Coptic Orthodox Church Beliefs

1. Who the Copts Are

The Copts are the native Christians of Egypt, and the Coptic Orthodox Church is their church, headed by the Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St Mark. The word Copt comes through Arabic qibt from the Greek Aigyptios, meaning simply Egyptian, and it came to mark the Christian population of Egypt after the Arab conquest of the seventh century. A Copt is therefore an Egyptian Christian by descent and culture, and Coptic Orthodox is the church body that most Copts belong to.

The Coptic Orthodox Church is the church of the great majority of Egypt's Christians, with a substantial diaspora in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and across Europe, and with a wide missionary presence in sub-Saharan Africa. Its seat is the Cathedral of St Mark in the Abbassia district of Cairo, and its head at the time of writing is Pope Tawadros II, enthroned on 18 November 2012.

This guide gives no membership figure. The Egyptian census does not publish a settled religious breakdown, the Coptic Orthodox Church's own estimates for Egypt run well above those produced by outside survey researchers, and the gap between the two has been politically contested for decades. Any single number would suggest a precision that no published source supports.

The Family This Church Belongs To

The Coptic Orthodox Church is one of six churches usually grouped together as Oriental Orthodox, alongside the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India. These six accept three ecumenical councils and are in full communion with one another. Our guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches as a family covers the shared Christology and the modern accords across all six, and this page stays with Egypt.

Three cautions about names are worth setting down at the start, because getting them wrong distorts everything that follows. The Coptic Orthodox Church is not part of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which accepts seven councils and is a separate communion; the two are not in communion with one another. The Coptic Orthodox Church is not the Coptic Catholic Church, a much smaller body in full communion with Rome, treated in section 12. And the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, though its bishops were supplied from Alexandria for most of its history, has been self-governing since 1959 and is not a branch of the Coptic Church.

2. St Mark and the Church of Alexandria

Coptic tradition holds that St Mark the Evangelist brought the gospel to Alexandria in the middle of the first century and was martyred there, and the Coptic Orthodox Church counts its patriarchs as his successors in an unbroken line. Eusebius of Caesarea records in his Ecclesiastical History that Mark was the first to be sent to Egypt to preach the gospel he had written and that he founded churches at Alexandria. Coptic sources place his martyrdom in the city in the reign of Nero, and the See of St Mark is named for him.

Egypt has a place in the gospel narrative before any of this. Matthew records that Joseph took the child and his mother and fled into Egypt to escape Herod, and applies to that flight the words of Hosea, out of Egypt I called my son.

Copts keep the memory of that journey with great seriousness. A network of churches, monasteries and springs across Egypt is associated by local tradition with stages of the Holy Family's route, from the Delta down to Upper Egypt, and Coptic hymnography returns to it constantly. The Coptic reading of Isaiah 19 sits behind that devotion: a prophecy of an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and of Egypt named alongside Assyria and Israel as a people God blesses.

The Catechetical School

Alexandria was one of the intellectual centres of early Christianity, and its Catechetical School shaped Christian thought far beyond Egypt. Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen taught there in the second and third centuries, developing allegorical exegesis of Scripture and the first sustained Christian engagement with Greek philosophy. Didymus the Blind headed the school in the fourth century. The Coptic Church regards this tradition of learning as its own inheritance, and it is one reason Coptic writers resist the idea that their church is a provincial offshoot of anything.

Athanasius and Cyril

Two Alexandrian bishops stand behind much of the doctrinal vocabulary the whole Church still uses, and both are honoured as saints by Catholics and Copts alike. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria from 328, defended the consubstantiality of the Son against Arianism through five exiles, and the creed that came out of Nicaea and Constantinople carries his fight in every line. Our guide to St Athanasius and the Arian crisis tells that story in full.

Cyril of Alexandria presided at the Council of Ephesus in 431, where the Church defined that Mary is Theotokos, God-bearer, against Nestorius, who preferred to call her Christ-bearer. Cyril's Christological vocabulary is the vocabulary the Coptic Church still uses, and our guide to St Cyril of Alexandria and the Theotokos sets out what he argued. Everything in section 4 of this page turns on how Cyril's words were read after his death in 444.

