For Egypt’s Christians, 1,374 Tough Years and Counting
BY BRIAN O’NEEL
Anti-Christian violence during the first weekend in April marked
an alarming acceleration of the centuries-old persecution
carried out by the country’s dominant Muslim community.
Tonight, an Egyptian Christian mother will lie awake, worrying if her kidnapped daughter was merely forced to marry a radical Islamist and convert or if her fate was much worse.
This Sunday, an Egyptian father will hitchhike more than 10 miles to the nearest church with his sons, not knowing whether the boys will be kidnapped by gunmen who don’t conceal their identities. Also uncertain is whether he and his fellow congregants will make it through Mass alive or whether extremists will set off explosives and shoot those inside.
Any day of any week, a priest in this ancient land will wonder how he can help his tiny flock survive against a system that basically says, “If you are not Muslim, you are not Egyptian. Therefore, you have no worth.”
Furthermore, Christian families all over the nation will wonder, “Do I stay or do I leave? For no one should have to live like this.”
Such questions have been a fact of Christian existence for a long time, but the situation appears to be worsening under the fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood regime that took over leadership of Egypt two years ago.
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