Holy Week... What Coronavirus Deprived Us Of

O God of mercy and compassion, do not be angry with us or hold us accountable for our evil deeds. Listen and look, O God of our help, and lift from the world death, high prices, epidemics, evacuation, the sword of enemies, earthquakes, calamities, and every frightening matter. We ask You, Lord, hear us and have mercy on us” (from the Book of Holy Pascha Prayers of the Coptic Orthodox).

Black banners fill the church, standing between the walls and above the capitals of the columns. A solemn black curtain bearing the image of Christ crucified hangs over the sanctuary screen, with the words written beneath it in Arabic and Coptic: Yours is the power, glory, blessing, and might. This is the prayer repeated most often throughout the church during that week.

Holy Week:
The holiest days of the year for Copts. It begins on the evening of Palm Sunday and ends on the night of Easter Sunday. Between the two Sundays unfolds the most important spiritual journey in the lives of Copts.

“The Holy Pascha”

An Aramaic word meaning crossing or passing over. These ascetic prayers commemorate Christ’s suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection according to Christian belief.
The church arranged special prayers for this week, not only on a daily basis, but also assigned specific readings and prayers to every hour, preserving them in books passed down through the generations to this day.

For decades, the church was keen to hold Pascha prayers throughout the day so that the greatest possible number of Copts could attend. There was a morning Pascha at six o’clock, lasting two hours and attended mainly by students and employees; another at noon, also lasting two hours; a third in the evening, which had the largest attendance and was the longest, lasting about four hours; and a final service at eleven in the evening, lasting approximately one hour.

Anyone following the country’s circumstances realizes that Copts have endured difficult conditions in the modern era. The first was the strained relationship between President Sadat and His Holiness Pope Shenouda III in the late 1970s following sectarian incidents, until tensions reached their peak when Sadat removed the pope from his patriarchal position and placed him under house arrest in the monastery.
The papal headquarters in Abbasiya also witnessed attacks by mobs and outlaws, who assaulted it with stones and Molotov cocktails during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was followed by the burning of churches after the dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in following the June 30 Revolution, and finally the church bombings: the Botroseya Church in Cairo, the Mar Girgis Church in Tanta, and the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria in 2016 and 2017.
None of these incidents deterred the church from its determination to hold prayers and liturgies, nor did they prevent the state from protecting churches by reinforcing security services outside them under the leadership of the armed forces and police. But today, the danger threatens everyone, not only Copts.
The novel coronavirus.

This is the danger that has led churches to close their doors by order of the Holy Synod and suspend all liturgical activities and services, foremost among them the prayers of the “Holy Pascha,” which had never stopped, even during the darkest circumstances the country or the Copts had faced. But the strong winds of COVID-19 brought what the Copts did not wish for. On Palm Sunday, Copts awoke and headed not to churches but to television screens, watching with emotion the rites of the Divine Liturgy broadcast live from the Monastery of Anba Bishoy, the monastery where Pope Shenouda was forcibly confined in the 1980s, while the churches remained closed: no prayers, no palms, no Pascha, and no black banners. Everyone followed from home, online, what the churches broadcast from old recordings of the Holy Pascha prayers, longing for the days of the Pascha, when churches opened without restriction or obstacle.

The accompanying photographs were taken in the churches of the Virgin Mary the Helper in Haret al-Roum in al-Ghouria, the Archangel Gabriel in Haret al-Saqqayeen in Abdeen, and the Virgin Mary in Haret Zuwaila in Gamaleya.