February 13, 2024 / 09:11 AM
The Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity has announced that next Thursday Pope Francis will attend an ecumenical ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica on the occasion of the celebration for the first time of the feast of the 21 Coptic martyrs of Libya.
These witnesses of Christ, beheaded by members of the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015 in a criminal act whose images went around the world, were included in the Roman Martyrology in the month of May 2023 “as a sign of the spiritual communion that unites to our two Churches”.
The ecumenical event will be presided over by Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and will take place starting at 5 p.m. in the Choir Chapel of the temple and will feature the participation of a Coptic choir.