Persian and Arab Egypt

The Coptic Church has lived under non-Christian rule for most of its history. The Arab conquest of Egypt was completed in 642, and Copts became a protected but subordinate population, paying the jizya tax and living under legal restrictions that varied enormously from one dynasty to another. Arabic gradually replaced Coptic as the everyday language, so that by roughly the eleventh century the liturgy needed Arabic translation alongside the Coptic text. Periods of tolerance alternated with periods of destruction of churches and forced conversion, and the church survived by concentrating on liturgy, fasting and the monasteries.

3. What Coptic Orthodox Christians Believe

Coptic Orthodox belief is the faith of the Nicene Creed as the first three ecumenical councils left it, held with a strongly Alexandrian account of the person of Christ. A Copt confesses one God in three persons, the Son eternally begotten and consubstantial with the Father, the Holy Spirit worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son, the Incarnation of the Word from the Virgin Mary, the crucifixion and bodily resurrection of Christ, his ascension, his return to judge the living and the dead, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. A Catholic reading that list finds nothing to correct.

Three Councils

The Coptic Orthodox Church recognises three ecumenical councils as binding: Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381 and Ephesus in 431. It holds the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in its original form, without the Filioque clause that the Western church later added, and Coptic objections to that addition track the Eastern Orthodox ones closely. Later councils, from Chalcedon in 451 onward, are not received. The Catholic Church counts twenty-one ecumenical councils, so the number of received councils is itself one of the substantive differences, and it is an authority question rather than a Christological one.

The Cyrillian Formula

The heart of Coptic doctrine is a single sentence from St Cyril: one incarnate nature of God the Word, in Greek mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkomene. Copts read physis here as meaning the one concrete reality of the incarnate Christ, and they take the formula to state that the divinity and the humanity of Christ came together at the Incarnation in a real and perfect union. The union is confessed with four denials that recur in every Coptic statement of faith: without mingling, without confusion, without alteration, without division and without separation.

Copts insist on two things at once. Christ is perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity, consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and consubstantial with us in his humanity. And his divinity never left his humanity for a moment nor for the twinkling of an eye, a phrase used in Coptic liturgical texts and repeated in the 1973 declaration with Rome. The theological name commonly given to this position is miaphysite, from mia, one, and physis, nature.

Scripture and the Canon

Coptic Orthodox Christians read Scripture within the church's liturgy and tradition, in the way Catholics and Eastern Orthodox do, and against any principle of Scripture standing alone as its own interpreter. The Coptic Old Testament follows the Greek Septuagint tradition and includes the books Catholics call deuterocanonical, so on that question Alexandria and Rome agree against the Protestant canon, a subject our guide to the deuterocanonical books takes up. Coptic lectionaries carry very heavy Scripture reading: a full Divine Liturgy includes readings from the Pauline epistles, the Catholic epistles, the Acts of the Apostles, the Synaxarion account of the day's saints, the Psalms and the Gospel.

Salvation, Sin and the Last Things

Coptic theology speaks of salvation as the healing and restoration of a human nature damaged by the fall, accomplished by the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection, and applied through the sacraments and a life of repentance. Like the Eastern churches generally, the Coptic tradition emphasises inherited corruption and mortality rather than inherited personal guilt, and it does not use the Latin categories of satisfaction and temporal punishment. Copts pray for the dead at every liturgy and expect the general resurrection and the last judgment, without the developed Western doctrine of purgatory. Our guides to the final judgment and to purgatory set out the Catholic teaching and where the East differs.

4. Chalcedon in 451 and the Coptic Refusal

The Council of Chalcedon, held in 451, defined that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, made known without confusion, without change, without division and without separation. The Church of Alexandria refused the definition, and the refusal split the Christian East in a way that has lasted for more than fifteen centuries. Understanding why requires stating the Coptic reasons as Copts state them, before any Catholic answer.

The Wording

The Alexandrian objection to Chalcedon is that the phrase "in two natures" sounds like a concession to Nestorius. Ephesus in 431 had condemned Nestorius for a way of speaking that Cyril believed divided Christ into two subjects, one divine and one human, joined by a moral union. Twenty years later a council used the counting language of two, and Alexandrian theologians read that as reopening what Ephesus had shut. Their concern was for the unity of the acting subject: the one who was born, taught, suffered and died is the eternal Word, and any formula that appears to distribute those acts between two natures as though between two agents is a betrayal of Ephesus.

