in their native Egypt could you really stand in front he current Pope and tell him that he is holding on to a delusion for the sake of his own prosperity? The Egyptian Coptic community faces persecution on a daily basis at the hands of Muslims and it was even recently that the Pope while participating in the Holy Week liturgy (palm Sunday I believe) was caught up in a terrorist attack.
Yes, it was during the Palm Sunday celebrations in Alexandria and Tanta this year. In total, 45 people were martyred and 126 were injured. The attack in Alexandria occurred at the Cathedral of St. Mark, which is the seat of the Coptic Orthodox papacy together with Cairo (only since the time of HH Pope Christodolos, 1047-1077) at the Hanging Church (Al Mollaqa). Thanks be to God, HH Pope Tawadros left the Cathedral only minutes before the bomb exploded at the gate, in order to go to Tanta to be with the people after learning of the bombing there. (And may God be pleased with the soul of
'Am Nseem, the gate-keeper of the cathedral who gave his life in stopping the terrorist from entering the building.)
Be that as it may, we need not look to such things to prove the point, as the historical examples of the patriarchs and other bishops who bore oppression for the faith began long before the modern era. We might wonder where the luxury was in the life of our common father HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, who was several exiled from his see by hostile forces which the emperor acquiesced to after Nicea, as was the case with regard to the Arian Synod of Tyre in 335, which led to HH's exile to Trier. This also sheds light on Peter's claim that the Church was in the hands of Constantine, as I am sure we both know (so I write this for Peter;
please pay attention here, Peter) that HH St. Athanasius was received as the sole rightful bishop of Alexandria at Trier, Rome, Sardica, and everywhere else he went, and found innocent of any wrongdoing at synods held during this time in Alexandria (339), Rome (340), and Sardica (343). This was all subsequent to the reinstatement of his banishment in 338 after the death of Constantine (May 337), by Constantine's son Constantius II who had Arian sympathies.
Not to mention that even if this were so in the way that Peter would have it, with emperors controlling what the Church believes (rather than some trying to do that and failing, as history actually shows), this then could only have conceivably extended within the Roman/Byzantine Empire itself. As an OO person, I feel somewhat obliged to point out the following facts relevant to this way of looking at history:
- Armenia, which is the first modern/recognizable nation to adopt Christianity in the entire world (under King Tiridates III in 301 AD), was not under the control of the Byzantine Empire until 387, when Armenia was divided between the Sassanid Persians and the Byzantines, with the Byzantines taking control of Western Armenia only. (Aside: the Sassanid Persians and the Byzantines continued to fight each other to the degree that this caused the Armenians to not be able to attend the Council of Chalcedon, as that would be akin to fraternizing with the enemy during an active conflict.) This is obviously well after Nicaea (325), and Western Armenia would remain under Byzantine control only until 536.
- Pursuant to the above, we should really remember that for a large number of Christians who would've been in 387 and for some time afterwards considered orthodox by all, they were in a hostile environment under leaders within the Persian empire who oppressed all forms of Christianity, as it was the religion associated with their hated enemies, the Byzantines. This was so bad in fact that the Church of the East (since Ephesus 431 known as Nestorians, though that would be anachronistic for this time period) were moved to hold the Synod of Dadisho' in 424, at which they declared their Church to be ecclesiologically independent of the Byzantine Empire, probably in an effort to get the authorities to stop arresting their clergy for having contact with their Byzantine counterparts. See Suha Rassam's Christianity in Iraq for more on this. (It is perhaps interesting to note that the formal rejection of Chalcedon by the Armenians also came by reference to the Armenians in Persia, as it was to them that the two letters of HH Catholicos Babken II, who would chair the council at Dvin in 506 which would formally reject Chalcedon, were addressed in order to assure the Orthodox, by which he of course meant Armenians, that what the Nestorians had been telling them -- namely, that the Greek and Latin churches now agree with them, and not with the Armenians -- was false; HH had not yet learned of what had gone on at Chalcedon, as the Armenians had no representatives there, as I've already mentioned.)
- The Church in India, est. 52 by St. Thomas, should also be mentioned, as it too was outside of Byzantine control.
- Likewise too the churches of East Africa, both the Orthodox Tewahedo (modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) who were first sent bishops by HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic after the conversion of the Kingdom of Axum under King Ezana c. 330 (by which point it had been its own kingdom for approximately 230 years), and the Nubian Christian kingdoms, who were a bit later (5th-6th century) but only ever partially theologically allied with Byzantine Christianity and hence the wider Byzantine empire (Nobatia and Alodia were OO, while Makuria was EO).
Taken together, that's a lot of the Christian world right there, including churches that still have millions of followers to this very day, and would've had a much, much larger share of world Christianity in earlier times much closer to the so-called 'apostasy'. I am writing from memory at this point, because I don't have the book in front of me, but I think the previously-mentioned
Christianity in Iraq mentions at one point that something like 25% of all the world's Christians were within the territory governed by the See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, which is not too hard to believe if you have ever read about the geographical spread of the Church of the East at its zenith, before it was essentially crushed to death by the twin onslaught of Islam and the Mongols.
So I don't at all buy that saying that "the church was in the hands of Constantine" or any Roman (Byzantine or Latin) emperor actually means anything, particularly if the accusation stays as general as that, with only the assertion that some people somewhere were bad (a point which nobody disputes in the first place) to back it up. Chances are Peter's version of "the church" is a lot more geographically limited than mine, and much more importantly a lot more limited than what the historical record shows us regarding the establishment of Christianity itself across the entire world, spanning several distinct empires with their own rulers, relations, and histories.
That's the problem with worldwide, irrecoverable apostasies lasting hundreds upon hundreds of years: they have to include
the entire world during the entire period (which you are loathe to even define with concrete dates, as we have seen), not just the parts or eras you want to selectively focus on in an attempt to prove your unprovable case.
