Pope Francis Recognizes Coptic Orthodox Martyrs
Pope Francis Recognizes Coptic Orthodox Martyrs
Exploring the Theological Implications
Last Thursday, Pope Francis made a remarkable ecumenical gesture by adding twenty-one Coptic Orthodox martyrs—construction workers captured and beheaded by ISIS in Libya—to the Roman Martyrology, an official list of martyrs and other saints recognized by the Catholic Church. Pope Francis announced this decision in an audience with Pope Tawadros II, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and in his remarks, Francis mentioned that the decision had been made with Tawadros’s consent. This gesture by the pope is perhaps most noteworthy because it means that non-Catholics have now been officially recognized as saints by the Catholic Church. It should be of interest to theologians and touches not only on questions of ecclesiology, but also Christology, soteriology, and anthropology.
The twenty-one martyrs had been captured by a militia group affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in two separate attacks on the Libyan town of Sirte in December, 2014 and January, 2015. Twenty of the workers were Coptic Orthodox Christians from the Egyptian town of Al-Our, while the twenty-first, Matthew Ayariga, was apparently from Ghana and his background remains somewhat mysterious (I’m referring to the entire group as “Coptic martyrs” as a shorthand even though Ayariga was likely not Coptic, and possibly not even Christian; at the moment of his death, however, when presented with the possibility of renouncing the faith of his colleagues, Ayariga is said to have replied, “Their God is my God.”). On February 12, 2015, ISIS publicized that they had the men in custody, and on February 15, ISIS released a video showing the beheading of all twenty-one men, dressed in orange jump suits.
The incident was immediately condemned internationally, including by then-U.S. President Barack Obama. Egypt carried out airstrikes against ISIS facilities in Libya the following day. Seven days after the killing, Pope Tawadros II declared the men to be saints. The bodies of the martyrs were discovered in 2017, and the following year the remains of the Egyptians were returned to Egypt, where they were placed in a shrine that had subsequently been built in Al-Our for veneration. Ayariga’s body was likewise transferred to the shrine in 2020.
The Coptic Orthodox Church emerged in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when the majority of Christians in Egypt rejected the Chalcedonian definition that Christ is two natures (physeis), human and divine, in one person (hypostasis), instead insisting that the Second Person of the Trinity is fully human and fully divine, united in one nature (mia physis), a position sometimes referred to as miaphysitism. This led to a separation of the Coptic Orthodox Church, headed by the Coptic Pope of Alexandria, and a much smaller Chalcedonian church headed by the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria.
With the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the majority of Egypt’s population gradually became Muslim, but the Coptic Orthodox Church has persisted in Egypt until today. The situation was quite different in Ethiopia, where the Coptic Orthodox Church remained the largest religious group until 1959, when the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church became autocephalous (self-governing). The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church became autocephalous in 1994.
Beginning with the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century, there were a number of failed attempts to bring unity between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a small but growing number of Coptic Christians pledged their loyalty to the pope, and in 1781 Pope Benedict XIV appointed a “vicar apostolic” to serve them. In 1895, Pope Leo XIII appointed a Catholic Patriarch of Alexandria to lead what came to be called the Coptic Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic Church only a small fraction of the size of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
Since then, relations between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church have been focused more on reconciliation. In the wake of the ecumenical revolution brought about by the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI met with Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria in 1973. At that meeting, the two produced a shared statement of Christological faith overcoming the divisions arising from the Council of Chalcedon. It reads, in part:
We confess that our Lord and God and Savior and King of us all, Jesus Christ, is perfect God with respect to His Divinity, perfect man with respect to His humanity. In Him His divinity is united with His humanity in a real, perfect union without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without separation.
The entire statement can be read here. In a similar statement issued by Pope John Paul II and the Syrian Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas in 1984, they recognized that:
The confusions and schisms that occurred between their Churches in the later centuries, they realize today, in no way affect or touch the substance of their faith, since these arose only because of differences in terminology and culture and in the various formulae adopted by different theological schools to express the same matter.