The Politics

Chalcedon also deposed Dioscorus, the reigning Pope of Alexandria, and the Coptic Church has never accepted that deposition. Dioscorus had presided over an earlier assembly at Ephesus in 449 that reinstated Eutyches, a gathering Pope Leo the Great called the Robber Synod, and Chalcedon proceeded against him. The Coptic reading is that Dioscorus was condemned on procedural and disciplinary grounds pressed by Rome and the imperial court rather than for heresy, and that the see of Alexandria was being cut down after decades in which it had dominated Eastern church politics. Copts venerate Dioscorus as a confessor. That judgment is not shared by the Catholic Church, and naming the disagreement plainly is more useful than smoothing it over.

What Followed in Egypt

After 451 Egypt had two rival patriarchates. The Chalcedonian line, backed by Constantinople and called Melkite from a Syriac word meaning royal, that is, the emperor's party, held the state's recognition. The non-Chalcedonian line, supported by the great majority of Egyptian Christians and by the monasteries, is the Coptic Orthodox Church of today. Imperial pressure, deposition and periods of persecution ran for nearly two centuries. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria descends from the Chalcedonian line and still exists, a point our guide to the Greek Orthodox Church touches on.

The Modern Reading

The modern theological verdict, reached independently by several dialogues, is that the two sides were using physis in different senses and were confessing the same faith. Where Chalcedon used physis to mean an abstract nature or set of properties, so that Christ has two, Alexandria used it to mean the one concrete existing reality, so that Christ is one. Once that is clear, the miaphysite confession and the Chalcedonian confession say the same thing about Christ. That conclusion is exactly what the common declarations of 1973 and after have put on paper, and section 13 sets out what those texts say.

The Christological history summarised here is covered at length in our guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches, which treats Chalcedon, the miaphysite formula and the terminology dispute across all six churches. This page keeps to the Egyptian side of the story.

5. The Seven Mysteries in Coptic Practice

The Coptic Orthodox Church celebrates seven sacraments, called mysteries, the same seven the Catholic Church names: baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, repentance and confession, anointing of the sick, matrimony and holy orders. The differences with Rome are in discipline and sequence rather than in the count or in the underlying theology.

Baptism and Chrismation

Coptic baptism is by triple immersion in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, administered to infants, traditionally at forty days for boys and eighty for girls, following the purification periods of Leviticus 12. Chrismation with the holy myron follows immediately, so the Eastern equivalent of confirmation is not deferred to adolescence, and the newly baptised infant receives Communion at the same liturgy. The Catholic Church recognises Coptic baptism as valid, a recognition that was made mutual by the 2017 declaration described in section 13. Our guide to baptism sets out the Catholic theology of the sacrament.

The Eucharist

Copts believe that the bread and wine become the true body and blood of Christ, and the Coptic anaphoras say so without hedging. The bread, called the qorban, is leavened, stamped with a central square and twelve small crosses, and baked for the liturgy that morning. Communion is given in both kinds, the consecrated bread placed in the mouth and the chalice administered with a spoon, and it is given to infants. Preparation is strict: a fast of at least nine hours before Communion, attendance from the beginning of the service, and confession to one's father of confession at intervals. Shoes are removed at the sanctuary. Our guide to the Eucharist gives the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence, which the Coptic Church holds in substance.

Repentance and Confession

Coptic Christians confess their sins to a priest who serves as their ab i'tiraf, father of confession, usually the same priest over many years, who functions as a spiritual director as well as a confessor. The relationship is more continuous than the Latin practice of confessing to whoever is available, and Copts commonly regard regular confession as the precondition for receiving Communion. Our guide to confession covers the Catholic sacrament of penance.

Marriage, Orders and the Anointing

Coptic marriage is celebrated with a crowning rite and is understood as indissoluble, and the Coptic Church permits divorce only in narrowly drawn circumstances, historically adultery and the defection of a spouse from the faith. That discipline has repeatedly come into conflict with Egyptian civil law and has been the subject of hard public disputes inside the community. Holy orders are conferred in the ranks of deacon, priest and bishop; parish priests are ordinarily married men who married before ordination, while bishops and the pope are drawn from the monasteries and are celibate. The anointing of the sick is administered widely, including a general anointing of the whole congregation before Pascha.

