With 100 massacred in five months, leaving vengeance to the Lord is getting harder for Copts.
They couldn’t even wash their dead.
Thirty Coptic Christians were gunned down by ISIS, ambushed in a church bus on a weekend outing to a popular monastery in the Egyptian desert. Their families gathered to receive their loved ones in a local hospital, but were met with a mixture of ill-equipped facilities and overwhelmed staff. They even had to fetch their own water.
As if another reason was necessary, Coptic anger turned the funeral march into a protest.
“With our souls and blood we will redeem you, oh Cross!” they shouted. Some seemed to take aim at Islam. “There is no god but God,” they chanted, before changing the second half of the Muslim creed, “and the Messiah, he is God.”
Other chants took no aim at all, thrashing wildly in anger. “We will avenge them, or die like them.”
Many observers say such anger plays right into the hands of ISIS, which is keen to turn Egypt against itself.
Six weeks earlier, after twin suicide bombings on Palm Sunday, Bishop Boula of the Coptic Orthodox diocese of Tanta found himself in a similar situation. Hospitals did not have enough refrigeration units to keep the 25 bodies of those martyred at St. George Church. Crowds were gathering, and anger was surging.
Quickly, he made the decision to bury them together in the church crypt reserved for bishops. Honoring the dead with their leaders of ages past, he then marshaled the youth to provide order and security for the semi-spontaneous funeral service.
“It cooled the fire of all the people,” he later recounted on satellite TV. St. George was renamed to include “the righteous martyrs of Tanta,” with a shrine erected outside the crypt.
It was perhaps the most practical of Coptic ...
from
http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/june/egypt-persecuted-christians-righteous-anger-copts-isis.html
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