In 2017, Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II issued a joint statement occasioned by the former’s visit to Egypt that, among other things, committed the Catholic and Coptic Orthodox Churches to recognizing one another’s baptisms. There have since then been calls to explore mutually recognizing other sacraments, as well.
The mutual recognition of the twenty-one Coptic Orthodox martyrs represents another step in these efforts toward unity. At their meeting last week, Pope Tawadros gave Francis a reliquary containing remains of the martyrs. The Coptic delegation was also allowed to celebrate the divine liturgy at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, an exception to the typical rule limiting non-Catholic celebrations in Catholic churches. The inclusion of the martyrs in the Roman Martyrology, however, is certainly the most important gesture, as it has ecclesiological and anthropological ramifications.
Pope Francis’s addition of the twenty-one Coptic martyrs to the Roman Martyrology is significant because they are non-Catholics, whereas the Catholic Church almost exclusively only officially recognizes Catholics as martyrs or saints. Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, told Catholic News Service, “This is a first,” noting that while the Catholic Church has informally commemorated martyrs from other traditions at ecumenical gatherings, “there never has been a decision to put them into the martyrology.”
This is not entirely true, however. As Vatican News mentions in its reporting on the event, Pope John Paul II added four Orthodox saints to the martyrology in 2001: Saints Theodosius and Anthony of Kiev, both from the eleventh century, and Saints Stephen of Perm and Sergius of Radonezh, both from the fourteenth century.
The example of these four saints shows just how complicated an ecumenical issue sainthood can be. As a rule, the Catholic Church has not officially recognized Orthodox saints who lived after the schism of 1054 (and the Orthodox have similarly not recognized Catholic saints). Members of the Eastern Catholic Churches do venerate some of these saints, however, a practice that has been acknowledged by Rome. And a handful of these saints, including the four mentioned above, have been put forward by Rome for more universal veneration in the Catholic Church.
So Bishop Farrell is at least correct that there is something unique about the inclusion of the twenty-one Coptic martyrs in the Roman Martyrology; they are the first non-Catholics to be included without having first been venerated by one of the Eastern Catholic Churches. Their inclusion is also noteworthy because it comes only a few years after their martyrdom, and not centuries later, as in the other cases.
As Mike Lewis points out at Where Peter Is, it is also striking to compare the case of the twenty-one Coptic martyrs to another relatively recent case, that of Charles Lwanga and his companions, who were martyred in 1866 and canonized in 1964 by Paul VI. Lewis writes:
In 1964, when the Ugandan Martyrs were canonized by Pope Paul VI, St. Charles Lwanga and the other 21 Catholics among his companions were declared saints. The 23 Anglicans who were martyred alongside them were mentioned briefly in the pope’s homily, when he said, “And we do not wish to forget, the others who, belonging to the Anglican confession, met death for the name of Christ.”
Although they were praised for their heroic sacrifice, the majority of the Ugandan martyrs were given no official recognition by Rome, despite the group having been martyred together.
Representing a far different perspective, during his pontificate, Pope John Paul II pushed for a “common martyrology,” an official list of martyrs shared among Christian churches, as John L. Allen, Jr. points out. Such a list would include not just martyrs from the Orthodox Churches, but even figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. The Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin suggests that Pope Francis’s recognition of the Coptic martyrs, together with Pope Tawadros, may represent a nod in this direction.
Many have argued for a broader classification of “saints” than that authorized by the Vatican. For example, Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, which proposes for veneration or imitation traditional Catholic saints like St. Rose of Lima, St. Sergius of Radonezh, and St. Katherine Drexel, but also figures such as George Fox, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harriet Tubman, and even non-Christians like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Buber, and Anne Frank, was a bestseller and remains quite popular decades after it was first published in 1997.
