A Man of Faith and Unity

When we celebrate Easter, we recall to memory Pope Shenouda III, the outstanding late Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church - a man who departed to God on March 17 and who greatly influenced by his presence the pastoral work of many Christians in Egypt and the Churches of the Middle East. His heroic contribution is far more than mere pastoral care of the Coptic Orthodox Church or theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Non-Chalcedonian (called also Old Oriental) Orthodox Churches in which he significantly contributed.  He was an energetic person who went everywhere he could go to preach and teach the Christian faith according to the early Church of Alexandria.  His contribution to the welfare of his faithful included direct contact with those in authority and those who listened to him among his faithful in his weekly answers to their questions in personal, social, and theological matters. So much can be said about his commitment to the monastic life in Egypt which flourished during his pontificate, or to his enormous writings accessible by the ordinary and simple folks as also about his relationship with other Christian Churches and communions as well as the President of Egypt and other political leaders, Muslim leaders and organizations. But let me only present his contribution to the dialogue for Christian unity.

This faithful servant of God, as Pope Benedict XVI called him in his letter of condolences to the Coptic Orthodox Church, initiated a new idea and presented it to other theologians from Chalcedonian/Greek and Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches as well as theologians from the Catholic Church. The theologians meeting in Vienna in 1971 agreed to use a new language and new terms in coherently expressing the disputed doctrine of the divinity and humanity of Christ at the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon where the schism between some of the above Churches took place in 451 AD partly due to using old philosophical terms that were probably misunderstood. In 1951, on the occasion of the 15th centuries anniversary of the Council, Pope Pius XII had expressed his conviction that there is little, if any, disagreement between the Catholic Church and the Non-Chalcedonian Churches on the doctrine of the two natures in Christ promulgated by the Council. With the theological agreement in 1971, the proposed solution now had to be ratified by ecclesial authorities in Rome and the Patriarchates of Orthodox Churches both Chalcedonians who agree on the decisions of Chalcedon and Non-Chalcedonians who did not accept the decisions of Chalcedon. 


In 1972 Shenouda, newly elected Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, visited the major Chalcedonian/Greek Orthodox Churches to soothe the relations with them. While in Lebanon before the end of his ecumenical tour, he received an invitation from Pope Paul VI for a visit to the Vatican. It was in his Easter message in 1973 that Pope Shenouda III announced to his Coptic people that he accepted the invitation and gestured that Pope Paul VI would send with him a relic of St. Athanasius the Great, one of Shenouda’s great predecessors who defended the faith in the divinity of Christ in the 4^th century, to its original place in Egypt. In May 1973, Pope Paul VI received Pope Shenouda III in the Vatican and together they signed a common declaration on the Incarnation of the Son of God. See the Declaration here:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1973/may/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19730510_dichiarazione-comune_en.html

Even when our Orthodox brothers may question the "Development of Doctrine" you can see here how one of their profound theologians, Shenouda, used new expressions of the doctrine to re-present it anew according to the current thought yet he did not rescind what the Coptic Orthodox tradition believed with regard to the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ; for he willed unity as much as he could push it and in the way he understood in his conscience. May be for him, he was restoring the recognition of the Holy See of Rome of the Coptic theological understanding. In fact the Council of Chalcedon did not condemn Dioscorus, then Patriarch of Alexandria, for any theological error but because Dioscorus dared to excommunicate the Pope of Rome before the Council! This is, in my opinion, a case of  the Development of Doctrine since new expressions are used to illuminate an old doctrine. The Ecumenical Second Vatican Council had said it in 1965.  It does not mean that the doctrine changes in itself but that the the Church perceives it more fully as she grows in her experience or uses new expressions that fit the culture/language she lives in. 

