Copts mark Christmas Eve after a bloody year
NATIVITY OF CHRIST CATHEDRAL, EGYPT: Coptic Orthodox Christians packed Egypt’s new Nativity of Christ Cathedral on Saturday for a Christmas Eve mass after a bloody year for a minority repeatedly targeted by jihadists.
Police bolstered security around the country’s churches for days, especially at the cathedral east of Cairo where President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to pay his respects to the community.
He walked in alongside Coptic Pope Tawadros II and took to the altar amid ululations and cries of “we love you”. “We love you too,” he said. “You are our family, you are from us, we are one and no one will divide us.”
Sisi said the cathedral, in a new administrative capital Egypt is building, was a “message to the world, a message of peace and a message of love”.
Military and political officials also attended the mass, conducted in a mix of ancient Greek and Coptic.
Police set up barriers around the church and spread out on the street leading to it while congregants took pictures before a Christmas tree outside.
Copts, who make up about 10% of Egypt’s 93 million people, have long complained of discrimination and intermittent sectarian attacks.
Islamic State jihadists have taken aim at other Egypt civilians, but they have focused on the ancient Coptic community, the largest Christian group in the Middle East.
In December 2016, an IS suicide bomber killed almost 30 worshippers at a church in Cairo located in the Saint Mark’s Cathedral complex, the seat of the Coptic papacy.
In the Sinai Peninsula, where IS is based, hundreds of Christians were then forced to flee after a wave of assassinations.
IS jihadists killed more than 40 people in twin church bombings in April and a month later shot dead almost 30 Christians as they headed to a monastery.
The year ended with an IS jihadist killing nine people in an attack on a church in a south Cairo suburb.