These more generous lists of saints sometimes make appeal to recent theologies of grace, such as that of Karl Rahner (who Ellsberg lists as a saint in All Saints), that insist that holiness is not confined to the institutional boundaries of the Catholic Church nor its sacraments. As Ellsberg says in explaining Rahner’s theology:
At the heart of the human being is a dynamism driving us toward union with an infinite horizon that lies beyond the objects of our knowing or loving. That infinite horizon is God, a Holy Mystery, who is forever reaching out to us in every situation of our lives. To the extent that we open ourselves to this gift—offered freely to all people in all situations of life—that is the way of salvation. (p. 103, emphasis added)
Why does the Catholic Church restrict sainthood to Catholics in its official lists of saints and martyrs? The first reason is the teaching, formally expressed at the previously-mentioned Council of Florence, that there is no salvation outside the Church, and therefore saints, those who have certainly attained salvation and are in heaven, must be members of the Catholic Church. Pope Pius XII, however, in his 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, taught that even those who are not visibly members of the Catholic Church may be mysteriously connected with the Body of Christ, and since at least Vatican II the Catholic Church has taught that God gratuitously makes salvation available to all, not limiting it to Christians, let alone Catholics. So only the most recalcitrant traditionalist would find this reason sufficient for excluding non-Catholics from the rolls of the saints.
Second, however, the Catholic Church sees the saints as role models for the faithful. Therefore, even though the saints must demonstrate “heroic virtue” in their lives, it is also important for them to confess the orthodox creed of the Church, as well. Although Rahner (among others) helped lay the groundwork for a broader understanding of sanctity, he also insisted that grace working at what he called the transcendent level of the interior life has an intrinsic dynamic toward becoming “concretized” at the categorical, outward level. What he means is that the life of grace does not remain an interior mystery, but rather wants to become concrete in the unity provided by the Church’s sacramental life and confession of faith. Therefore, without denying the presence of sanctity outside the bounds of the Catholic Church, it makes sense to look those who confess the Catholic faith as examples of the life of grace most fully realized, at least this side of the eschaton.
Pope Francis’s inclusion of the twenty-one Coptic martyrs in the martyrology, however it is interpreted, pushes the boundaries of the Church’s current practice. Perhaps he considers the Catholic and Coptic Orthodox Churches as sufficiently confessionally unified that there is no obstacles to Coptic Christians being considered saints. Perhaps he thinks in the contemporary world the shared witness of martyrdom is a more important concern that confessional divisions. Or, as some have suggested, his move is meant to recognize the twenty-one as martyrs but not as “saints,” since he side-stepped the formal process of canonization. Whatever the case, I think Pope Francis’s gesture should be of great interest to theologians and deserves further discussion.
Of Interest…
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Perry of Chicago has been appointed by the USCCB to head its Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, Catholic News Agency reports. Perry already chairs the USCCB’s Committee on African-American Catholics, of which he has been a member since 2004. Perry succeeds Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, who has served two terms as chair of the Ad Hoc Committee.
Kate Scanlon offers a good overview of the end of Title 42, restrictions on asylum claims at the border linked to the COVID-19 emergency and first implemented by the Trump administration in 2020, and the implementation of new policies by the Biden administration that restrict asylum claims from migrants who have traveled through a third country in which they could have claimed asylum, a policy that will significantly impact asylum seekers from Central and South America who travel through Mexico to get to the United States. The article includes reactions from Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso and representatives of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) and the Maryknoll Missioners.
Yonat Shimron and Alejandra Molina at Religious News Service also have reactions to the new Biden administration asylum policy from faith-based refugee agencies.
Jacob Lupfer at Religious News Service has an interesting analysis on the decline of religious rhetoric in the early stages of the 2024 Republican presidential primary, particularly focusing on the campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Coming Soon…
A reminder: During the second half of this week, I will be traveling back to Washington, D.C. for a meeting of the National Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Convening Table. I am a volunteer representative of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for these ecumenical gatherings. We are close to wrapping up a multi-year project of reflecting together on racism and the Christian churches in the United States, and hopefully I can write up some thoughts when I get back. I most likely will not be able to post while I am gone, however. Thank you for your patience!