No, no, no. I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything like that. My point was more that insofar as you can find something objectionable in HH Pope Shenouda III's writings, so can we, the difference being that some of us are not willing to admit it. Perhaps it is because HH was recently declared a saint, to which I would say so was St. Justin Martyr in the pre-congregation times, but that doesn't make his seeming acceptance of creation out of preexisting matter somehow magically be "the Orthodox position" or whatever you'd call it. That's simply not how things work.
When I wrote about the man in the chair, I was talking about the deference that some Copts pay to the Coptic Pope that seems to be
de facto akin to the same syndrome in the Latins, in terms of its rabidness and its lack of critical thought (even though the Copts wouldn't realize it or necessarily talk about it in those same terms). No doubt this is especially heavy and sensitive when it comes to HH Pope Shenouda III, because he has recently departed within everyone's memory, and for many who are of a certain age he is the only Pope that they really remember (HH Cyril VI having passed in 1971). That ought not change our ecclesiological principles, however, which are traditional in the Orthodox, conciliar sense. One of the very first things that HH Pope Tawadros II did after being elevated was decree his intention to root out precisely this tendency, and so he declared "We are a conciliar Church", and set about working to try to fix some of the things that HH Pope Shenouda III's very long papacy had set in place and/or left ossified that needed to be dealt with, like finally getting some darn bishops for the ecclesiological badlands that we call Canada.
The OO Church does not have, and has never had, and never will have, one chair. Our ecclesiology does not allow such a thing. Etchmiadzin of the Armenians, Axum of the Ethiopians, and wherever it is that the Syriacs have been chased to thanks to the war/Islamist takeover of Syria (Beirut, I think) all function just fine. We are actually less tightly held-together in that way than you guys are, as we lack an equivalent of the EP. Some will argue (of these particular churches...
totally coincidentally, I'm sure
) that the Patriarch of Alexandria or of the Syriac Orthodox should have this role, but that doesn't make it a thing. Hence, just for instance, we mention by name the Patriarch of Antioch (one of the oldest churches of the communion) and the Patriarch of Eritrea (one of the newest, in terms of their 1990s autocephaly) in every Coptic liturgy, because this is following an agreement that we have with these churches in particular. It does not say anything regarding who would or should be ranked where. We don't really do that.