The Coptic Orthodox Bishop of Youth Anba Moussa told Watani that today’s papal elections will help draw the features of the Church of tomorrow; it will place the Church on the path for a new vision by the grace of God
The Coptic Orthodox Bishop of Youth Anba Moussa told Watani that today’s papal elections will help draw the features of the Church of tomorrow; it will place the Church on the path for a new vision by the grace of God.
The new pope, Anba Moussa said, will have a have his hands full; much awaits his decisions.
Perhaps among the most important tasks to be tackled, he said, is the amendment of the 1957 bylaws for papal elections. The bylaws, he explained, need much updating, since so much has changed in the Church and in Egypt since they were first drawn. For one, the number of eligible voters need to augmented, and their prequalifications updated to suit the growing congregation and the changing times. Native-born bishops who serve in the Coptic Church outside Egypt are currently disqualified from the vote since they are non-Egyptian, Anba Moussa cited as an example. The new bylaws should make provision for that predicament. When the current bylaws were drawn in 1957 there were no Coptic churches outside Egypt, let alone native-born clergy. Today, he said, Anba Iliya of Sudan, Anba Athanasius of France, and Anba Seraphim of England could not vote.
The laity too sees that the conditions to qualify laymen for voting need updating; the sums cited in the 1957 bylaws as minimum salaries earned or taxes paid by eligible voters are today laughable. Voters that are today in sectors that never existed back in 1957—such as journalists in privately-owned papers; papers in 1957 were mostly State-owned—are not eligible for the vote.
“Pope Shenouda had intended to amend the 1957 bylaw but had no time to do so. Furthermore, he did not want it to appear as though new bylaws would be tailored for a specific person to succeed him. But now, whoever will be the new pope will amend the bylaws within one year into his papacy,” Anba Moussa said. All five candidates for the papacy have signed pledges to do so.
Anba Moussa was asked whether he thought an Islamist-majority parliament would stand in the way of approving to legislate the new bylaws for the election of the Coptic Orthodox patriarch, to which he replied that the new constitution should secure the right for Christians to choose their religious leaders according to their own doctrine.
Watani International
29 October 2012