This was a moment of celebration in which the two sister Churches of Rome and Alexandria embraced each other again after 15 centuries of enmity and moved wisely to re-establish full visible unity.  The great Catholic ecclesiologist and Cardinal, Yves Congar, commented about this declaration that it included the only concrete Christological dogmatic agreement between two heads of Churches. Shenouda III had the dogmatic agreement ratified by the Coptic Orthodox Synod in 1986. Shenouda remained committed to the reunion of the Churches. This was a wise move too by Pope Shenouda;  for by accepting the invitation of Paul VI, he opened the way for more mutual understanding of theologies and, more importantly, the world heard of this Coptic Orthodox tiny Church  for the first time in centuries.  To his credit, he was a magnificent contributor to the doctrinal agreements reached between the Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches in 1989. Both families of Churches found nothing that would stand in their full reunion in terms of tradition or doctrine. In 2000, Pope Shenouda III received Blessed Pope John Paul II in Cairo and in the Mass celebrated by the Roman Pontiff, Pope Shenouda addressed him with warm words about the ecumenical results achieved so far by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In the same meeting Pope Shenouda referred to his warm relations with Sheikh Dr. Tantawi, the late Grand Imam of Al-Azhar which meant that the patriarch was a moderate man with a large heart for Non-Christians. Even when in Pope Shenouda's mind, Christian unity may have meant first restoring unity among Christians of Egypt to come back to the "mother Church" i.e. the Coptic Orthodox Church, it still was encouraging to see the patriarch use his energy to open theological dialogues with the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Churches without compromising his own traditional doctrines of faith. He did not accept the Catholic dogmas of Purgatory and Filioque although these same dogmas were accepted by the Jacobites (including Coptic representatives) and Greek Orthodox bishops in the Council of Florence (1439 AD). He maintained a distance against the Assyrian Orthodox Church accusing them of keeping the Nestorian heresy even when Pope John Paul II had received Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Orthodox Church and the two issued a Christological declaration in 1994 that in substance was not different from that issued by Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III in 1973. In many ways the energetic Pope Shenouda III resembled Blessed John Paul the Great not the least in his outspoken courage to deal with heresy such as Jehovah's Witnesses, his pastoral concerns for the youth, and his patriotic stance for which he is remembered as saying "Not that we live in Egypt, but that Egypt lives in us."

Here is the lesson we learn from such a Christian giant. He laboured with full courage to advance the cause of his Church and by doing that he advanced the cause of Christian unity.  Pope Shenouda's concern was primarily about a local Church - the Church of Egyptians including those in the diaspora.  And it seems, at least to me, that his concern for Christian unity was a defense of the Coptic Orthodox faith as truly orthodox (i.e. living in the right faith) before Catholic and Greek Orthodox authorities. In Benedict XVI, the same can be said: In theological dialogue, theologians representing the Catholic Church express (probably in new terms) the doctrines of faith of the Catholic Church in order to clear misunderstandings of the past, but there is no compromise about Catholic faith in theological dialogue with other Christian communions or Churches. This was the basis of the common declaration on the doctrine of Justification by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation  in 1999 in which both sides recognized that, although there remain some differences on justification by grace, mutual condemnations with regard to this doctrine in the 16th century no longer apply today.


Now we ask ourselves, what do ordinary Christians do to help advance Christian unity? We do not have to be theologians.  We do not have to build shrines and churches but at least open up to the great Eastern Tradition which very few know about; learn and dialogue with Orthodox neighbours; live a life of charity towards Christians in pain in the Middle East whether Catholic or Orthodox; help them to survive as Christians; give financially to the cause of many Christians in need there; and appreciate dialogue with moderate Muslims in the Middle East. After all, the Catholic Church gives priority to unity. Unity in Truth starts with the dialogue of love. Today, rich Catholics in the Western hemisphere have an opportunity to help their fellow Christians in the Middle East and alleviate their feelings of helplessness.  In a larger context, people of good will need to help a process of permanent and just peace among all citizens of the Middle East. This is certainly not happening today as we see powers of every political and ideological stripe fighting for a larger piece of the land or at least supporting a destabilization of existing peace through armed rebellion in the name of bringing a concept of freedom and risking, in the mean time, many lives. No one can ignore the vicious attacks on Libya by American, French and British bombers to free it from one dictator in the name of supporting freedom while they were creating more tribal divisions in that country as one example. Christian unity will, on the contrary, start the process of peace in the Middle East.


