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The declaration of a common Baptism between Rome and Alexandria

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April 28, 2017                                                                                                                                 The Memorial of Saint Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort

I wanted to interrupt my discussion of the great Apparition of October 13, 1917 at Fatima to share with you a bit of good news that just came out of Egypt during the last few hours: the Holy Father Pope Francis, Successor of Saint Peter, has signed a joint declaration with His Holiness Tawadros II, Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of Saint Mark, in Cairo recognizing for the first time in much more than almost sixteen centuries that there is a common Baptism shared between the Church of Rome and the Church of Alexandria.

The whole declaration can be read here, but the operative language runs like this:

The mystery of Jesus who died and rose out of love lies at the heart of our journey towards full unity.  Once again, the martyrs are our guides.  In the early Church the blood of the martyrs was the seed of new Christians.  So too in our own day, may the blood of so many martyrs be the seed of unity among all Christ’s disciples, a sign and instrument of communion and peace for the world.

In obedience to the work of the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies the Church, keeps her throughout the ages, and leads her to full unity – that unity for which Jesus Christ prayed:

      Today we, Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II, in order to please the heart of the Lord Jesus, as well as that of our sons and daughters in the faith, mutually declare that we will not repeat the baptism that had been administered in either of our Churches for any person who wishes to join the other.  This we confess in obedience to the Holy Scriptures and the faith of the three Ecumenical Councils assembled in Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus.

       We ask God our Father to guide us, in the times and by the means that the Holy Spirit will choose, to full unity in the mystical Body of Christ.

While the distance between this declaration and full Communion between the ancient Sees of Saint Mark and of Saint Peter is known only to God, this is good news.  Good news in a darkening world.  Please include a prayer of thanksgiving to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is our common Mother, sometime today.  And don’t forget that her title Mother of God that we now say so easily and take so much for granted had once, a very long time ago, to be defended against a monstrous attack waged against her; and her most stalwart defenders in that troubled time came from the Church of Alexandria.  And the Mother of God, the great Θεοτόκος, never forgets a good turn done to her, whatever disasters the intervening years, decades, centuries, or millennia bring.

The See of Alexandria

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It is hard to imagine the Catholic Church as we know it without the contributions of the See of Alexandria.  Reputed by tradition to have been founded by the evangelist St. Mark, the list of Fathers of the Church who came from the school of Alexandria is too long to cover fully but includes such great names as St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Athanasius, and St. Cyril of Alexandria.  The doctrines concerning the Trinity and the Person of Christ as we now have them came largely from the work of the school of Alexandria and as such this ancient See has had more influence on the Catholic Church save any but the Apostolic See of Rome.

Alexandria was already a great city at the turn of the age when the Incarnation occurred.  The city was founded in Egypt just west of the Nile Delta three hundred years earlier by Alexander the Great as he stormed out on his road of conquest and was ruled by his successors the Ptolemies for the next three centuries until Octavian defeated Cleopatra who had made common cause with his rival Marc Antony at Actium in 31 B.C. and absorbed Alexandria and the Nile Valley into the Roman Empire thus completing the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and making Alexandria the second city of the empire and the great city of the East.  During their reign the Ptolemies sought to collect all of the literature, scientific, and philosophical knowledge from around the known world and store it in the Library of Alexandria which transformed the city into the intellectual powerhouse of the Mediterranean world.

The Church came early to Alexandria.  There were Jews from Egypt visiting Jerusalem who were converted by St. Peter’s sermon preached from the Upper Room on Pentecost (Acts 2: 16), but we do not have a specific date beyond that for the establishment of the church of Alexandria.  Tradition tells us that St. Mark the evangelist and companion of Saints Peter and Paul was its founder but it is a rather sketchy though not necessarily unreliable tradition.  The church of Alexandria and its catechetical school developed fast however due to the city’s reputation in the Empire with those who were following intellectual pursuits.  By the second century already many of the leading thinkers and theologians of the Church came from Alexandria.

Origen at the beginning of the third century began seriously to tackle the question of the Trinity and, although he seems to have fallen into error at the end of his life, his work had an impact on the Church which continues to this day.  The Trinity was to remain a fixation of the city and its school after the Edict of Milan and during all of the Christological disputes of the subsequent centuries.  The Arian heresy was born in Alexandria with the preaching of Arius but its intellectual foundation stemmed from Antioch.  During the subsequent centuries of dispute and discord Alexandria produced many great defenders of the Divinity of Christ and of the Trinity; first among them St. Athanasius.

The dispute over the nature of Christ was to be the death knell of the unity of the Alexandrian church.  Following the declarations of the two natures of Christ by the Council of Chalcedon a large segment of the church of Alexandria split off and formed what was to become the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt.  These theological and Christological disputes thus began to merge with imperial political disputes and the influence of the Alexandrian church rapidly diminished.  The city and its church was largely cut off from Rome and Constantinople after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the middle seventh century.  The city of Alexandria rapidly diminished in importance with the cutting off of trans Mediterranean trade by the Islamic conquests and the center of gravity of Egyptian life moved south to Cairo.

The Catholic Church was then largely removed from Egyptian life but Coptic church has endured and Christians continued to form a majority of the Egyptian population well into the Middle Ages before falling prey to the Islamization policies of Egypt’s Mameluke rulers following the Mongol invasions of the Middle East during 13th century.  Coptic Christians today form about 10% of the Egyptian population but have been placed in an extremely precarious position by the ongoing upheaval in that country over the last three years.  The current Patriarch of Alexandria, the Coptic ‘pope’, is Theodoros (Tawadros) II in his office since November 18, 2012.  Pray the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, for its liberty and its salvation, for the restoration of its ancient position as a pillar of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome and for the conversion of the Muslim peoples.