Gondar - Phi Kappa Psi

Appendix Theta: The Gondar Intellectual Line
Connecting brothers of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University,
tracing their fraternal Big Brother/Little Brother line
to tri-Founder John Andrew Rea (1869)
John Andrew Rea, tri-founder of
Phi Kappa Psi at Cornell . . .
. . . we begin towards the end of Appendix
Gamma: The Halle Intellectual Line . . .
. . . . Archbishop Bilson was a descendant
of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria . . .
. . . Wilhelm Vth founded the University
of Ingolstadt, home of the Jesuits . . .
. . . Ingoldstadt was an intellectual base for
Peter Canisus (1549-1552) . . .
. . . Brother Pedro went on mission to
Ethiopia, succeeding brother Oviedo . . .
. . . Oviedo served God and Susenyos of
Ethiopia . . .
. . . Susenyos was preceded by Yekuno
Amlak of Ethiopia . . .
. . . Canisus inspired Francis Xavier and
his Conferes . . .
. . . and Yekuno came to power with the
support of the Ethiopian theologians: Tekle
Haymanot, Iyasus Mo'a and the Abbot
Yohannes . . .
. . . One of Xavier’s conferes was Pedro
Paez . . .
Below we present short biographies
of the Gondor intellectual line of
the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity
at Cornell University.
“Who defends the House.”

New York Alpha’s intellectual, Archbishop William Laud, above,
was mentored by Bishop Thomas Bilson, below:
Dr. Thomas Bilson the great
grandson of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, a
major force in the Catholic Reformation.
He descended from a line “bar sinister”,
meaning it was illegitimate, but Dr. Bilson
was proud of the association, nonetheless.
Duke Wilhelm’s liaision produced a
daughter, who married Albert Belsson, and
the union of this marriage was Hermann
Bilson, father of the Bishiop. Bilson was
educated in the school of William de
Wykeham. He entered New College, at
Oxford, and was made a Fellow of his
College in 15645. He began to distinguish
himself as a poet; but, on receiving
ordination, gave himself wholly to
theological studies.
New College, Oxford
He was soon made Prebendary of Winchester, and Warden of the College
there. In 1596, he was made Bishop of Worcester; and three years later, was
translated to the see of Winchester, his native place.
He engaged in most of the polemical contests of his day, as a stiff partizan
of the Church of England. When the controversy arose as to the meaning of the
so called Apostles’ Creed, in asserting the descent of Christ into hell, Bishop
Bilson defended the literal sense, and maintained that Christ went there, not to
suffer, but to wrest the keys of hell out of the Devil’s hands. For this doctrine he
was severely handled by Henry Jacob, who is often called the father of modern
Congregationalism, and also by other Puritans.
Much feeling was excited by the controversy, and Queen Elizabeth, in her ire,
commanded her good bishop,
“neither to desert the doctrine, nor let the calling which he bore in
the Church of God, be trampled under foot, by such unquiet
refusers of truth and authority.”
Dr. Bilsons’ most famous work was entitled “The Perpetual Government of
Christ’s Church,” and was published in 1593. It is still regarded as one of the
ablest books ever written in behalf of Episcopacy. Dr. Bilson died in 1616, at a
good old age, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. It was said of him, that he
“carried prelature in his very aspect.” Anthony Wood proclaims him so “complete

in divinity, so well skilled in languages, so read in the Fathers and Schoolmen, so
judicious is making use of his readings, that at length he was found to be no
longer a soldier, but a commander in chief in the spiritual warfare, especially
when he became a bishop!”

Bishop Thomas Bilson was the great grandson of Wilhelm V,
“the Pious” von Wittelsbach, Duke of Bavaria:
Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria, son
of Duke Albrecht V. Born at Munich, 29
September, 1548; died at Schlessheim, 7
February, 1626. He studied in 1563 at the
University of Ingolstadt, but left on account
of an outbreak of the pest. Nevertheless,
he continued his studies elsewhere until
1568, and retained throughout life a keen
interest in learning and art. In 1579 he
became the reigning duke. He made a
reputation by his strong religious opinions
and devotion to the Faith, and was called
"the Pious". His life was under the direction
of the Jesuits. He attended Mass every
day, when possible several times a day,
devoted four hours daily to prayer, one to
contemplation, and all his spare time to
devotional reading.
House of Wittelsbach

