THE African Catholics who welcomed Pope Paul to their continent last week are among the newest and the oldest Christians in the world. In Egypt, Alexandria had a colony of Christians at the time of the Apostles, and it became a prominent center of early Christian scholarship. The great 4th century church father, St. Augustine, was bishop of Hippo in what is now Tunisia. Yet North African Christianity was virtually erased by the massive Moslem invasions that swept across the northern part of the continent in the 7th and 8th centuries; only the...
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