c. 2000 Religion News Service

CAIRO, Egypt _ Twelve-year-old Simon Nasef has already figured out his future career. He doesn’t want to be a firefighter. Or a policeman. Or a football player.

He wants to be a monk.

“I like it,” said the slight sixth-grader, who serves as an altar boy at his local Coptic Christian church and spends hours each week studying the ancient Coptic liturgy. “Maybe I’ll change my mind at university. But I won’t feel alone because I can fast and pray in a monastery.”

At their suburban Cairo home _ a bleak, solidly middle-class apartment block skirting the edges of the desert _ Simon’s parents list monasticism’s advantages. It is a solid, respectable vocation, they say. If their son joins, he will make the family proud.

“He will be our mediator in heaven,” explained Simon’s mother, Amani George, as she sat in the family’s tiny living room, crammed with pictures of Jesus and other religious mementos.

“Anyway,” she added, “it’s better than mixing with bad people.”

If Simon becomes a monk, he will follow the path of hundreds of young Egyptian men in recent years. Across Egypt, monasteries are enjoying a revival unprecedented since their desert origins 1,600 years ago. Applicants to become priests and nuns have also surged in number, and a new order of women _ consecrated deaconesses _ works in the Christian community.

No longer a refuge for the poor and the uneducated, the Coptic church is now attracting some of Egypt’s most promising youth. The phenomenon is all the more remarkable given that the country’s Coptic community of 6 million _ about 10 percent of Egypt’s population _ is actually dwindling.

Analysts offer a complex tapestry of reasons behind the spiritual renaissance, including a powerful church movement aimed at promoting religious participation among children. But several religious scholars say that growing Islamic extremism and discrimination toward Egypt’s Christian minority also have driven many to the church.

“In the last 30 years, there has been a growing influence in the country by the Muslim Brotherhood and by more radical Islamic movements,” said Coptic scholar Gowdat Gabra, referring to an outlawed political group. “As a reaction, some young Christian people are becoming monks to defend their faith, and also to avoid this world full of disturbances.”

Founded at the end of the third century, monasticism is Egypt’s signature contribution to Christianity. A hundred years later, thousands of Egyptian Christians had flocked to spare desert caves or sought a more communal life in newly established monasteries.

But as Islam tightened its grip in Egypt during the Middle Ages, monasticism _ and Christianity as a whole _ fell into decline. Monasteries were abandoned. Priests and monks maintained the traditions but not the spirit of the church. A Christian revival began only in the 19th century, gathering force in the 1940s with the birth of the Sunday school movement.

“The movement takes care of the children,” said Bishop Moussa, who heads youth programs for Egypt’s Coptic church. “It teaches them the Bible _ the New Testament, the Old Testament, the church topics, the Christian life. And all this has created a revival in the church.”

Heavily promoted by Pope Shenouda III, a former monk who now heads Egypt’s Coptic church, the movement inspired hundreds of young Christian men like Yasser Sarwat to abandon promising futures in secular life.

Like many other Egyptian boys, Sarwat spent summer vacations in a monastery. After finishing university and mandatory military service, the 22-year-old business major from southern Egypt became a novice at Al Muharraq monastery. When he was ordained as a monk, he changed his name to Father Felixinos.

Ten years later, Father Felixinos says he has no regrets.

“What is life going to give you?” he asked, as he walked a visitor around the monastery’s quiet grounds. “You can be successful in the outside world, have a family, live like any ordinary young man or woman. But we try to live in this spiritual atmosphere. We want another kind of life.”

Inside Al Muharraq’s massive stone walls, some 200 miles south of Cairo, life turns around a predictable cycle of work, prayer and meditation. The day begins at 2:30 a.m. with a four-hour Mass. Evening Mass is followed by solitary prayers and reading. In between are daily tasks, short rests and simple meals of cooked beans and chewy, monastery-baked bread.

Just 30 years ago, less than three dozen aging monks ran this sprawling fourth-century monastery. Today, some 110 monks pray at Al Muharraq. Like Father Felixinos, many are in their 30s. Almost half have university degrees.

These young, educated men are filling monasteries across Egypt. In the past 50 years, the number of Egyptian monks has soared from about 200 to almost 2,000, according to church estimates, and Coptic leaders are scrambling to open new monasteries.

The religious revival is following the recent exodus of some 750,000 Copts to the West, including almost half to North America.

“His Holiness is looking after his children everywhere in the world,” Moussa said of Shenouda. “He is searching for them before they ask for care, and establishing churches, and sending priests and monks.”

Moussa spends his summers visiting Egyptian youth in the United States and Canada, where many of the 200 Coptic churches overseas are located. There are eight new Coptic monasteries abroad, including one in Los Angeles.

But religious experts point to troubling undercurrents influencing the church’s success. They note Egypt’s Coptic emigration, which began in the 1970s, was partly in reaction to religious discrimination at home. Although many praise the spiritual revival, a minority worry that the popularity of monasticism and of other church orders will push Copts to the margins of Egypt’s social and political life.

“I don’t like it,” said Coptic scholar Milad Hannah. “To me it’s very dangerous. Because if the Copts get together and become a ghetto, they will easily be attacked.”

Moussa doesn’t deny that Copts have few means of political expression in Egypt. But now, he said, the church is matching its spiritual push with a secular one as well. He points to regular interfaith dialogues between Copt and Muslim religious leaders, and to Christian youth lectures on the importance of voting.

“Our church is a traditional one, a spiritual one, a monastic one,” Moussa said. “But now we are very much involved in the life of the society. And we are trying to revive this in our people.”

DEA END BRYANT