Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Francis today prayed for ‘full unity’ with the Coptic Orthodox Church as he met with the Coptic Pope Tawadros II for an historic visit at the Vatican.

This was the first such meeting in 40 years.

“Our persevering prayer, our dialogue and the will to build communion day by day in mutual love will allow us to take important further steps towards full unity,” Pope Francis told the Coptic leader. “We long for the day when, in fulfillment of the Lord’s desire, we will be able to communicate from the one chalice.”

In saying this, the Holy Father acknowledged that there had been ‘centuries of mutual distrust’ between their two Christian churches.

The Coptic Pope’s predecessor, Shenouda III, visited the Vatican in 1973 to meet pope Paul VI and the two had launched a process of dialogue between Catholics and Copts and Pope John Paul II also visited Shenouda in Egypt in 2000.

The Pope said the two Churches were linked by ‘an ecumenism of suffering.”

“Just as the blood of the martyrs was a seed of strength and fertility for the Church, so too the sharing of daily sufferings can become an effective instrument of unity,” he said. “And this also applies, in a certain sense, to the broader context of society and relations between Christians and non-Christians: from shared suffering can blossom forth forgiveness and reconciliation, with God’s help.”

The four-day visit was the high-point of a tour of Europe by Pope Tawadros, who was elected in November 2012 as leader of a Christian Church faced with the rise of radical Islam and growing emigration.

Copts account for up to 10 percent of the population in Egypt, where tensions and clashes with the majority Muslim population have increased since the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011.

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