The Global Church Era · 1940s-present · Egypt
The Coptic Monastic & Sunday-School Revival
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
Two renewals ran together in the Coptic Orthodox Church and remade it. The first was catechetical. Habib Girgis, born in 1876, taught and wrote from the 1890s and built a church-wide Sunday-school movement, organized around 1918, that trained a generation of lay teachers and then of bishops. The second was monastic: from the middle of the century the desert monasteries, which had been emptying, were repopulated, and the movement gathered pace under Kyrillos VI, patriarch from 1959 to 1971. Matthew the Poor, of the monastery of St Macarius, wrote a body of spiritual work that is read well outside Egypt. Shenouda III, who came out of the Sunday-school generation, was patriarch from 1971 until 2012 and published steadily throughout. And the church has gone on adding to its martyrology in the present century: the twenty-one Copts killed in Libya on 15 February 2015 were entered in the synaxarium and given an icon in the same year.
Sources
- Habib Girgis (1876-1951): catechetical writings, curricula, the Sunday-School movement's organization (c. 1918) and magazine; canonized 2013 (primary) — Girgis's own Arabic-language corpus; the Suriel study is the fullest English-language treatment of it.
- Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor): Orthodox Prayer Life (ET SVS 2003) and the St Macarius corpus; Kyrillos VI papers (1959-71); Shenouda III's books (1971-2012) (primary) — The monastic stream's own voice - the Wadi Natrun repopulation's theological record.
- The new martyrs: the 21 Libya martyrs (15 Feb 2015) - the church's own synaxarium addition and icon (2015); Mosebach, The 21 (ET 2019) (primary) — Mosebach's own account is literary journalism rather than academic history, worth reading as such.
- Bishop Suriel, Habib Girgis: Coptic Orthodox Educator and a Light in the Darkness (SVS Press, Coptic Studies 2, 2017); S. S. Hasan, Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt (OUP, 2003) (secondary)
- CHC vol. 5, ch. 21 'Coptic Christianity in modern Egypt' (O'Mahony); CHC vol. 9 (reference) — Standard reference works on modern Coptic Christianity.