A boy between the ages of seven and ten who wishes to become a deacon joins a church school and lives with his teacher - a priest or debtera who has achieved a specified level of learning - and fellow students near a church. There are several categories of clergy, collectively referred to as the kahinat (priests, deacons, and some monks) and the debteras (priests who have lost their ordination because they are no longer ritually pure, or individuals who have chosen not to enter the priesthood). Large churches had as many as 100 priests one was said to have 500. An estimated 10 to 20 percent of adult male Amhara and Tigray were priests in the 1960s - a not extraordinary figure, considering that there were 17,000 to 18,000 churches and that the celebration of the Eucharist required the participation of at least two priests and three deacons, and frequently included more. At that time it was sufficient for a man to know the letters of his Alphabet, with a few prayers, and to give two pieces of salt to the Interpreter of the Abuna or Coptic bishop after which he receives the imposition of hands, without examination or exhortation: and this is the reason why those who are better instructed would be ashamed to be made priests. The Ordination of priests was easily performed in the mid-19th Century. The priest has the most significant role. From the Christian peasant's point of view, the important church figures are the local clergy.
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The new abun was a fifty-eight-year-old monk who took the name of Tekla Haimanot, after a fourteenth-century Ethiopian saint. When Abuna Tewoflos was ousted by the government in 1976, the church announced that nominees for patriarch would be chosen from a pool of bishops and monks - archbishops were disqualified - and that the successful candidate would be chosen on the basis of a vote by clergy and laity. In addition, the Church Council, a consultative body that included clergy and laity, reviewed and drafted administrative policy.īeginning in 1950, the choice of the abun passed from the Coptic Church of Egypt in Alexandria to the Episcopal Synod in Addis Ababa. The ultimate authority in matters of faith was the Episcopal Synod. The boundaries of the dioceses, each under a bishop, followed provincial boundaries a patriarch (abun) headed the church. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church's headquarters was in Addis Ababa. For some Oromo who achieved significant political power in Amhara kingdoms in the eighteenth century and after, adherence to Christianity seemed to be motivated by nothing more than expediency. The meaning of that religion for the Oromo and others is not clear.
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Yet almost all of the analysis of Orthodox Christianity as practiced by Ethiopians has focused on the Amhara and Tigray.
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The dominant element in Ethiopian culture and its major distinguishing feature is the Christian religion. Their canon comprised 81 books: besides the biblical, there are 16 patristic writings of the Pre-Chalcedonian age. observing the Sabbath alongside of the Sunday, forbidding certain meats, circumcision, covenanting. In worship and discipline, besides much that is primitive, it borrowed many things from Judaism, and retained many of the old habits of the country, e.g. The Abyssinians, in common with the other Christian episcopal churches, are represented in Jerusalem, where they have several convents, including one situated on the roof of S.
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They are Monophysites and in communion with the Copts, from whom they receive their chief Bishop (Abuna). The Abyssinians have preserved, in the heart of Africa and surrounded by Moslem and pagan peoples, the Christianity, to which they were converted in the fourth century.