Nice words from our pastors are not enough. Exhortations without real action are empty! If Orthodox Christians are still scared of the Catholic Church fearing she is there to absorb them, Catholics must reassure them that they are valued with their tradition and in the event of full unity their tradition will be fully respected. This is the role that Eastern Catholics are here to play. The Orthodox Churches are part of us since Apostolic times and an opportunity or rather a call for restoring their unity with the Catholic Church is urgent and timely. Orthodox must recognize the only international voice of Christians which is performed by the Pope, Bishop of Rome.  Rome still wields the most formidable power in defense of Christians and Non-Christians with her diplomatic relations among nations and is the only sovereign country represented in Arab nations.  On the other hand, bishops of the Catholic Church headed by the Bishop of Rome may well pray and work together with those of the local Orthodox Churches to ignite again the fervor for Christian unity in the faithful. As I indicated in my letter to Pope Benedict XVI last October, this year is the 50th anniversary of the start of Vatican II, and would be a great initiative for His Holiness to convoke an Ecumenical Council to which bishops of the Orthodox Churches are invited to participate together with bishops of the Catholic Church to resolve what remains of doctrinal issues and the primacy issue.  This same proposal was uttered by Pope Shenouda III in 1974. He thought that differences between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches would be solved within a few weeks of such an Ecumenical Council. Again we must remember history. As Blessed Pope John XXIII was the first Catholic leader to recognize the need of the Catholic Church to enter into ecumenical dialogue with the rest of Christians, so was Shenouda III the first Coptic Orthodox Patriarch to realize and actively enter from his perspective into the same dialogue.  


It is in unity that we find strength as Christians. It is in unity that our Christian brothers in the Arab world can survive. The Lord has risen. Let’s imitate Him and strive to follow him as Patriarch Shenouda III did in his energetic work; for the Lord is generous in His love and He has conquered death for us!

Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church

I am very saddened by the passing away today of Pope Shenouda III, the outstanding Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church (and,  according to the Coptic Orthodox tradition, officially Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark.) His Holiness Shenouda III contributed significantly to the theological dialogue between the Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church. His pastoral work and charismatic preaching influenced many thinkers especially in the Churches of the Middle East. 

His personality was such a humble and rich person who was able to bring thousands of followers and admirers to not only hear him in his weekly sermons at St. Mark Cathedral in Cairo and in Alexandria but also to share and laugh with him when he joked about things including himself. 

For forty years, I followed closely the words of this charismatic man, first as an attendee of his sermons and lectures in Cairo, then in Toronto when he visited his people a few times in the 1980s, 1990s, and later in the 21st century, or on YouTube through the Internet. 

May God give him peace in heaven and continue the ecumenical work that this distinguished leader brought forward in the Churches.

From Freud's Unconscious to My Conscious Love!

