WATANI International
25 January 2009
Last week Pope Shenouda III decided that the church of the Holy Virgin in the town of the Rosetta, which had belonged to the Rum Orthodox sect until 1990 and which was used by the Coptic Orthodox since 2007, would be evacuated and handed over to Mohamed Mustafa Kamel al-Taranelli. The hand-over was conducted peacefully and the building is already being demolished.
Mr Taranelli had in 1990 bought the church building, together with its outer fencing wall alongside which 14 rooms had been built and rented as shops. In 2007 Pope Theodorus II wrote to Rosetta primary court informing of the details of the sale, and explaining that, at the time of the sale, the Rum Orthodox patriarchate had been ignorant of the fact that Egyptian law banned the sale of places of worship. Accordingly, and in line with objections to the sale from the Antiquities Authority—the church was built in the sixth century and renovated several times since, the last of which was in 1817—the patriarchate was reneging on the sale while offering Mr Taranelli the sum of money he paid in addition to any suitable compensation, be it an equivalent sum, say. The patriarchate then handed the church over to the Coptic Orthodox Church to use as a church.
Last September Mr Taranelli, who had taken the matter to court and expected a decision yesterday—by which time Watani had already gone to press—had a band of 40 armed thugs accompanied by a bulldozer attack the church and the shops, causing huge damages.
Reda Nassif, the lawyer for the bishopric said Pope Shenouda’s decision was based on the utmost priority of social peace among Rosetta’s people.