaffernSana Hasan, an Egyptian scholar best known for her Enemy in the Promised Land, has written another important book in Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt—a book in which she honestly confronts the sorry condition of Christians in Egypt, where the “problems faced by the Christian minority are for many . . . a taboo subject.” Hasan courageously describes the discrimination and harm often visited upon one of Christianity’s oldest communions—the Coptic...

Several hundred worshippers from Western Pennsylvania and surrounding states watched Friday as Coptic Christianity's spiritual leader consecrated the region's only Coptic church in a rite dating from the 1st century. Pope Shenouda III conducted a ceremony filled with pomp, as well as a very personal touch, at St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Ambridge, Beaver County. The 83-year-old pope, who arrived in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, is beloved by followers for his warmth and for his success in expanding the church. When he became the patriarch in Alexandria, Egypt -- the center of the Coptic faith -- in 1971, the...