Word: coptic
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...Cairo's Cathedral of St. Mark filed an excited swarm of sweating, portly pashas to elect a new patriarch, the 114th successor to St. Mark as Pope of Egyptian Christianity. Among the electors, for the first time, were both Egyptian laymen and swarthy delegates of the Ethiopian Coptic Church. The choice: Archbishop Anba Yussab, 63, whose flowing white beard gives him a proper patriarchal dignity. Ordained 40 years ago in a desert monastery founded by St. Anthony, he later studied theology in Athens,* was an abbot in Jerusalem during World War I, when he showed great diplomacy in dealing...
...supporters looked to Yussab as the only man who could 1) salvage Coptic education and finances after centuries of ruinous monopoly by ignorant monks; 2) bring the schismatic subjects of Haile Selassie back to the Coptic fold. Yussab who has crowned Haile Selassie, planned soon to make an almost unprecedented journey to Addis Ababa to placate the Copts' only foreign ally. The 1,500,000 Copts pray that Yussab's diplomacy may avert the wave of persecution which they foresee as an outcome of a resurgent Islam...
...singlehanded swung the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) against the Arians* and made the doctrine of the Trinity the belief of all orthodox Christianity. In the 17th Century the Copts became prisoners of Islam. Millions of Copts were persecuted and driven from their faith by ridicule, taxes, restrictions. The Coptic language all but disappeared; the tongue of the Pharaohs survives today only in the long Coptic Mass, where it is chanted to the sound of cymbals and triangles. Coptic churches tried to escape attention by being outwardly drab, tucked into back alleys, though gorgeous within...
...Copts could develop no great religious art or thought. Sneered the great German theologian Ernst Troeltsch: "Christianity is what it has come to be only through its alliance with antiquity; while with the Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery." But the very backwardness of the Coptic Church has made it an archeological repository of beliefs and practices more like those of apostolic Christianity than those of Western churches...
...smelling something. They were-the West Wind. One day this week the 17,000,000-odd dwellers along the Nile arose at dawn, took several deep breaths, and went picnicking. It was the Shamm en-Nesim, the one common holiday for all Egyptians-Moslem, Christian and Jew. Once a Coptic feast day, the Shamm en-Nesim means literally "the smell of the West Wind." Irreverent Americans in Cairo call it "sniff-the-breeze day." Egyptians believe that a lungful of the departing spring air will ward off summer languor-provided the sniffer manages to stay awake all day on Shamm...