RAFÄEL TUKI (TULLE). — Coptic bishop of Arsinoe, scholar, and liturgist, born in Girga (Upper Egypt) into a heterodox Coptic family in 1701, died in Rome on 16 October 1787.
At the age of nineteen he was a deacon; he abjured heresy at the hands of Fr. Claudio Sicard, S.J. The Franciscans of the Apostolic Prefecture of Upper Egypt sent him in 1724 to the Urban College of Propaganda Fide in Rome, where he obtained a doctorate in theology on 27 May 1735. Ordained priest on 5 June of the same year, he was immediately entrusted by the Congregation of Propaganda with the task of editing the Euchologium, containing the three anaphorae of the Coptic Alexandrian rite (Rome 1736). Returning to Egypt in May 1737, he devoted himself to apostolic work to secure the adhesion of the Coptic patriarch JOHN XVII to the Roman Church. Summoned back to Rome by the Congregation in 1739, he taught Coptic for more than forty years at the Urban College. The fruit of his teaching is the Rudimenta linguae coptae sive aegyptiaca ad usum Collegii Urbani de Propaganda Fide (Rome 1778). He also worked on the monumental edition of the liturgical books of the