He received the sacraments weekly, and twice a week in the Advent
season and during Lent. Whenever possible he took part in public devotions,
processions, and the pilgrimages; thus in 1585 he went on a pilgrimage to Loreto
and Rome. His court was jestingly called a monastery, and his capital the
German Rome. He founded several Jesuit monasteries, in particular that of St.
Michael at Munich, and contributed to the missions in China and Japan.
He did everything possible in Bavaria and the German Empire to further
the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and laboured to prevent the spread of
Protestantism. Thus it was largely through his efforts that the Archbishopric of
Cologne did not become Protestant, due mainly to the vigorous support he gave
his brother Ernst, who had been elected archbishop against Gebhard Truchsess.
On the other hand, the manner in which he bestowed benefices upon
members of his family makes an unpleasant impression at the present day,
though, at that time, this was not considered so unseemly. In the end his brother
Ernest had, besides other benefices, five dioceses, and Wilhelm's son Ferdinand
was bishop of an equal number; another son intended for the clerical life, Philip,
was made Bishop of Ratisbon in 1595 and cardinal in 1596, but died in 1598.
Wilhelm had his eldest son Maximilian educated with much care, and in 1597 he
resigned the government to Maximilian and led a retired life, devoted to works of
piety, asceticism, and charity, and also to the placid enjoyment of his collections
of works of art and curiosities.
The house of Wittelsbach in the years before William the Vth reign was
allegedly governed by a series of “compacts”. In spite of the decree of 1506
William IV was compelled in 1516, after a violent quarrel, to grant a share in the
government to his brother Louis X, an arrangement which lasted until the death
of Louis in 1545.
William followed the traditional Wittelsbach policy of opposition to the
Habsburgs until in 1534 he made a treaty at Linz with Ferdinand, king of Hungary
and Bohemia. This link strengthened in 1546, when the emperor Charles V
obtained the help of the duke during the war of the league of Schmalkalden by
promising him in certain eventualities the succession to the Bohemian throne,
and the electoral dignity enjoyed by the count palatine of the Rhine.
William also did much at a critical period to secure Bavaria for
Catholicism. The reformed doctrines had made considerable progress in the
duchy when the duke obtained from the pope extensive rights over the bishoprics
and monasteries, and took measures to repress the reformers, many of whom
were banished; while the Jesuits, whom he invited into the duchy in 1541, made
the university of Ingolstadt their headquarters for Germany. William, whose death
occurred in March 1550, was succeeded by his son Albert V, who had married a
daughter of Ferdinand of Habsburg, afterwards the emperor Ferdinand I. Early in
his reign Albert made some concessions to the reformers, who were still strong in
Bavaria; but about 1563 he changed his attitude, favoured the decrees of the

Council of Trent, and pressed forward the work of the Counter-Reformation. As
education passed by degrees into the hands of the Jesuits the progress of
Protestantism was effectually arrested in Bavaria. Albert V patronised art
extensively. Artists of all kinds resorted to his court in Munich, and splendid
buildings arose in the city; while Italy and elsewhere contributed to the collection
of artistic works. The expenses of a magnificent court led the duke to quarrel with
the Landschaft (the nobles), to oppress his subjects, and to leave a great burden
of debt when he died in October 1579.
The succeeding duke, Albert's son, William Vth (called the Pious), had
received a Jesuit education and showed keen attachment to Jesuit tenets. He
secured the archbishopric of Cologne for his brother Ernest in 1583, and this
dignity remained in the possession of the family for nearly 200 years. In 1597 he
abdicated in favour of his son Maximilian I, and retired into a monastery, where
he died in 1626.

