Religion: New Coptic Patriarch

Close to 1,000,000 Coptic Christians of Egypt, who believe themselves to be the world’s oldest Christian sect, celebrated the election of a new pope last week. The man who will also be looked to for guidance by Coptic leaders in Ethiopia, the Sudan and Libya was chosen, according to ancient custom, by lot. In Cairo’s Cathedral of St. Mark, a seven-year-old boy approached an envelope lying on the altar. Amid prayers, he opened the envelope and drew from it one of three slips, each bearing the name of a candidate for the office of “Most Holy Father and Patriarch of the great city of Alexandria and of all Egypt . . . and of all the places where St. Mark preached.” The choice: Mina al Baramoussi, born Azer Yousef Atta, sometime clerk at Thomas Cook’s travel bureau and a renowned priest known to his followers as “The Solitary.”

The Coptic Church traces its tradition to St. Mark, who is believed to have brought Christianity to Egypt, and recalls the days when Alexandria was a rival to Rome as Christendom’s foremost city. But the Copts’ Monophysite theology (which holds that Christ has only a single nature in which the human and divine are blended) was eventually condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and with the emergence of Islam, Coptic Christianity virtually went underground for centuries.

Its modern adherents preserve the ancient Coptic language in their ritual, proudly point to the art and architecture of their monasteries and churches and to their long line of theologians and ascetics. To that line belongs the new 56-year-old Patriarch, who spent five years in the desert as a solitary monk, then, in 1936, rented an abandoned mill in Cairo (for 3¢ a month), fitted it with a homemade altar and started preaching. His reputation as a holy man grew, and eventually the faithful built him a small church.

From that simple church next week, clad in a black, gilded robe and bearing a diamond-studded crown, Mina the Solitary will journey to the patriarchal palace in Cairo, where he will reside, Copts believe, as St. Mark’s 116th successor.