In a lecture on the development of what Freud called “The Unconscious,” Dr. Paul Bloom of Yale University said in 2007 “We use our minds and our behaviours and our actions continually to try to trick people into believing what's not true. We try to trick people, for instance, into believing that we're tougher, smarter, sexier, more reliable, more trustworthy and so on, than we really are. And a large part of social psychology concerns the way in which we present ourselves to other people so as to make the maximally positive impression even when that impression isn't true.” If that is true, then I need to overcome the selfishness and tricky ways embedded in my Unconscious. In fact, I sense it in me and around me all the time in real life. Cheating is a norm of adaptation to modernity in the scheme of evolution. There must be a counter-norm to cheating in order to impress the moral demands on my conscious and unconscious acts. It makes more sense that the development of true civilization of justice is dependent on how much each of us is willing to let go of himself as Christ did, and the willing of each one of us to trust as Christ trusted.  Christ said it “He that finds his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it” (Matt 10: 39). We are dependent on God’s grace but God works through us if we allow him. We all need to force ourselves into self-discipline of developing a prayerful attitude of sacrifice – in thought and action – again and again. The more we do it, the more it becomes a habit...A bit of sacrifice and a bit of prayer everyday is a start. If we commit to repeating this we will go into the deep, and slowly we will be transformed by God from within. Now I understand the enormous benefit of repetition of prayers which I had thought was not clever. By repeating my prayer, I am getting used to being in the presence of God and investing my time in the eternal. It is still selfish to think of myself but it is much better than cheating. With time, this prayer will be grounded in my being and transferred to my offspring.  By repeating it with others, the community prays together and this togetherness cements the community and prepares the offspring to imitate their parents. Nothing is lost if we work honestly together, but at a deeper level, the more I lose myself in the community the more I resemble the Eternal God; for God is a continuous self-giving community of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father and the binding power of this eternal self- giving is the Holy Spirit who in us creates life from disorder and chaos (Genesis 1). And while we are at it, let us make a conscious effort to reform our intentions towards each other and renew our commitment to the Church, the visible community of the kingdom of God. If Jung or Freud is right, our efforts will be transmitted to “The Collective Unconscious” and “trick” us and others to become children of God. Satan uses almost the same words “become like God” to inspire selfishness. By imitating Christ, the tricks of Satan will be overcome. Or as St. John Chrysostom said of Christ “Hell was tricked [by his presence].”

Tears of Aida

Although tears of a woman can be those of joy, quite often they are tears of loss and sadness. In the movie “Amish Grace” the tears of Aida are the tears of a woman who lost her child. She lost part of her because that child was once in her womb, part of her.  Pregnant women who lose their unborn children whether in miscarriage or abortion feel that great loss.

Aida took care of that child only to see her child shot when she was only 14. The human drama is the continuing violence, a cycle of vengeance.  Violence is not only in shooting others but also in raping innocent girls taking advantage of their vulnerability and in stealing lands, in lending money with huge interest, in evading taxes when they are fair and due, in speaking ugly words when you should be silent, in enslaving yourself to the mighty business for a little profit. When you violate others, you are already violated of your own dignity as a human person.

A week after I saw Aida crying and sobbing, I can’t help it but remind you of our suffering too. My suffering stays in my memory and this causes me to remember and not forget violence against me. When I did my military service I was harassed and threatened. When I had my stroke my boss made fun of me. We all need healing of memory. We need to forgive ourselves and forgive others who caused us harm. Nelson Mandela was able to forgive his enemies who imprisoned him in South Africa. We need to reroute our energy to do good to others.   Any suffering a person endures without blaming someone else is a blessing. We need love... much love within our families and our churches and our communities, with our neighbours, with our co-workers, classmates or colleagues; and above all with God who has never abandoned us. He will supply not only joy in this life but eternal joy with Him in the next life; for heaven is love and joy is the fruit of love. Heaven is going to be an everlasting joy for those who choose God.  This is a lesson I learned from Aida who accepted at the end to forgive and reconcile. Not that her daughter became cheap but that Aida was able to grow into forgiveness and pardon.

A Theory of Everything

The entire essence of existence, God himself, is a relationship, according to Joseph Ratzinger "God, too, is absolute permanence, as opposed to everything transitory, for the reason that he is the relation of three Persons to one another, their incorporation in the "for one another" of love, act-substance of the love that is absolute and therefore completely "relative", living only "in relation to". As we said earlier, it is not autarchy, which knows no one but itself, that is divine; what is revolutionary about the Christian view of the world and of God, we found, as opposed to those of antiquity, is that it learns to understand the "absolute" as absolute "relatedness", as relatio subsistens." (Introduction to Christianity, 1968).

