How Will the New Coptic Pope Deal with the New Islamist Egypt?

So the leadership of Egypt’s Coptic Church gets marks for conducting a truly transparent papal-selection process — literally and physically transparent. On Sunday morning, following a lengthy and lavish special Mass, the names of the remaining three candidates were written on pieces of paper. Each was folded and sealed inside a clear glass ball.

Then a blindfolded boy picked one the three balls from a bowl lotto-style, revealing that an unassuming rural bishop named Tawadros was the church’s new pontiff. Every step of the process took place out in the open in front of a packed cathedral and broadcast live on state television.

But Egyptians are a conspiracy-loving community, and despite even these extraordinary steps, by Sunday evening videos of the ceremony were being e-mailed around the country with Zapruder-style scrutiny and hints that the fix was somehow in the process.

Nevertheless, stewardship of one of the Middle East’s largest Christian communities now falls to Bishop Tawadros, who was a pharmacist before he took his clerical vows and serving for years in the rural Nile Delta province of Beheira. Tawadros, who turned 60 on Sunday, faces the daunting task of following the iconic Pope Shenouda III — who reigned for more than 40 years until his death in March.

Under Shenouda, the Coptic Church struck a common Middle Eastern bargain: the religious or ethnic minority allies itself with an authoritarian ruler as protection against the Muslim majority. But in Egypt and elsewhere, that bargain is now obsolete. Secularist dictators like Mubarak have been replaced and Christian communities must fend for themselves — often with elected Islamist governments. With Morsy, a lifelong Muslim Brotherhood official, occupying the presidential palace and a new constitution being drafted by a council dominated by Islamists, one of Tawadros’ first challenges will be managing this redefined relationship between church and state.

It will be a daunting task. Even before the revolution, a younger generation of politicized Copts had long since stopped expecting political courage or leadership from the church. They regarded Shenouda’s policies as far too conciliatory — desperately dedicated to staying on the good side of the Mubarak government, no matter what the cost was.

So far, Tawadros’ comparative obscurity has bred a host of questions as to his policies and political persona going forward. “People know very little about him,” said Kees Hulsman, a Dutch sociologist who has studied the inner workings of the Coptic Church for 30 years. “He has almost no public profile outside of Beheira.” Church watchers believe that kind of low profile was exactly what Coptic elders wanted in the new Pope.

But just because his final selection was indisputably transparent, if random, it doesn’t mean the process wasn’t partially politicized. With Coptic papal selections, the closed-door politics is front-loaded. An original list of 17 candidates was reduced to five by a nontransparent committee of church elders. Analysts describe that initial vetting as proof that the church — in the wake of Shenouda’s reign — deliberately sought to influence the process by allowing only low-key and noncontroversial candidates through to the later rounds. “There was a certain type of person that they obviously wanted,” Hulsman said of the five semifinal candidates. “These were all people with low public profiles — people who were not known for making strong statements on major issues.”

One such vetting casualty may have been Bishop Bishoy, a high-profile and outspoken figure who was widely regarded for years as a strong candidate to succeed Shenouda. He and other more famous clergymen didn’t make the second round. The five remaining candidates were narrowed down to three last month by a public vote among more than 2,000 church officials and senior laypeople — leading to Sunday’s final “altar lot” selection ceremony.

So far Tawadros has mostly kept his public statements innocuous. In the wake of his selection, he spoke to reporters about wanting to first focus on internal church issues, or as he put it, “organizing the house from the inside.”

Another Sunday comment by Tawadros, who will be ordained on Nov. 18, seemed to hint that he envisions less church involvement in politics — with greater emphasis on its spiritual and community work. “The most important thing is for the church to go back and live consistently within the spiritual boundaries because this is its main work, spiritual work,” the new Pope said. “Most important is … that the church, as an institution, serves the community.”

Loosely estimated as comprising 10% of Egypt’s 84 million–strong population, Egypt’s Coptic Church traces its history there back to long before the emergence of Islam, with St. Mark regarded as their first Pope. Now Tawadros assumes the mantle as the church’s 118th leader. He inherits stewardship of an increasingly anxious congregation that feared violence and social marginalization even before the revolution and more so now.

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By Ashraf Khalil, a Cairo-based journalist and author of Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation. TIME