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Cairo church bombing raises fears among Christians

A bombing at Cairo’s largest Coptic cathedral killed at least 25 people and wounded 49, many of them women and children attending Sunday mass, in the deadliest attack on Egypt’s Christian minority in years.

The attack comes as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi fights the Egyptian branch of ISIS.

The militant group has also carried out deadly attacks in Cairo and has urged its supporters to launch attacks around the world in recent weeks as it goes on the defensive in its Iraqi and Syrian strongholds.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but ISIS supporters celebrated on social media. “God bless the person who did this blessed act,” wrote one supporter on Telegram.

The explosion took place in a chapel, which adjoins St Mark’s, Cairo’s main cathedral and the seat of Coptic Pope Tawadros II, where security is normally tight.

The Great Apparition of the Virgin Mary at Zeitoun, Egypt

By Stephen Ryan  
In two days Martin Luther King would be dead, a month after that Robert Kennedy would die in a crowded hotel hallway in California. These tumultuous events were soon followed by riots in Chicago, a music festival in Vermont that would define a generation and unleash a cultural tsunami of change in America.  The day was April 2, 1968 and on that day perhaps “the most dramatic manifestation of the supernatural since Jesus Christ”  occurred in Egypt in the outskirts of Ciaro in a town called Zietoun.

The first apparition at Zeitoun was recorded that evening  when a Muslim bus mechanic called Farouk Mohammed Atwa, who worked across the street from the church of Saint Demiana in Zeitoun, thought that the apparition was a woman attempting suicide by jumping from the structure. Two other men also noticed a white figure on the top of the church . The sighting was reported to the police.  A crowd began to gather on the event site and the police attempted to disperse it. According to the police, the sighting was just a reflection of the light from the street lamps. However, the crowds viewed the sighting as a clear apparition of Saint Mary, and so the attempts by the police to disperse the crowd were unsuccessful. The event itself ended in few minutes, but within months millions of people bore witness to the extraordinary event of the miraculous presence of the Virgin Mary.

Great Video

While Americans sat in their couches watching their country literally burn on television, the Mother of God began to appear nightly before tens of thousands of Muslims, Christians and Jews.   She was in fact televised.  She appeared above a church dome in the land of the pyramids at a Coptic church constructed to commemorate the area in Egypt where she had come with Joseph and Jesus when they all fled from Herod.  Her appearances at Zeitun were astounding. The impossible image was before his eyes.  The image was no less shocking to the crowd than if a UFO had landed on the dome and aliens had stepped out and waved to the crowd.

But it was no alien form from outer space the crowd was looking at. No,  the unmistakable ghostly figure hovering over the Church was the Blessed Virgin Mary.

She was seen by more than a million people. The apparitions were broadcast by Egyptian TV, photographed by hundreds of professional photographers and personally witnessed by Egyptian President Abdul Nasser, an avowed Marxist. The apparitions lasted for three years with numerous unaccountable healings recorded by various medical professionals. The local police, who initially thought the apparitions were an elaborate hoax, searched a 15-mile radius surrounding the site to uncover any type of device that could be used to project such images. They were completely unsuccessful.

Moslems who saw the apparitions chanted from the Koran, “Mary, God has chosen thee. And purified thee; He has chosen thee “Above all women.” She was seen accompanied by doves of light in apparitions that lasted from a few minutes to as long as nine hours. Kyrillos VI, the Orthodox patriarch, formed a commission to investigate the apparitions. A number of the commissioners observed plumes of fragrant purple smoke rising from the church at the time of the apparitions and the figure of a woman surrounded by a very bright globe of light accompanied by doves of light. A digitally-enhanced, negative image of one television frame is shown at the top of this page to enable you a see an outline of what was seen by hundreds of thousands in Egypt.

While the appearances at Zietum were silent, the silence spoke volumes to those who came to see and strengthen their faith. The local Coptic Patriarch, Kyrillos VI, publicly announced a year after the apparitions started that he had no doubt that the Mother of God was appearing above the roof of St. Mary’s Coptic Church.

For those who, like Thomas, needed to see for themselves, Mary offered an unequivocal televised demonstration at Zeitun. Yet, because of an unresponsive media and an indifferent world, very few outside of Egypt learned of her astonishing appearances there until well after they had ended.