All these are confirmed by the historian Rufinus of Aquileia in his Historia Ecclesastica1 and by an authentic comment inserted in the Apologia of St. Frumentius had, together with his brother Edessius, a long stay in Ethiopia as minister of the court of Axum, historical capital of the Ethiopian Empire. Before his investiture as Bishop of Ethiopia, St. Frumentius who was invested by the great St. The evangelization of Ethiopia, in its true, strict sense, began about the middle of the 4th century.
The starting-point of the history of the Ethiopian rite must, in any case, coincide with the introduction of Christianity into Ethiopia. Frumentius invested as first bishop of ethiopia These monasteries are the very depositories of the few documents that could be saved from the above-mentioned destructions. The difficulty in making a historical reconstruction of the liturgical rite is further increased by the inaccessibility of Ethiopian monasteries. Both of them gave their disruptive movements an anti-Christian background and consequently they destroyed temples and monasteries and all the treasures of the sacred literature preserved there. The second was the Muslim Mohammed Gragn. The first protagonist was the famous woman Judith of the Falashas group that claims to descend from the Jews who immigrated in the distant past. This lack of historical witness is the result of politico-religious upheavals that led to the destruction of the literary and archeological patrimony to do with the liturgy.Įthiopia, in fact, had been twice the scene of such uprisings: at first in the 10th century and again in the 16th century.
In its essential elements, it stems from the Alexandrian rite and the language used in the services is classical Ethiopian called Ge’ez.īecause local documents are lacking, it is difficult to reconstruct the history of the Ethiopian rite, and to study the various phases through which it attained its actual form. The Ethiopian rite is one of the oldest rites and is used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as well as by that group which is in full communion with the Church of Rome, The Ethiopian Catholic Church. According to the Rite of the Ethiopian (Ge'ez) Churchīy Archbishop Paulos Tzadua (Cardinal Emeritus)
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