Prior to his election, he had been oikonomos of the Monastery of St Macarius - one of his early acts as patriarch was the improve the freshwater supply to Alexandria.
[2] Shenouda I was elected during the final days of the rule of the 10th Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil, who was killed by a Turkic guard on orders by his son.
His son and successor, Al-Muntasir, appointed a finance minister who doubled taxes, cancelled exemptions on religious minorities, and devised new ways of extorting wealth from subjects.
Shenouda I spent much of his early days as patriarch dealing with internal religious disagreements that verged on heresies, i.e. teachers claimed that the Resurrection of Jesus took place on 11 April instead of on 25 March, bishops teaching that the Nature of the Divinity had died, etc.
It was suggested that the spread of false teachings among the Copts was because "the scantiness of the knowledge of their shepherds (the bishops) was manifest in those days".