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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Tue Aug 31 2010 - 17:59:45 EDT
The Eritrean Catholic Rite: Hybridity and Authenticity
Aug 31
Posted by Andrew Casad in Art and Architecture
I recently had the opportunity to give a paper on the Eritrean
Catholic Church at “Faith, Art, and the Politics of Belonging in
Africa,” the combined meeting of SERSAS and SEAN held at UNC Chapel
Hill. I began studying Eritrean Christianity in 2003 by praying with
and learning from Eritrean Orthodox Christians in San Diego at the
beginning of my doctoral studies in cultural anthropology which
subsequently lead to my fieldwork in Eritrea in 2005. Although it had
been my intention to primarily gather more information about the
Eritrean Orthodox liturgy while continuing my Tigrinya language
studies I ended up spending most of my time with and learning from the
Eritrean Catholic community.
The Orthodox (ተዋህዶ, Tewahdo) Church of highland Ethiopia and Eritrea
has remained the dominant religion of this part of the Horn of Africa
for nearly 1700 years. This traditional form of Christianity
continues to exercise great influence over its 1.5 million adherents
in Eritrea even after a 30-year nationalist struggle for independence
(1961-1991) from their colonial neighbor: the explicitly Christian
empire of Ethiopia. European missionaries arriving in highland Eritrea
in the mid-19th century preferred to penetrate into the more remote
and non-Christian areas in the east of present-day Eritrea rather than
evangelize those whom they recognized as belonging to a Christendom
distinct from and previously out of contact with their own Western
patterns of behavior that are often assumed to be synonymous with
Christianity. Both Italian and French missionaries did, however,
attempt to bring the native Christian population within the fold of
the Roman Catholic Church. Their efforts brought about neither the
desired widespread unification nor the feared complete expulsion of
Western missionaries (as had been the case with the Portuguese Jesuits
in Christian Ethiopia two centuries earlier) but rather gave rise to
the hybrid Eritrean Catholic Church. Today numbering 140,000 the
Eritrean Catholic Church maintains much of the outward appearance of
the Orthodox Church while having simultaneously adopted centralized
education for clergy, world-wide ecclesial connections associated with
the Roman Catholic Church, a hybrid liturgical calendar, and other
elements characteristic of this new form of Christianity that is
distinct from both that of the traditional Orthodox (Tewahdo) Church
and that of the Roman Catholic missionaries. Though emerging as a
separate church only in the 19th century the Eritrean Catholic Church
is constituted as a traditional religion both by its adherents as well
as by the government of Eritrea. Contrasting the Eritrean Orthodox
(Tewahdo) Church and the Eritrean Catholic Church as two parallel
forms of Christianity provides a crucial lens through which we can see
the integration of an indigenous Christian tradition into a
universalizing system and therefore illumine the processes of
hybridization that followed reevangelization by missionaries in the
highland Eritrean context.
“Integration of an Indigenous Christian Tradition into a
Universalizing System: the case of the Eritrean Orthodox (ተዋህዶ) Church
and the hybrid Eritrean Catholic Church” explores the practices of two
communities whose differences, I argue, can be explained in terms of
different strategies to the question of authenticity.
Looking at the exterior of these exemplar churches, La Catterdale
built in the Lombard style by the Italians in Piccola Roma, the
capital of their firstborn colony (now Asmara), and the typically
circular monastery church built by then Ethiopian Emperor Haile
Selassie (“Power of the Trinity”) at Debre Bizen, Eritrea’s oldest
monastery, one might assume that the Eritrean Orthodox and Eritrean
Catholic Churches were radically different.
However, it is not so much the style of buildings that distinguishes
these two Christian communities. In fact a great deal of hybridization
can be observed in the architecture of the two Churches. Depicted
above right is an Orthodox church looking very Roman and below left
the Catholic seminary beneath a typically Ethiopian church dome.
Nor does their divine worship differ that greatly since the Eritrean
Catholic Church began using the liturgical books of the then-Ethiopian
Orthodox (Tewahdo) Church completely. In fact the Eritrean Catholic
Church (right) occasionally celebrates one of several anaphora that,
though conserved in the shared Ge’ez “Missal,” are not used in the
Eritrean Orthodox Church (left).
Even some of the musical elements unique to the Ge’ez Church such as
sistras and prayer sticks, drums, and the debtera (a chanter who
improvises various sung responses at the conclusion of the liturgy)
are found in both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. It should be
noted that an Orthodox debtera is still paid to teach music at the
Catholic seminary.
Especially on the level of devotional practices, including art, a
great deal of hybridized forms have developed. The recognizable Divine
Mercy image can be found in at least one Orthodox Church (left) while
the Catholic parish of Saint Anthony has depicted their patron, though
clad in the familiar Capuchin habit, amid a thoroughly local scene and
in an indigenous idiom (right).
Before moving on into what I find are the most structurally
significant differences and why these are important for understanding
the hybrid nature of the Eritrean Catholic Church, we need to outline
the historical processes that gave rise to these differences beginning
with an understanding of the normal path taken by Roman Catholic
missions in non-Catholic territory as they proceed from
1.a mission with a focus on evangelization,
2.then becoming a prefecture by the development of the infrastructure
needed to sustain a Catholic population,
3.which is elevated to a vicariate with more developed Catholic
infrastructure and headed by a bishop,
4.to finally become an independent diocese, the self-sustaining Church
under a local bishop.
