His Holiness Pope Shenouda visits the Bibliotheca Alexandrina
The lecture’s content focuses on the importance of preserving and restoring manuscripts and the Egyptian spiritual and cultural heritage, and the necessity of gathering knowledge across different branches such as religions, philosophy, history, languages, arts, and sciences.
The initiative shows pride in modern libraries and buildings designed to display manuscripts while preserving the originals, and it includes digital efforts that provide the full text and digital copies for researchers to facilitate research and preservation.
The lecture highlights examples of old and historically valuable manuscripts and texts — from religious copies to scientific and rare books — and explains that there was a local movement before European influences in the renaissance, which confirms the originality of Egyptian intellectual production.
There is interest in modern technologies of the digital library that allow page magnification, and conversion of characters into translations into other languages to expand the circle of benefit and knowledge.
A spirit of cultural openness is manifested in placing different manuscripts side by side (Gospel, Qur’ans, Islamic texts) as a means to discover points of convergence and dialogue between cultures.
The lecture highlights a close and fruitful relationship between cultural institutions and the Church, and praises the impact of such scholarly meetings in enhancing awareness of the Coptic Egyptian heritage.
Pride is shown in local efforts in digital imaging, programming, and scientific documentation, with a call to involve researchers and the public to visit the libraries and view the collections.
The spiritual and educational message calls to consider heritage preservation a sacred duty that links faith and knowledge and serves the nation, with encouragement of cooperation between the Church and cultural institutions to protect this legacy.
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