A small foundation with one job, and nothing to hide.

The foundation was established to preserve the culture and heritage of an ancient people. While Egypt's ancient history is well known, its two-thousand-year Christian past is relatively unknown. Taking major milestones as starting points, the foundation researches that history in detail in order to build curricula that teach it, from the Church of Alexandria's beginnings to the present day.

Its first work is to build, in Hillsborough, New Jersey, a replica to every detail of St. Mary's Church of Zeitoun, as a memorial of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary there from 1968; to establish within it a museum that preserves and presents the artifacts, photographs and writings of those apparitions and the heritage of the Coptic people; and to keep both open to the public, without regard to faith.

The foundation is cultural and historical in purpose. It does not conduct worship and is not affiliated with any parish or diocese, though it works alongside them and with their blessing. What it preserves is the record of an event and the heritage of a people.

The standard the museum holds itself to

Where scholars disagree, the museum says so on the wall. Egyptian history attracts more confident nonsense than almost any other subject, and a good deal of it circulates in heritage material specifically. A visitor who catches this institution overclaiming will discount everything else it says.

So the heritage pages carry a note of what they leave out and why — the famous claims that did not survive checking, named rather than quietly dropped. The apparition page notes that the Coptic community's own newspaper declined to publish the most famous photograph. That nerve is the point: an institution that volunteers the inconvenient thing earns the right to be believed about everything else. What the Egypt page leaves out →

Three commitments follow from that:

• Fidelity. The replica will be built from measured drawings of the original, and the museum will present the record as it is — sourced, dated, and credited.
• Openness. The memorial and museum are for everyone: Copts and other Christians, Muslims who were at Zeitoun and their descendants, scholars, schools, neighbors, and anyone who is curious.
• Transparency. Every dollar given is accounted for in a public annual return. The foundation publishes what it has raised, what it has spent, and what comes next.