Patriarch,[1] who lays his hands on their head. The assisting bishops lay theirs on the shoulders of the elect. The Patriarch breathes on him saying: "Receive the Holy Ghost; whose sins, etc." The ordained is vested.[2] Priests are ordained by the imposition of the bishop's hands, and are then vested by him. A priest who becomes a ḳummuṣ is made one by much the same rite, exactly like ordination.[3] The archdeacon and deacon are ordained by laying on hands, not the sub-deacon and reader. The deacon receives the Eucharistic spoon as the symbol of his office,[4] the sub-deacon a lighted candle.[5]
The anointing of the sick has curious features. It should be done, if possible, by seven priests. The matter is oil from a holy lamp.[6] To procure this, little lamps with places for seven wicks are specially made.[7] One of these is placed before a picture of a saint; prayers are said, each priest lights a wick in turn. While it burns, there are more prayers and a gospel is read. Then the sick man is anointed with the oil. This service can only take place in church; if the man is too sick to come himself he sends a friend as a substitute, who receives the sacrament in his name.[8]
- ↑ Remember that in the East the man who ordains you acquires thereby jurisdiction over you.
- ↑ Silbernagl: op. cit. p. 287; Butler: op. cit. ii. 312-318.
- ↑ Except (a theologian would say) that the different prayers make all the difference. The ordination prayer is (in our language) the "form" which determines the meaning of the imposition of hands (for a father may lay his hand on his son's head, asking God to bless him). Now a prayer that a deacon may be made a priest is a "form" of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. A prayer that a priest may become a ḳummuṣ is not, since the ḳummuṣ is no part of the hierarchy founded by Christ. So the Coptic bishop when he makes a priest administers a sacrament; when he makes a ḳummuṣ he only gives a sacramental. And this may be true, even if he himself has no clear idea of the difference.
- ↑ Not a Gospel-book. The connection between deacon and gospel has never been quite so clear in the East as it became in the West. At bottom all lessons could be (and once were) read by a lector (Fortescue: The Mass, 280-281).
- ↑ For all these orders see Vansleb: op. cit. 162-190; Butler: op. cit. ii. 318-322. There is no evidence of chrism being used at any Coptic ordination.
- ↑ Anointing with oil from a lamp which has burned before a holy picture, or in church, is an old form of blessing in the East. See, for instance, Ignatius: Vita Tarasii, ed. Heikel (Helsingfors, 1891), pp. 421, 436.
- ↑ See the picture of one in Butler: op. cit. ii. 76.
- ↑ Butler: ii. 326-329.