In 1839 St. Justin de Diacobis, CM, an Italian Vincentian (also known
as the Lazarists) arrived in the new Catholic mission at Adwa to
establish the Apostolic Prefect of Abyssinia (under the auspices of
the Congregation of Mission, a French Society of Apostolic Life, not
the universal Congregation Propaganda Fidei) having heard that the
Holy See wanted to begin a mission in Ethiopia. Catholics were
subsequently persecuted, doubtless owing to the memory of the failed
Jesuit mission, and Diacobis took refuge along Red Sea and in southern
Eritrea though his mission was primarily to the Christian inhabitants
of the Kebessa/Hamasein (highlands), in what is now the province of
Tigray in Ethiopia and highland Eritrea. Diacobis is nearly unique
among his missionary contemporaries for advocating that missionaries
dress as Ethiopians, adopt their way of life, use the local liturgy,
and so forth not unlike the path advocated by 17th century Jesuit
Roberto de Nobili in his mission among non-Christians in India.
Despite the difficulties seven years later the Vicaraiat Apostolique
d’Abbyssinie under the direction of the French Lazarists was
established in 1846. Shortly thereafter, still in refuge along the Red
Sea, Diacobis was secretly ordained bishop in Massawa by the Italian
Capuchin, Bishop Massaia, and permitted to celebrate sacraments in the
Ethiopian (Ge’ez) Rite. This decisive event in 1848 can without a
doubt be looked upon as the genesis of a distinct Ethiopian/Eritrean
Catholic Church. In 1853 Diacobis reopened the Catholic college in the
Ethiopian province of Gualla (having first been founded in 1841-6)
before entering into his eternal rest in 1860.
Three decades after the death of Diacobis Eritrea became the
‘firstborn’ colony of Italy in 1890 following the expansion of
shipping interests at the Red Sea port of Massawa. Fearing that the
subsequent 1894 Bahta Hagos rebellion against Italian rule was
instigated by the French, the Italian governor expelled the French
Lazarists and invited the Italian Capuchin Franciscans to assume
responsibility for the evangelization of the new Italian colony and
dominance over its educational apparatus. The Prefettura Apostolica
dell’Eritrea was then established (bypassing any mission status) which
was to be elevated to a vicariate in 1911. During this same period of
upheaval Ferdinando Martini was made governor of Eritrea in 1897 and,
though he tolerated the Capuchins, openly opposed their “superstition”
and established his own secular schools for the Italians in the
colonies which, limited in number, resulted in many of the children of
Italian colonists coming to Eritrea in increasing numbers joining the
native Eritreans in the more numerous Capuchin mission schools. In
1930 an Ordinariate (Ethiopian Rite) of Eritrea was created and the
Ethiopian College was founded in Rome where it remains one of only two
colleges within the borders of the Vatican. Tekeste Negash has noted
that during this period the Capuchin schools, while seemingly in
conflict with the nationalism of the colonial government, advanced the
colonial mentality of the state. Jonathan Miran records that the rise
of the fascists in Italy and the subsequent Lateran Pact (reducing the
Holy See to the Vatican City-State enclave within Rome) sealed at a
legal level what was already emerging in Eritrea itself, namely, the
almost complete dominance of education by the Catholic orders,
including the Sisters of Saint Anna and the Capuchins in Eritrea. In
1951 the Ordinariate of Eritrea was elevated to an Apostolic Exarchate
(the Eastern Rite equivalent of Vicariate Apostolic) and, ten years
later, erected as the full Eparchy of Asmara (as the Latin Vicariate
was suppressed in 1959). Following independence, in 1995, the
additional Eparchies of Barentu and Keren were erected.
The Eritrean Catholic Church tends toward a historicized,
classroom-based model (cathedral school at right) which stands in
contrast to the monastic apprenticeships that characterize Orthodox
formation (learning chants under an older monk at left), a difference
which significantly shaped the development of the Eritrean Catholic
Church as a hybrid tradition.
Various elements of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, with
its emphasis on the “fully conscious and active participation” of the
faithful, have been incorporated into the worship life of the Eritrean
Catholic Church despite the closer similarity of the liturgy of the
Eritrean Catholic Church to its Orthodox counterpart than to its Roman
Rite affiliate (Orthodox posture, left; Catholic, right).
That the liturgy can be studied developmentally, analyzed, and
subsequently adapted within the Eritrean Catholic Church is markedly
different than the treatment of the liturgy within the Orthodox
context and derives precisely from the differences in the methods of
formation outlined above. In the Orthodox tradition a man seeking
ordination to the priesthood would ascend a particular monastery and
be trained for some years under a single master before, in some cases,
returning to the city to be ordained a priest. In this schema all of
the learning of the liturgy, the chants, doctrinal formulations, and
so forth are personalized to the master and localized to a given
monastery. The authenticity of such practices rest unproblematically
on their having been faithfully transmitted from one master to
another. This is quite different from the critical and historicized
treatment such subjects receive in the abstract, classroom-centered
model of formation that typifies the formation of seminarians in the
Eritrean Catholic context. In this latter model many different voices,
each conveying something of the universal tradition, can be dissected
and reassembled without being perceived as threatening its
authenticity which comes to rest less on the personal and local
transmission but more on the universal and abstracted truth being
conveyed.