6. Coptic Worship: Liturgy, Language, Chant

Coptic worship is long, sung throughout, and built on the Alexandrian liturgical tradition that carries the name of St Mark. Three eucharistic liturgies are in use. The Liturgy of St Basil is the ordinary one, used on most days of the year. The Liturgy of St Gregory the Theologian, addressed throughout to the Son rather than to the Father, is used on major feasts. The Liturgy of St Cyril, the Coptic form of the older Liturgy of St Mark, is used chiefly in the Great Fast and the month of Kiahk. A full liturgy with the preceding offering of the lamb and the morning offering of incense runs to three hours or more.

The Coptic Language

Coptic is the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in the Greek alphabet with several extra letters taken from Demotic script to carry sounds Greek lacked. The Sahidic dialect of Upper Egypt dominated the earliest Christian literature, and the Bohairic dialect of the Delta became the liturgical standard from roughly the eleventh century. Coptic died out as a spoken vernacular under Arabic, and it survives as a liturgical language, learned by clergy and deacons and printed in service books alongside Arabic and, in the diaspora, English or another local language. A visitor to a Coptic liturgy will typically hear all three languages in the same service.

Chant, Deacons and the Cymbals

Coptic chant has been carried orally from cantor to cantor over many centuries, and the blind cantors of Egypt have had a recognised part in preserving it. The accompaniment is percussion alone, cymbals and the triangle, keeping time under long melismatic lines. Deacons and the congregation carry much of the singing, and the responses are learned by heart. The tunes are seasonal: a Coptic ear can tell the Great Fast, Kiahk, Holy Week and the Resurrection apart within a few notes, because each has its own melodies.

Icons, Crosses and the Church Building

Coptic churches carry icons in a style of their own, with large eyes, flattened perspective and strong colour, and modern Coptic iconography owes much to the twentieth-century revival associated with the artist Isaac Fanous. A veiled sanctuary, an iconostasis screen and the removal of shoes inside the altar area mark off the holy place. Many Copts wear a cross tattooed on the inside of the right wrist, a practice that goes back centuries and that has functioned both as a devotional sign and, at times, as a mark that made concealment impossible.

7. Fasting, the Agpeya and the Coptic Calendar

Coptic fasting is far heavier than anything in current Latin discipline, in what it excludes and in how many days it covers. A Coptic fast has two parts: abstaining from all animal products, meat, fish, eggs, milk, butter and cheese, and going without any food or drink for a set number of hours before the day's first meal. Added together, the fasting seasons and the weekly Wednesday and Friday fasts cover more than half the days of a typical year.

The Fasting Seasons

Lengths follow the Coptic Orthodox Church's own published fasting rules. Practice varies by household and by the guidance of a person's father of confession, and children, the elderly, the sick and pregnant women are dispensed. Ask a Coptic priest rather than a table before assuming what is expected of a particular person.

The Agpeya: Seven Hours a Day

The Agpeya is the Coptic book of hours, and it structures private and family prayer as much as monastic prayer. Seven daytime and evening hours are appointed: Prime at daybreak, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline and the Midnight Prayer, with monastics adding the Prayer of the Veil. Each hour follows a fixed shape: the Lord's Prayer, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, Psalm 50, a set of psalms proper to the hour, a gospel passage, litanies, the Trisagion, the creed and a closing absolution. The psalms are the substance of it, and the repetition through the day is the point. Catholics who want a daily rhythm in this shape will find the same instinct in the Church's own hours and in our collection of daily prayers.

The Coptic Calendar

The Coptic calendar has thirteen months, twelve of thirty days each and a short final month, called the Little Month or Nasie, of five days in ordinary years and six in leap years. Its era is the Era of the Martyrs, Anno Martyrum, counted from the accession of the emperor Diocletian in AD 284, so that the church dates its years from the beginning of the persecution that killed more Egyptian Christians than any other. Naming an era after martyrdom rather than after a victory says a great deal about how this church understands itself.

The Coptic new year, Nayrouz, falls on 11 September in most years and 12 September in the year preceding a Coptic leap year. Because the Coptic calendar has kept the Julian leap rule, its fixed feasts now run thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar, which is why the Coptic Feast of the Nativity falls on 7 January in civil reckoning and not on 25 December. Pascha is calculated by the Julian reckoning, so Coptic Easter usually falls with Eastern Orthodox Easter rather than with the Western date. The month of Kiahk, the month before the Nativity, carries its own cycle of night-long Marian praises known as the Seven and Four.

