On the evening of Thursday, 14th August, 2014, representatives of the Churches met at the St. Mark’s Cathedral at Abbasseya, to discuss the vision of each Church regarding the construction of churches, and arriving at a unified bill for the “Building Places of Worship” Law, instead of having a separate bill for each of the three Churches.
The three Churches put forward several proposals, to be drafted by a committee. The representatives will be meeting a second time to discuss the suggestions and come to an agreement on a final draft, one week from today.
The Church representatives suggested in their meeting that there be a single body, specializing in church construction, like a local or suburbian council, with the stipulation that approval or rejection of a request for a building permit be finalized within a certain time frame, attributing this to their having a crisis pertaining to church construction in Egypt, this being specifically the lack of a specific authority specializing in issuing permits and approvals for building churches and commencing implementation.
The meeting was attended by HG Bishop Pola, representing the Coptic Orthodox Church, as well as Faridi Al-Bayady and Refaat Fatthy, representing the Anglican Church. Counsellor Gamil Halim, representative of the Catholic Church apologized for not attending, but he sent through his suggestions.
Worth mentioning, the Church representatives convened in full last week at the Cathedral to set forth a preliminary vision and the content of templates to prepare a single project for church construction, to be presented it to the Minister of Interim Justice, who will forward it to the next House of Representatives for discussion.
