by Marie Elena Giossi

Dignity for all Egyptians – that is the hope and prayer of one Egyptian priest as the country learns to live under a new constitution, a new president and a soon-to-be elected parliament.

Father Antonios Fayez, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Egypt, and pastor of St. Mary Virgin parish in Shoubra, northeast of Cairo, shared his thoughts on a recent morning in Greenpoint.

He was in New York to visit his American counterpart, Father Andrew Small, O.M.I., following the annual assembly of Pontifical Mission Societies, which they both attended in Rome. Pope Francis addressed the national directors from around the world.

Father Fayez spent 10 days visiting the U.S., primarily to see the workings of the Pontifical Mission Societies office in New York; meet with Aid to the Church in Need, one of his partners in ministry; and visit the USCCB offices in Washington, D.C. He also came to spend time with local Coptic Catholics, including relatives in Brooklyn.

No stranger to the Brooklyn Diocese, he ministered to the faithful at Resurrection Coptic Church, Park Slope, in the mid-1980s while studying English at St. Joseph Seminary, Dunwoodie.

Egypt is home to approximately 84 million people, mostly Muslims, and Christians make up 10 to 15 percent of the population. Of them, Father Fayez said about 200,000 are Coptic Catholics, who follow an Eastern Catholic rite, but are in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

Muslim-Christian tensions and violence have caused Christians to flee from Egypt in recent years and immigrate to the U.S., settling in New York, New Jersey and California.

“Usually we lived with Muslims from many, many years ago,” the priest said, but when the revolution happened in late January, 2011, things changed.

Under former president Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Muslims and Christians lived together on the same streets but even then, Christians were marginalized. “For the Christian,” Father Fayez said, it was “not easy to be as an equal person with the Muslims.”

“We had hoped after the revolution to be equal, to work together, to live together,” he said. “All the Egyptian people had hoped to be better and to live together better.”

Instead, conflicts arose and violence broke out against Christians, giving them daily opportunities to witness to their faith through suffering and death under President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood party.

“We didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood in government. We needed a change,” he said.

Father Fayez has hope that the election of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi will improve conditions. One positive sign, he said, was that prior to his election, al-Sisi met with both Muslims and Christians to discuss a roadmap to be more inclusive.

The roadmap is a “good initiative to bring the people together,” said Father Fayez, who noted that the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches have supported the plan. “He (al-Sisi) insisted we are Egyptians – not Muslims, not Christians. We are Egyptians.”

The priest also has a great deal of hope in the new constitution that was passed in January. It guarantees equality between the sexes and a freedom of belief, even though it affirms Islam as the state religion.

The constitution has “many, many liberties” for women, children and Christians, Father Fayez said. “It is better, we hope.”

Amid the turmoil, Father Fayez says the Coptic Catholic Church has been a source of assistance for all people, “to do what we can do for all Egypt, not the Christians only … to give dignity to all.”

The Pontifical Mission Societies in Egypt contribute to that dignity and spread the Catholic faith by supporting social services and programs, aiding schools and hospitals, and finding work for the unemployed and refugees.

Addressing the needs of Sudanese refugees is a major project of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Egypt.

“We have many refugees from Sudan, more than one million and a half,” he noted. The Catholic Church has opened two schools for the refugees in Cairo and tries to find work for women in schools and hospitals.

Another aspect of the program trains Egyptian volunteers to go as missionaries to Sudan to evangelize the people while also learning their way of life.

“They discover the culture of Sudan and the mentality and when they return to Egypt they can collaborate with the Sudanese,” Father Fayez explained.

Over the last six years, 150 volunteers have gone to Sudan and returned help the refugees. Six have since entered the seminary or religious life.

“In the Middle East, we are a Church suffering and when a person is suffering he can’t see the problem from other sides because he is concentrated about his own suffering,” Father Fayez said.

The lay missionaries “discover another suffering and another people,” he explained. “They come back more rich, with more open minds and open hearts to collaborate. This is very good to discover our mission.”

And Father Fayez says that mission of spreading the faith applies to Egyptian Catholics living overseas too.

He asks Coptic Catholics in the U.S. to stay connected to their homeland, but also to open their hearts to the land and people they have adopted.

“You are here to eat well and study well. That is good,” Father Fayez said. “But you come as a missionary… to transmit your faith.”

Father Fayez would like to see American Catholics get “to know our culture, our solidarity and our problems … not only to give money to help the situation but… to have a global view.”

Most importantly, he said, “pray for us. We need the prayers.”