8. Monasticism and the Desert Fathers

Christian monasticism began in Egypt, and the Coptic Orthodox Church has never stopped being a monastic church. St Antony the Great, who withdrew into the eastern desert around the end of the third century, is remembered as the father of monks, and the biography Athanasius wrote of him carried the ideal across the Roman world within a generation. St Paul of Thebes is honoured as the first hermit. St Pachomius, in Upper Egypt in the fourth century, organised the first communities living under a common rule, and later monastic rules in East and West draw on what he built.

The desert of Scetis, today Wadi al-Natrun between Cairo and Alexandria, became the heartland. Four ancient monasteries there remain in use: the Monastery of St Macarius, the Monastery of Anba Bishoy, the Monastery of the Syrians and the Monastery of the Romans, Baramus. In the eastern desert near the Red Sea stand the monasteries of St Antony and St Paul. The sayings collected from the fourth-century monks, the Apophthegmata Patrum, are read by Copts, Eastern Orthodox and Catholics alike.

Why Monasticism Still Governs the Church

Monasticism still governs the structure of Coptic life. Bishops are chosen from among monks, and so is the Pope of Alexandria, so the leadership of the church is monastic by rule. The twentieth century saw a substantial monastic revival, associated particularly with Pope Kyrillos VI and with Father Matthew the Poor at the Monastery of St Macarius, and monasteries that had dwindled to a handful of aged monks filled again with graduates and professionals. Lay Copts make retreats at the monasteries in large numbers, and the desert houses function as spiritual centres for the whole community.

9. How the Coptic Church Governs Itself

The Coptic Orthodox Church is governed by the Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St Mark together with the Holy Synod, the assembly of the church's metropolitans and bishops. The pope is the head of the synod and the focus of the church's unity, and he does not claim jurisdiction over any church outside his own. Coptic writers note often that Alexandria was using the title pope for its bishop by the third century, before Rome had settled it as a proper title of its own.

How a Coptic Pope Is Chosen

The election of a Coptic pope combines nomination, voting and a drawing of lots. Candidates are screened for eligibility, an electoral college of clergy and lay representatives votes to reduce the field to three names, and the final choice is made by the altar lot: at the liturgy, a blindfolded child draws one of the three names from a chalice on the altar. Pope Tawadros II was chosen this way on 4 November 2012 and enthroned on 18 November 2012, succeeding Pope Shenouda III, who had led the church from 1971 until his death in 2012. The procedure is understood as leaving the last word to God after the church has done its discernment.

Dioceses, Clergy and the Diaspora

Coptic dioceses in Egypt are headed by bishops who are monks, assisted by married parish priests and by a large body of deacons, many of them serving in ranks below the diaconate proper. Sunday schools have been the engine of the modern Coptic revival: a movement that began in the 1910s and grew through the mid-twentieth century produced a generation of educated lay teachers, many of whom later became monks and bishops, including Shenouda III. Emigration since the 1960s has built substantial Coptic dioceses in North America, Australia and Europe, with their own bishops, and the church has also planted missions across sub-Saharan Africa.

Alexandria and the Ethiopian Church

For most of its history the Ethiopian church received its metropolitan from Alexandria, a bishop sent from Egypt who headed the Ethiopian hierarchy. That arrangement ended in stages in the twentieth century, and in 1959 the Coptic Pope Kyrillos VI consecrated an Ethiopian patriarch, granting the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church autocephaly. The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church became autocephalous in turn in 1998, with Coptic consent. The three churches remain in full communion and are distinct bodies with their own heads. Our guide to Christianity in Africa covers the wider continental picture, including the growth of Christianity south of the Sahara, which is a different story from Egypt's.

10. Mary and the Saints in Coptic Devotion

Marian devotion is central to Coptic life, and the Coptic Church confesses the Virgin Mary as Theotokos, defined at Ephesus in 431 under the Alexandrian archbishop who presided there. Copts address her as ever-virgin, as the Mother of God, and as the second heaven, and Marian hymns fill the month of Kiahk with night-long praises. The Fast of the Virgin Mary in August and the Feast of the Assumption of her body are kept with great solemnity, and a large share of Coptic churches are dedicated to her.

The Coptic Church honours the saints, keeps their commemorations in the Synaxarion read at every liturgy, asks their intercession, and venerates their relics. On these questions Coptic and Catholic practice run closely together, and both differ from the Reformation traditions. The Coptic Church has not defined the Immaculate Conception, which is a Latin dogma defined in 1854, and Coptic writers generally hold that Mary was preserved from personal sin without adopting the Western framework of inherited guilt that the definition addresses.