Relationship rests on communication. I will not be able to relate to you if I cannot communicate with you or if I do not have the intention of communicating with you. We know that the first communication in infants takes place when they suck on their mothers breasts. As little as one month, Rene Girard, correcting the great Jean Piaget, has shown that Children start immitating their parents and people around them and they learn how to communicate in gestures before they learn language. But communication goes deeper than using mere language. There is also body communication or body language. What matters in the end is the result: Relationship! John Polkinghorne, professor of nuclear physics at Cambridge University, wrote, in one of his latest books: Quantum Physics and Theology, about relationship as science is attempting to discover it at the subnuclear level: "Quantum theory brought to light a remarkable form of entanglement between subatomic particles that have once interacted with each other (the so-called EPR effect), which implies that they remain effectively a single system however far they may subsequently separate spatially- a counterintuitive togetherness-in-separation that has been abundantly confirmed experimentally as a property of nature. The physical world looks more and more like a universe that would be the fitting creation of the trinitarian God, the One whose deepest reality is relational" (Quantum Physics and Theology, p.104). Not only at the human level. Not even at the living cells level. But also at the microcosmic level there seems to be an inherent structure that calls for relationship.

We started with God and we will end up with God. But in between we move from the Big Bang, the formation of the high energy singularity as Stephen Hawking likes to call it, into galaxies, hundreds of thousands, to arrive into the Sun, and eventually the Earth. In this entire process non-living matter has solidified. Wait a minute or, in fact, 10 billions of years. Life then starts on Earth. In some 3.5 billion years humans appear from apes.

Here it is again to keep going: From God comes the universe. the universe explodes and is accelerating while energy is transformed to matter. Matter is inanimate and in this inanimate matter there seems to be a certain reality of relationship at its deepest level. Fast forward...Life begets plants, fish and so on until animals appear. There is a complexification of life as it develops. Man is at the top of this chain. Where is God? He is not sitting back or resting as the ancients imagined. God is at work always as Christ teaches. God is within us supporting and developing his creation. God is not in heaven above but here within his creation guiding it into fruition. But he can't hide anymore. His inner being "relatedness" as Ratzinger says is starting to be seen, and in the "fullness of time" he is united to his creation in Christ. This is how far we understand the Mystery of the Incarnation. For he is not only with us but his kingdom, that is he himself, is within us (Christ). This is partly why we as Catholics and Orthodox eat him in the Eucharist. Not only do we eat the flesh but the living flesh of Christ united with his divinity (The Body of Christ.)

With the appearance of humans there is not only complexification of life but of brain too. According to the 2009 Winter issue of "The Brain," the human brain is endowed with a neurochemical hormone called Oxytocin that is responsible for inducing social memory in humans. Oxytocin triggers the drive for social attachments. Moreover, recent studies in 2008 have shown that oxytocin is the agent for bonding between new mothers and their infants. It is also the agent that helps people find their life partners in monogmous love. The only other species that was found to carry oxytocin is the monogomous prairie voles. This leads us to contemplate the possibility that our love at the natural level is built in as much as it is a social encounter with the other. The scientific finding that oxytocin leads to a monogomous sexual life confirms what the Catholic Church has been saying for the past 2000 years. Of course, this does not at all exhaust love as a supernatural gift from God. Love of enemies is not found in any creature except in Christ's humanity and his saints. Since Original Sin, there is no other way to overcome human selfishness other than the gift of God's love which means self-emptying love.

Now we have stretched the theory of everything from the pure Mind of God to the inanimate matter to living creatures to man who is the epitome of creation fully saved in Christ. And in Christ we know there is only self-emptying love that transcends matter yet joins it in his incarnation to the divine. This is the basis of the Trinitarian God of Christians. It is the power of not only collaboration as seen in lower creatures, and not only in communication as is seen in inanimate matter, and not only in natural love as is seen in humans, but after all in self-emptying love that the Father eternally gives to his only begotten Son and his Son, accepting it in gratitude, returns it back to the Father...That binding love that is the Holy Spirit.