Sighhh. Why do I come back to such misinformation? Or perhaps a better question would be why I come back here at all…
But you know, I can’t leave well enough alone, when it’s about my own church/communion.
Only the Eastern Orthodox Communion don’t routinely extend them the courtesy of including the word Orthodox in both Coptic Orthodox Church and Oriental Orthodox Communion. Even then, usually, most EO do refer to them by the CO and OO terms.
Well that settles it. I guess we’d best close up shop. The Byzantines (still) don’t like us. What will we ever do to gain their approval…
Further, remember, somewhere between 5% and 15% of the copts are part of the Catholic Communion, in the Coptic Catholic Church.
This is highly doubtful, to put it mildly. According to
CNEWA, an unabashedly pro-Catholic source if there ever was one, there are 162,000 Coptic Catholics. Even if we take the lowest part of your 5%-15% range, and put it within the context of the undoubtedly low but commonly-cited figure of 5 million, that would be 250,000 people – well above the 162,000 figure given by CNEWA. Even
more hopeful Catholic news sources say that they account for “as many as 300,000” – just barely cracking the 5% mark of the purposefully low 5 million figure. If, on the other hand, there are as many as 12,000,000 Orthodox Copts inside of Egypt, as was reportedly stated by the Church itself in 2008 according to
Al-Arabiya (for those of you who don’t read Arabic, the headline says “Controversy in Egypt after official Church census states 12 million Copts”), then obviously the percentage of non-Orthodox Copts which might make up the remaining share of Christians drops accordingly. It is not controversial to state that approximately 95% of Egypt’s Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the remainder is not only Coptic Catholics, but also various Coptic Protestants, as well as the historic Greek Orthodox community, and various Christians of other churches, such as Armenian Orthodox, Syriacs of various flavors, etc. Using
the CIA number of 9% for the total Christian population, even the highest estimate of Coptic Catholics (the 300,000 from the news story linked above) would amount to approximately 3.3%, and the CNEWA figure 1.8%. Silly I thought it was mostly Coptic Orthodox advocacy groups in the West who like inflating the number of Copts, but I haven’t seen them do so by 13.2% as you just did. You sure you aren’t a Copt?
Of course it would be lovely if numbers didn’t matter, but since the Coptic population is a
political issue, sadly, we have to be cautious about what sorts of numbers we do throw out there. Since the recent days of Pope Benedict and his infamous Regensburg lecture and its political fallout, the association of any Christian community in the Middle East – and particularly in hotbeds of radicalism such as Egypt – with the church of Rome and/or its Pope is (sadly) a liability and a stumbling block to changing the popular conception of the Islamic majority of Christians as being somehow Western implants hellbent on destroying the societies in which they live.
