They trace their origins back to the age of the Apostles, yet still the Copts are treated as second-class citizens in their own county.

When Islamic State extremists attacked Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria on Palm Sunday, they struck at the historic heart of Egypt’s Christian community. The Coptic Patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, was leading a service inside when a suicide bomber was challenged at the church gates.

Forty-five people were killed in two separate attacks on Coptic churches that Sunday: one of the bloodiest days of violence against Christians in Egypt in decades. Earlier at St George’s church in the city of Tanta, 60 miles north of Cairo, at least 28 people died and another 80 were injured when another attacker slipped past security and blew himself up near the front pews of the church. The Patriarch later issued a statement declaring that “these acts will not harm the unity and cohesion of the people.”

Pope Francis has chosen not to travel in a bullet-proof vehicle for his first trip to Egypt this week, despite a recent spate of terrorist attacks targeting the country’s Christians.
The Pope will fly from Rome to Cairo on April 28 for a two-day visit intended to build on inter-faith dialogue with Muslim leaders and to show solidarity with beleaguered Christian communities in the Middle East.

Despite his vulnerability as a potential terrorist target, the Pope will not travel through the streets of Cairo in an armoured vehicle, the Vatican said. “The Pope will use a closed car to move around, but not an armoured one,” said Greg Burke, the Vatican spokesman. “That’s how he wanted it.”

France’s Catholic primate has condemned the current presidential campaign as his country’s “worst ever” and urged Christians to help prevent democracy from “losing its sense.” “Left and right rivalled each other and had their radical wings, but there was also a centre. Now, left and right have stepped back, and the main candidates are divided by other unclear criteria. I have the impression our voters are totally lost,” said Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyon.

Pope Francis has granted permission for priests of the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X to celebrate valid marriages, in another sign that the quasi-schismatic group are on the verge of being reconciled back into the Church. In a ruling approved by Francis, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has said that SSPX clergy can celebrate wedding liturgies providing they are assisted by a priest from the local diocese who would act as a witness to the vows. However, if there are no diocesan priests available the CDF states that a priest of the society can conduct the ceremony on his own.

The latest move, authored by Cardinal Gerhard Muller and by Arcbishop Guido Pozzo, who is in charge of the Vatican body tasked with reconciling the group back into the Church, states it is part of the process of “institu-tional regularisation” of the SSPX. Significantly, the state-ment says the group is in a “canonical irregular” situation” only “for the time being.”
Known as the Lefebvrists after their founder- a French missionary Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre -the society broke away from the Church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

This split occurred definitively when Archbishop Lefebvre ordained four bishops for the society without Holy See approval.

Today the group, which celebrate the sacraments solely according to the old rite, remain in a sort of canonical limbo: al-though excommunicated Arch-bishop Lefebvre’s ordinations of his bishops were valid because he himself was a legitimate bishop.

Over the weekend, Cardinal Robert Sarah, who runs the Congre-gation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, argued in a message sent to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the publi-cation of the Motu proprio Summorum Pontificum by Pope Benedict XVI that those promoting a “modern liturgy” had caused disaster, devastation and schism by trying to reduce the Mass into a “simple convivial meal.”

Here Fr Anthony Ruff, who is a Benedictine monk and liturgical expert, gives his opinion on the text. “This is an interesting, rather odd talk by Cardinal Sarah. It is at times praiseworthy, at times questionable, and at times unfortunate and downright mistaken.

But Cardinal Sarah attaches excessive weight to Summorum Pontificum as if it is the fulfilment of Vatican II, when it is contrary to the intent and clear directives of the Vatican II liturgy constitution. His claim that Vatican II did not abandon the Missal of Pius V is simply mistaken.

His interpretation of Vatican II in general is questionable, for it emphasises only continuity (which of course is there) and underemphasises how much rupture is involved in the liturgy constitution’s paradigm shift.

It’s unfortunate that Cardinal Sarah is so unrelentingly negative about the liturgical reform. It seems that in his mind the reformers have brought only “disaster, devastation, schism, destruction, self-destruction, liturgy wars, and superficial, devast-ating subjectivism.”

It would be good if he could study the reforms more deeply and understand, for example, what “mystery” means in Catholic theology, or how “sacrifice” and “meal” are not opposed to each other in some sort of zero-sum game.

And this is odd: Cardinal Sarah strongly supports Liturgiam Authenticam and the botched new English Missal. That’s a risky move when his boss seems to be going in another direction.”