Al-Fajr released a statement delivered by Nādir al-Sirafī, spokesman of the “Copts 38” group, upon a meeting with Pope Tawadros II in the papal headquarters in ’Abāsīyyah. Al-Sirafī, and three other members of “Copts 38”, Rafīq Farūq, Vivian Jamīl, and Ra’fat Rīd, presented the problems almost 10 thousand Copts are facing as they were left divorced in the eyes of the law, but not in those of the Church.
Further, Al-Sirafī declared that Pope Tawadros II promised to settle this issue in a way that is in conformity with the Church’s and the Bible teachings on one hand and respects the state’s legislation on the other.
Copts 38 was named after a 1938 Statute which legalized a papal declaration listing ten circumstances under which Copts may divorce. When he ascended to the papacy in 1971, the late Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenouda reduced the permissible grounds to two, adultery and/or conversion to Islam or to another Christian denomination, although this change was not ratified by the state for nearly four decades.
Until 2008, Egyptian civil courts made use of the 1938 bylaws without Shenouda III changes, and in 2010, the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that Christian marriage being a sacramental act falls under the jurisdiction of the church as religious entity, and not the state. [Author not mentioned, Al-Fajr, Jan. 10, p. 15] Read original article in Arabic
