Amid last July, Sally Zakhari (known on Facebook as Sally
Zee) a Coptic young lady from Florida, published her story on Facebook. It was
a story of her being molested by a Coptic priest in her childhood. His name was
Father Reweis Aziz Khalil.
This was a terribly shocking announcement for the Coptic community all over the world. Copts have been elevating clergymen as if infallible since the early beginning of Coptic Christianity in Egypt. It might be something of a Pharaonic descent. This elevated stature of Coptic clergy made Sally’s statement not only went viral, but also was faced by a heavy armoured opposition. By no means, this was plausible for the Copts.
But things began to change
dramatically, when Sally and a supporting Coptic Priest, Father Pishoy Salama –
a Harvard Divinity School graduate who was appointed as an Adjunct Professor of
Theology at Toronto University- started to reveal new evidences accompanied
with a criminating documents. New evidence showed that this Priest was
defrocked in the year 2015 for the same kind of allegations, that was proven
true after an investigation was conducted by the church at that time. Surprisingly,
he was defrocked on paper only, it never happened in real. He kept serving in
the church, until Sally raised the red flag. Sally and supporters kept pushing
on Pope Tawdros II and the church, until Father Reweis was suspended and
defrocked for good.
The story was just starting. Comments
on Sally’s Facebook posts revealed disturbing stories of similar incidences
with different clergymen. For this reason, or may be for another, Sally
inaugurated a hashtag: #copticsurvivor. Molesting and Paedophile clergy began
to be exposed. But what appeared to be really disturbing was that pattern that
was shared by all the stories. These clergymen deeds were no secret, they were
well known, in fact all of them were either suspended or defrocked by official
declarations from the Pope, none of these declarations ever came into effect.
The maximum punishment ever occurred was transferring each of those to serve in
another church far away.
The church failed to deal with issue
since its real beginning decades ago. Some of these allegations was known from
twenty years ago. Yet, what mattered was how to cover up. But things have
changed. Women rights movements, social media, human rights organizations, and
else made it easy and encouraging to talk. Clergymen became no more infallible
or elevated. Nothing seems to be changing in how the Church is dealing with
these issues. No press releases were ever issued, and no official comments were
announced, as if nothing is happening or ever happened.
One can say the church is in a very
bad situation. From one hand it wants to do something toward those deviators;
but on the other hand, this will be a disaster for the church amid its Islamic
contexts. One Bishop told me, “if these incidents are exposed in front of the
society, it will be scandalous. Radical Muslims -which is large part of the
population- will take the chance to attack Christians and Christianity for
decades, then people will lose faith and leave their church. It will be a
disaster for the Coptic church.”
As the number of suspected clergymen
are rising, the question that keeps hitting the Copts’ minds is: How a
clergyman can be paedophile, molester or even a rapist? For the Copts,
clergymen are supposed to resemble and reflect Christ on earth. This very
established elevated view is now being shacked and uprooted drastically. But
the answer to this question is very simple. For more than half a century, there
were no clear rules, criterion, or even an interview for appointing clergymen
for priesthood or episcopacy. It was all random choices, no real investigations
were ever conducted to check the candidate’s backgrounds, psychology, and
spiritual authenticity. It all depended on personal favourability, nothing
else. This policy, eventually led to disasters, and instead of instituting a
well-developed policy for choosing and appointing clergymen, the church kept
covering up scandals.
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