Apparitions, and What the Church Says About Them

Reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary over Coptic churches, most famously at the Church of the Virgin Mary in Zeitoun, Cairo, beginning in April 1968, are part of modern Coptic memory, and the Coptic Orthodox Church investigated the Zeitoun reports and affirmed them. The Catholic Church has issued no judgment on Zeitoun, which lies outside its own jurisdiction, and readers should be careful not to convert a Coptic determination into a Catholic one.

Catholic practice on apparitions changed in 2024. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, under which the Church ordinarily does not declare an apparition supernatural at all. The most favourable of the six possible outcomes is nihil obstat, which permits devotion and makes no declaration about supernatural origin. Our guide to Marian apparition sites and their Church status sets out the six conclusions and applies them case by case.

11. Martyrdom, Ancient and Recent

Martyrdom is written into the Coptic Church's calendar, its self-understanding and its recent history. The Era of the Martyrs dates the Coptic year from the accession of Diocletian in 284, whose persecution fell on Egypt with particular weight, and the Synaxarion read at every liturgy is largely a record of martyrs. St Mark, whom Copts count as their first patriarch, is remembered as a martyr at Alexandria. Saints venerated by Catholics and Copts alike come out of this period, including St Catherine of Alexandria and the Theban soldier-martyrs.

The Twenty-One of Libya

In February 2015 twenty-one Christian construction workers, twenty of them Coptic Orthodox Egyptians and one a Ghanaian who died with them, were murdered on a beach in Libya by fighters of the Islamic State, who filmed the killing. The Coptic Orthodox Church canonised them as martyrs and set their commemoration on 15 February. On 11 May 2023 Pope Francis announced that the twenty-one would be inscribed in the Roman Martyrology, so that the Catholic Church commemorates them as martyrs on the same date. That is an unusual act: the Catholic Church added to its own martyrology men who died in communion with a church not in communion with Rome.

Coptic Christians in Egypt have suffered repeated attacks in recent decades, including the bombing of a church in Alexandria on 1 January 2011 and the bombings of churches in Tanta and Alexandria on Palm Sunday, 9 April 2017. Pope Francis travelled to Cairo weeks after the Palm Sunday attacks, in April 2017, and the visit produced the baptism declaration described in the next section. Coptic bishops speak of their community as a church of martyrs in the present tense, and the phrase is descriptive rather than rhetorical.

For the Catholic doctrine of what martyrdom is and how the Church honours martyrs, see our guides to the saints and to suffering and the problem of pain.

12. Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic

Two different churches use the word Coptic in their names, and confusing them produces errors in both directions. The Coptic Orthodox Church is the ancient church of Egypt described throughout this guide, headed by the Pope of Alexandria, and it is not in full communion with Rome. The Coptic Catholic Church is a much smaller body in full communion with Rome, headed by its own Patriarch of Alexandria of the Copts, and it is one of the Eastern Catholic churches.

Where the Coptic Catholic Church Came From

Catholic missionary work in Egypt from the seventeenth century onward produced a body of Egyptian Christians in communion with Rome who kept the Alexandrian liturgy. A vicariate was set up in the eighteenth century, and Pope Leo XIII erected the Catholic Patriarchate of Alexandria of the Copts in 1895. Coptic Catholics use the same Alexandrian rite, the same liturgical languages of Coptic and Arabic, and much of the same devotional culture, so a visitor can find the two churches hard to distinguish from the pew.

Why This Is a Sensitive Subject

Reception of groups of Eastern Christians into communion with Rome as separate Eastern Catholic churches is a practice that the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches have long objected to, and they have experienced it as proselytism among their own faithful. The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church addressed the issue at Balamand in 1993, agreeing that this method is not an acceptable path to unity, while affirming that the Eastern Catholic churches which already exist have a right to exist and to care for their faithful. Both halves of that statement matter, and Catholic readers who quote only the second half are not quoting the document. Our guide to the Eastern Catholic churches sets out the full list and their standing in Catholic law.

13. The Agreements Rome Has Signed Since 1973

Rome and the Coptic Orthodox Church have signed a series of texts since 1973 that together settle the Christological question and the question of baptism between them. These documents are the reason the fifth-century dispute can no longer be described as an open argument about the person of Christ, and they are also the reason full communion still does not follow, since what remains open concerns authority.

