The majority of Egyptians are moderate Muslims, and while Christians do not face the daily threat of death for their faith, they are suffering more intolerance, according to Reuters. This is the result of the rise of fundamentalist tendencies, which are on the increase even because of economic reasons.

Only one tenth of the population is Christian and most are members of the Coptic Orthodox Church. According to Vatican statistics, 0.3 per cent of the nation’s 77.6 million people are Catholic.

Will Christians disappear from the Middle East?

According to several speakers during the special synod for the Middle East, the political conflicts and the concomitant vast emigration from the region is endangering the presence of Christians there.

Patriarch Gregory III Laham of Antioch, the leader of the Melkite Catholic Church, said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the root of the region’s political instability.

Latin-rite Patriarch Fouad Twal of Jerusalem appealed to Catholics in other lands to show their love for their Christian brothers in the Holy Land – through prayers, pilgrimages, and concrete gestures of both economic and political support.

“To be silent because of fear before the dramatic situation you all know about would be a sin of omission,” he said.

Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Casmoussa of Mosul, Iraq – whose archdiocese has been battered by anti-Christian violence, and who was himself a kidnap victim in 2005 – said the Christian presence is decreasing for several related reasons: a loss of confidence, campaigns of intimidation by Islamic fundamentalist, a drop in the birth rate, and a sense that Christians are viewed as representatives of an alien Western presence in the Middle East.

Pontifical Council for evangelisation

With the October 12 promulgation of a motu proprio entitled Ubicumque et Semper, Pope Benedict XVI has established a Pontifical Council for New Evangelisation.

This new initiative targets European and North American countries which were predominantly Christian but have now been greatly secularised.

Pope Benedict observes that the “phenomenon of abandonment of the faith” has “become progressively more evident in societies and cultures that were, for centuries, impregnated with the Gospel”. The results are evident, he writes, in the “loss of the sense of the sacred” and the consequent loss of “the shared understating of man’s fundamental experiences, like birth, death and family life, and the reference to natural moral law”. The first president of the new Pontifical Council is Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella.

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)