A caricature of this can be set up by juxtaposing the Ethiopian
College within the walls of the Vatican (left) and the world-wide
associations symbolized and His Holiness the Abune (right), appointed
by the (Coptic) Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria through whom the
Eritrean Orthodox Church maintains an “apostolic pedigree” to one of
the four ancient sees.
Most of the priests of the Eritrean Catholic Church are “biritual,”
that is, belonging to both the Roman Rite by virtue of being members
of religious orders as well as to the Ge’ez Rite. The Franciscan
Capuchins of San Antonio, all of whom are Eritrean nationals,
celebrate the Latin Rite in their private chapel (right) while still
using the Ge’ez Rite as celebrated by both the Eritrean Catholic and
Eritrean Orthodox faithful (left).
The present situation of the Eritrean Catholic Church, then, is one
that maintains much of the outward appearance of the Orthodox Church
while having simultaneously adopted centralized education for clergy
that goes hand-in-hand with universal (catholic) ecclesial
connections. One of my Eritrean Orthodox informants regarded the fact
that the Orthodox (Tewahdo) Church “never had a theological academy
and that the monasteries are more akin to convents and are not
seminaries in any sense” as the reason there is a lacuna in the
literature concerning Eritrean Christianity which is indeed supported
by the fact that nearly all the published literature is from the
Pontifical Oriental Institute and the work of Eritrean Catholic
clergy. One of my informants in Asmara, the son of an Orthodox priest,
was a former Capuchin priest who had studied at the PIO and
subsequently taught liturgy in several European universities before
returning to Eritrea. Such world-wide ecclesial connections associated
with the Roman Catholic Church are not uncommon among the Eritrean
Catholic clergy and stand in stark contrast to the Eritrean Orthodox
Church that has, especially in the last two decades, become ever more
insular. While numerous Capuchins, a small community of Cistercians
affiliated with Casamari, and a hand-full of Comboni missionaries
(including the present Eritrean bishop) themselves embody this double
identity of being simultaneously Roman and Eritrean their experience
is paradigmatic of the Eritrean Catholic Church taken as a whole.
While the question of hybridity is one that comes up frequently in
anthropological studies in a way that seems to assume that persons
cannot fully possess two identities at once I prefer to cast the
two-naturedness of the Eritrean Catholic Church in theological terms,
echoing the full humanity and full divinity of Christ as explicated at
the Council of Chalcedon that was never embraced by the Alexandrian
Church and, by extension, the Eritrean Orthodox (Tewahdo) Church as
well (Tewahdo in fact means something like the Greek miaphysis).
The question of authenticity is then doubly poignant and few clergy
with whom I spoke about being Eritrean Catholic did not explicitly
mention some way in which they viewed themselves as fully or
authentically Eritrean as well as fully or authentically Catholic. One
Capuchin friar was in the midst of working out a hybrid liturgical
calendar which, despite otherwise sharing liturgical books with the
Eritrean Orthodox Church, he saw as necessary in order to include the
annual Roman sanctoral as well the monthly calendar used by the Ge’ez
Rite. Throughout Eritrea all Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran
Christians follow the Ethiopian calendar derived of the Julian
calendar while the state of Eritrea uses the Gregorian calendar
ironically itself a product of the Roman Catholic Church brought by
the secular Italian colonial government. Through such a calendar and
other hybridizations the Eritrean Catholic Church has been constituted
as a traditional religion both by its adherents as well as by the
government of Eritrea. While a simple genetic theory for making sense
of this hybrid nature of the Eritrean Catholic Church does not seem to
account for the variety of adaptations, taking seriously the concern
for authenticity expressed by agents who experience themselves to be
simultaneously fully Catholic while also fully Eritrean leads to an
understanding of hybridity as itself an authenticating discourse. What
is articulated by Eritrean Catholics (and, I would argue, visible in
an objectively verifiable way) is not some effaced version of the
authentic (“pure liturgy” that the earliest Roman Catholic
missionaries looked for in the Tewahdo liturgy but, of course, didn’t
find there any more than in their own Roman Rite) nor some idea of an
unchanged substrate glossed by an imposed colonial regime, but rather
the experience of persons constituted as subjects with both a national
identity that encompasses Ge’ez Christianity in all its richness as
well as an additional, universal, meta-discourse that does not efface
the local but rather preserves it as it simultaneously brings it into
a world-wide scope that is in itself authentic heir to both. This is
an incarnate, local, and grounded identity that is taken up into the
universal and global tradition that is itself constituent of such a
local identity without erasing it. In this I find a rich ground for
reflection on the theological truth by means of which my model
attempts to account for the hybrid nature of the Eritrean Catholic
Church.