At the end of September, Fr. Alois will promote together with the Coptic Church an ecumenical meeting between young Europeans and Arabs, near Cairo.
The ecumenical community of Taizé is also heading to Egypt. Following the news that on April 28 the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I will be in Cairo together with Pope Francis during the Pontiffs’ delicate journey which will take him to the University of Azhar, along with the scheduled meeting with the martyred Coptic Church, from France arrives the announcement of another important initiative that will bring Christians of various confessions together in Egypt. The community of Taizé has in fact released a statement that Cairo will be the Pilgrimage of Trust on Earth’s next destination, an initiative conceived and founded by Fr. Roger to make the young bearers of hope in today’s world.
The website of Taizé explains that - From 26 September to 1 October 2017, Brother Alois will visit the Christians of Egypt together with some brothers and around one hundred young adults from different countries - The meeting will be held in the community of Anafora, a spiritual Centre founded by a local Coptic Orthodox bishop Thomas, situated 75km from Cairo on the road to Alexandria. At Anafora, the young people coming from Taizé will meet with another hundred young Egyptians coming from the Coptic dioceses. The day program also includes a meeting with the Coptic Patriarch Tawadros II and a visit to one of the Monasteries of Wadi Natrun, source of the monastic tradition in Egypt.
“These few days of meeting and visits - the community of Taizé explains by announcing the initiative - will help us discover and find out more about the two millennia of Christian presence and praying tradition in the land of Egypt, the call of the desert, which gave birth to monastic life, the fertile meeting between Egyptian, Greek and Arab cultures and its fruitfulness today, as well as the lives of Christians in Egypt today and their social commitment to towards the most disadvantaged”
Each year around December 31 a different European city hosts the great gathering that sees young people of the Taizé community celebrate together in prayer the passage to the new year (New Year 2018, for example, will be held in Basel, the cradle of the Reformation). The community has often joined this event with other significant destinations of the “pilgrimage of trust” in Asia, Africa and Latin America. T oday’s choice of Egypt, announced a few days after the Palm Sunday attack and on the eve of Pope Francis’s visit, assumes a very special importance. Taizé has chosen to bring its prophecy of peace among the young people of a terribly wounded land. This journey further confirms Egypt as an important ecumenical crossroad: thanks to the current patriarch Tawadros II, an Ecumenical Council of Churches was born in 2013 in Cairo, which is significantly increasing the collaboration between different Christian denominations of which results we can see through initiatives such as the one announced by the Taizé community.
