President Mohamed Mursi has today asked the newly enthroned Pope Tawadros II to meet him at the presidential palace in Heliopolis tomorrow
President Mohamed Mursi has today asked the newly enthroned Pope Tawadros II to meet him at the presidential palace in Heliopolis tomorrow.
Coptic youth were enraged at what they termed the President’s ‘arrogance’. “Mursi not only refrained from attending the enthronement of the Pope the day before, but then summoned him to the presidential palace to allegedly congratulate him for his seating. This is unheard of,” the Coptic activist John Talaat commented.
According to Andrawus Uweida of the Maspero Youth Union (MYU), President Mursi’s ‘summoning’ of the Pope reflects a stark contradiction to any general protocol. Pope Tawadros, Uweida said, clearly exercised Christian love and accepted to go, but the MYU as a civic entity which considers the Pope a spiritual leader, denounces the President’s stance.
On behalf of Copts Without Borders, Haitham Kamil expressed his astonishment that the President, who has no qualms with move around every inch in Egypt for the merest of trivial matters, finds it hard to pay the new Church leader a visit. Mursi should have visited the Pope for congratulations, Kamil said, “if just to endorse his famous saying that he is a president for all Egyptians. We cannot ask the Pope to refrain from going, because we understand that the Pope needs to start his term in peace and goodwill towards all, but we would have hoped for the Church to be met with better appreciation from Mursi,” he said.
Watani International
19 November 2012