10 May 1973: Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III

On 10 May 1973 Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria signed a common declaration in Rome, the first meeting of a Roman pope and a Coptic pope since the fifth century. The text confesses one faith in the Incarnate Word, perfect God and perfect man, whose divinity and humanity are united in one real and perfect union, without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion, without alteration, without division and without separation, and it states that in Christ the divinity was not separated from the humanity for a moment nor for the twinkling of an eye. The wording is the classical Coptic formula. Rome signed it. The two also set up a joint commission and committed their churches to common pastoral witness and charitable cooperation.

Paul VI had prepared the ground in 1968 by returning a relic of St Mark to the Coptic Church for the consecration of the new Cathedral of St Mark in Cairo, a gesture the Coptic Church received as an act of respect for its apostolic origin.

1988: The Agreed Statement on Christology

The joint commission set up under the 1973 declaration produced an agreed formula on Christology in 1988, accepted by both churches, which states the union of divinity and humanity in Christ in terms both can sign and rules out the interpretations each had feared in the other. Its practical effect is that neither church now charges the other with the fifth-century heresies. The Coptic Church is not monophysite, as it has always said, and the Catholic Church is not Nestorian, as it has always said.

28 April 2017: Francis and Pope Tawadros II on Baptism

On 28 April 2017 in Cairo, Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II signed a common declaration on the mutual recognition of baptism, so that a person baptised in either church who enters the other is not baptised again. The Coptic Orthodox Church had historically rebaptised Catholics received into it, so this settled a real and painful practical question in families and in mixed marriages rather than restating a principle already agreed. The two also declared a shared commitment to work for the unity Christ prayed for and to a common witness in a country where Christians of both churches are attacked together.

Contact between the two churches is now regular. Pope Tawadros II visited Rome in May 2013 and met Pope Francis, and 10 May, the anniversary of the 1973 declaration, is kept between the two churches as a day of friendship. A Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, established in 2003, carries the wider dialogue with all six Oriental Orthodox churches.

14. Coptic vs Catholic: What Still Differs

Coptic Orthodox and Catholic Christians hold the same faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation, the same seven sacraments, apostolic succession, a valid Eucharist, the veneration of Mary and the saints, and Scripture read within tradition. What still divides them is authority: which councils bind, what the Bishop of Rome may do, and whether doctrines defined in the West without Alexandria's participation are binding on the whole Church.

The Catholic column follows the Second Vatican Council decree Unitatis Redintegratio, the 1983 Code of Canon Law canon 844, and the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism. The Coptic column describes the teaching and general discipline of the Coptic Orthodox Church and binds no individual diocese, since pastoral application rests with the local bishop and with a person's father of confession. Ask the local parish rather than assuming.

Why Communion Has Not Followed

The obstacle after 1973 is the structure of the Church rather than the person of Christ. The Coptic Orthodox Church cannot accept a universal jurisdiction that would place its pope and synod under the Bishop of Rome, and it does not regard councils held after 431 without Alexandria as binding on the whole Church. The Catholic Church cannot set aside Chalcedon or the definitions of Vatican I. Both churches say the dialogue continues, and neither claims that a resolution is near. For the Catholic case for the papal office and the texts it rests on, see our guide to the papacy, and for the Church's approach to Christian unity generally, our guide to ecumenism.

15. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

A Catholic who has read this far can do five concrete things, and each is more useful than an opinion about the fifth century. Stop using the word monophysite for the Coptic Church, since the church anathematises Eutyches by name and both churches have signed texts saying its faith in Christ is orthodox. Learn to distinguish Coptic Orthodox from Coptic Catholic, and both from Eastern Orthodox, before writing or arguing about any of them.

Third, take the fasting seriously as a challenge rather than a curiosity. A church that fasts more than half the year on a discipline that excludes all animal products is holding something the modern Latin discipline has largely let go, and a Catholic can learn from it inside his own tradition without appropriating a rite that is not his.

Fourth, pray for Christians in Egypt and across the Middle East by name and by event. The twenty-one martyrs of Libya are in the Roman Martyrology, which means the Catholic Church asks its own faithful to remember them on 15 February. Fifth, if you attend a Coptic liturgy, go early, stand, remove your shoes if you approach the sanctuary area, and do not present yourself for Communion, because Coptic discipline does not admit Catholics and respecting that is the courtesy the situation asks for.

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