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March 19th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Under Church law, the process of choosing his successor can take up to three
months, though an interim leader will be picked within a week. A synod will
then form a committee to come up with three candidates. The names are then
put in a box and a blindfolded acolyte picks one – a step meant to be guided
by the will of God.
For Coptic Christians, their much loved patriarch was a figure whose ability
to command respect from Muslim leaders and secular politicians served to
protect a community that has come increasingly vulnerable to Islamic
radicalism.
But he was also a symbol of continuity. As the 117th Pope of Alexandria he
was, for Copts, the heir to an unbroken apostolic succession dating back to
AD 42, when Mark the Evangelist, the author of the second Gospel, is held to
have brought Christianity to Egypt.
As Egypt’s military rulers declared three days of mourning for all Christians
in the country, world religious and secular leaders paid their own tribute.
Pope Benedict XVI recalled the patriarch’s meeting with one of his
predecessors Paul VI in 1973, the first time the leaders of the Roman
Catholic and Coptic Orthodox Churches had met in 1,500 years.
“I recall with gratitude his commitment to Christian Unity,” Pope
Benedict said.
“I can say how the Catholic Church as a whole shares the grief that
afflicts the Orthodox Copts.”
President Barack Obama hailed the patriarch’s commitment to tolerance and
religious dialogue, saying: “We will remember Pope Shenouda III as a
man of deep faith, a leader of great faith, and an advocate for unity and
reconciliation.”
The patriarch will be buried at the St Bishoy monastery of Wadi Natrun in the
Scetis Desert west of the River Nile.
It was in the Scetis Desert that Pope Shenouda spent seven years living in a
cave as a hermit between 1956 and 1962. Decades later, he was sent into
exile there by President Anwar Sadat for opposing Egypt’s peace treaty with
Israel in 1979 after arguing that it was a betrayal of Palestinian
Christians and Muslims left under Israeli occupation.
Such forthright views won him popularity among Muslims, but it did not halt a
rise in religious violence against Copts in the later years of his papacy.
Suspected Islamists have carried out a number of attacks on Egypt’s churches
over the past 18 months, none more violent than the bombing of a church in
Alexandria in January 2011, when 21 worshippers were killed.
But the Copts have become only more vulnerable since the fall of President
Hosni Mubarak last February, with both the military and extremists seeing
them as a useful target on which to pin Egypt’s woes. At least 25 Copts were
killed last October when the Egyptian security forces crushed a protest
called to demand better protection from Islamist attacks.
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