Coptic Orthodox Church Declares Three Days of Fasting and Prayers

OBL News:

Cairo: The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria has announced fasting and prayer 3 days in order to select the New Pope of Alexandria & Patriarch the Holy see of St. Mark

Divine Liturgy at all Churches on Sunday 30 September  will prepare the faithful for  the three day fasting and prayers.  It will begin on Monday 1st October, continue on Tuesday 2nd October and will end on Wednesday 3rd of October 2012. The Church has requested one all to pray and fast for the complete success of the Papal elections.

God Bless you all.

I certainly hope it goes better for them than it has with the deadlocked Canterbury Anglicans.

A Church of England panel meeting in secret to choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury has failed to reach agreement on who should be the new leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

After three days of talks behind closed doors in an undisclosed location, officials narrowed the field to three candidates, but will need to meet again to finish the job, the Sunday Times said, citing an unnamed senior cleric.

The choice of a replacement for Rowan Williams, who steps down in December, is critical for a church in danger of splitting over divisive issues such as gay marriage and senior women clergy, and facing a rising threat from secularism.

The Crown Nominations Commission (CNC), a church panel with 16 members whose chairman is appointed by the prime minister, had been expected to pick a preferred candidate and a second choice on Friday, a church source said last week.

The names were then due to be passed to Prime Minister David Cameron and Queen Elizabeth, supreme governor of the Church of England, before an official announcement within days, possibly on Wednesday.

Strange, all these different election traditions. How the Holy Spirit works. How He exercise His will. And of course, the spiritual discernment of man. ‘Deadlocked’. Come to think of it, I read of no such call to fasting from the Anglicans. Instead, we have things like: Critics attack secrecy of Archbishop selection.

 

Pentecost

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the  blowing  of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house  where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that  separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with  the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them - Acts 2:1-4.

And a prayer:

Almighty God, who on this day
didst open the way of eternal life
to every race and nation
by the promised gift of thy Holy Spirit:
Shed abroad this gift throughout the world
by the preaching of the Gospel,
that it may reach to the ends of the earth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth
with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

- BCP