Progressive patriarch brokered peace

5/9/2012

His Holiness Abune Paulos was Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian Churches in Africa; some two-thirds of Ethiopia’s 83 million people are Christian, the majority following the Orthodox faith.

The Church claims its origins from a eunuch and official at the court of the then Queen of Ethiopia said to have been baptised by Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven deacons described in the Acts of the Apostles. Western historians, though, date the arrival of Christianity in Ethiopia to the 4th century, during the reign of King Ezana (320-356), who adopted it as his kingdom’s official religion.

Cut off by mountains and isolated from the rest of Christendom, the Church drew many of its practices from Jewish traditions. Ethiopian Christians recognise the Sabbath on Saturday along with Sunday, and observe Old Testament rules about food preparation. The Church also claims to have in its possession the Ark of the Covenant, where, according to the Bible, Moses stored the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Prince Menelik I, supposedly the son of Israel’s King Solomon and the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba, is said to have brought the Ark to Ethiopia in around 950 BC. Replicas known as tabots exist in most Ethiopian churches, while the Ark itself is said to be kept far away from prying eyes in a shrine in the north of the country.

The Princeton-educated Abune Paulos (his full title was His Holiness Abune Paulos, 5th Patriarch and Catholicos of Ethiopia, Ichege of the See of St Tekle Haymanot, Archbishop of Axum) was chosen to lead the Church in 1992 — a year after the overthrow of the Soviet-backed communist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, under whom Paulos had been jailed in the 1970s and early ’80S. For the next 20 years he led Ethiopia’s 40 million Orthodox Christians with an energetic pragmatism.

He travelled widely, re-establishing good relations with the Coptic Church of Egypt (under whose jurisdiction the Ethiopian Church fell until Emperor Haile Selassie secured its autonomy in 1959), and strengthening ties with other Churches around the world. From 2006 he served as one of the seven presidents of the World Council of Churches.
Following the independence of Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993, he reluctantly acquiesced to the breaking away of the Eritrean Orthodox Church and, in 2000, was instrumental in broking peace following a vicious border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that cost 70,000 lives. He was awarded a Nansen Medal by the United Nations refugee agency the same year for his peace and humanitarian work.

Paulos championed the cause of the victims of the Mengistu regime, presiding over the funerals of Haile Selassie (who had died in mysterious circumstances under house arrest in 1975 and whose bones were subsequently found under a concrete slab in the grounds of his palace in Addis Ababa) and other members of the royal family and political opponents of the former regime.

He led a committee to raise funds for the restoration of Addis Ababa’s Holy Trinity Cathedral and secured the restoration of Church property that had been seized by Mengistu, including the campus and the library of Holy Trinity Theological College. He also celebrated the return of many holy relics and other Church treasures which had been lost abroad, including a carved wooden tabot, looted by British troops during the 1868 expedition to Abyssinia, which was returned to Ethiopia in 2002 after it was found in a cupboard at St John’s Church, Edinburgh.

Paulos threw his weight behind a nationwide campaign to boost child immunisation, urging his clergy to provide teaching on the importance of vaccinations against preventable childhood diseases. He also shocked some in the Church by suggesting that HIV and Aids patients seeking a spiritual cure should take antiretroviral drugs with their holy water. (With an estimated two million people living with HIV/Aids, Ethiopia is one of the worst affected countries per capita in the world). But he rejected the use of condoms, instead advocating chastity and monogamy as the best preventatives.

Abune Paulos was born Gebre Medhin Wolde Yohannes on November 3 1935 at Adwa, in Tigray Province. His family had a long association with the nearby Abba Garima monastery, which he entered aged six as a trainee deacon, later becoming a monk and then a priest. Educated at the Theological College of the Holy Trinity in Addis Ababa, he was sent to study at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in the United States, and afterwards began studying for a doctorate at Princeton Theological Seminary.

In 1974 his education was interrupted when he was summoned back to Ethiopia by the then patriarch, Abune Theophilos. He arrived in Ethiopia shortly after the revolution that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and was anointed bishop along with four others, assuming the name and style of Abune Paulos. But because he and his fellow bishops had been appointed without the permission of the new communist regime, all five men were arrested. The Patriarch was subsequently executed. Abune Paulos and his fellow bishops remained in prison until 1983. After his release he returned to Princeton, where he completed his doctoral degree and remained in exile.

He returned to Ethiopia in 1991 when Mengistu’s government collapsed and Meles Zenawi’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front assumed power. Shortly afterwards, the then Patriarch, Abune Merkorios, who was seen as having had close ties to the Mengistu regime, was ousted by a Church synod convened by the new government. Abune Paulos was elected in 1992, and Merkorios and his supporters went into exile, establishing a rival synod in the United States. Experts attributed the conflict to deep ethnic divisions that have riven Ethiopia for centuries. Paulos was from the Tigray ethnic group — the same as Meles Zenawi. Mengistu was a member of the rival Amhara ethnic group.

Although Paulos won widespread admiration, his detractors among Ethiopia’s Orthodox community continued to view him as being too close to the government, which has been accused of human rights violations.

Telegraph, London

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