Wilhelm Vth studied at, and patronized, the
University of Ingoldstadt :
The University of Ingolstadt was
founded in 1472 by Louis the Rich, the
Duke of Bavaria at the time, and its first
Chancellor was the Bishop of Eichstätt. It
consisted of five faculties: humanities,
sciences, theology, law and medicine, all of
which were contained in the Hoheschule
('high school'). The university was modeled
after the University of Vienna, its chief goal
was the propagation of the Christian faith.
The university closed in May 1800, by
order of the Prince-elector Maximilian IV
(later Maximilian I, King of Bavaria). In its
first several decades, the university grew
rapidly, opening colleges not only for
philosophers from the realist and
nominalist schools, but also for poor
students wishing to study the liberal arts.
University of Ingoldstadt
Among its most famous instructors in the late 1400s were the poet Conrad
Celtes, the Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin, and the Bavarian historian
Johannes Thurmair (also known as "Johannes Aventinus").
The Lutheran movement took an early hold in Ingolstadt, but was quickly
put to flight by one of the chief figures of the Counter-Reformation: Johann Eck,
who made the university a bastion for the traditional Catholic faith in southern
Germany. In Eck's wake, many Jesuits were appointed to key positions in the
school, and the university, over most of the 1600s, gradually came fully under the
control of the Jesuit order. Noted scholars of this period include the theologian
Gregory of Valentia, the astronomer Christopher Scheiner (inventor of the
helioscope), Johann Baptist Cysat, and the poet Jacob Balde. The Holy Roman
Emperor Ferdinand II received his education at the university.
The 1700s gave rise to the Enlightenment, a movement that was opposed
to the church-run universities of which Ingolstadt was a prime example. The
Jesuits gradually left the university as it sought to change with the times, until the
university finally had become so secular that the greatest influence in Ingolstadt
was Adam Weishaupt, founder of the secret society of the Illuminati. On
November 25, 1799, the elector Maximilian IV announced that the university's
depleted finances had become too great a weight for him to bear: the university
would be moved to Landshut as a result. The university finished that year's
school term, and left Ingolstadt in May 1800, bringing to a quiet end the school

that had, at its peak, been one of the most influential and powerful institutes of
higher learning in Europe.
The University of Ingolstadt (1472-1800), was founded by Louis the Rich,
Duke of Bavaria. The privileges of a studium generale with all four faculties had
been granted by Pope Pius II, 7 April, 1458, but owing to the unsettled condition
of the times, could not be put into effect.
Ingolstadt, modelled on the University of Vienna, had as one of its
principal aims the furtherance and spread of Christian belief. For its material
equipment, an unusually large endowment was provided out of the holdings of
the clergy and the religious orders. The Bishop of Eichstätt, to whom diocese
Ingolstadt belongs, was appointed chancellor. The formal inauguration of the
university took place on 26 June, 1472, and within the first semester 489
students matriculated. As in other universites prior to the sixteenth century, the
faculty of philosophy comprised two sections, the Realists and the Nominalists,
each under its own dean.
In 1496 Duke George the Rich, son of Louis, established the Collegium
Georgianum for poor students in the faculty of arts, and other foundations for
similar purposes were subsequently made. Popes Adrian VI and Clement VII
bestowed on the university additional revenues from ecclesiastical property. At
the height of the humanistic movement, Ingolstadt counted among its teachers a
series of remarkable savatns and writers; Conrad Celtes, the first poet crowned
by the German Emperor; his disciple Jacob Locher, surnamed Philomusos;
Johann Turmair, known as Aventinus from his birthplace, Abensber, editor of the
"Annales Boiorum" and of the Bavarian "Chronica", father of Bavarian history and
founder (1507) of the"Sodalitas litteraria Angilostadensis". Johanees Reuchlin,
restorer of the Hebrew language and literature, was also for a time at the
university.
Although Duke William IV (1508-50) and his chancellor, Leonhard von
Eck, did their utmost during thirty years to keep Lutheranism out of Ingolstadt,
and though the adherents of the new doctrine were obliged to retract or resign,
some of the professors joined the Lutheran movement. Their influence, however,
was counteracted by the tireless and successful endeavours of the foremost
opponent of the Reformation, Dr. Johann Maier, better known as Eck, from the
name of his birth-place, Egg, on the Gunz. He taught and laboured (1510-43) to
such good purpose that Ingolstadt, during the Counter-Reformation, did more
than any other university for the defence of the Catholic Faith, and was for the
church in Southern Germany what Wittenberg was for Protestantism in the north.
In 1549, with the approval of Paul III, Peter Canisus, Salmeron, Claude
Lejay, and other Jesuits were appointed to professorships in theology and
philosophy. About the same time a college and a boarding school for boys were
established, though they were not actually opened until 1556, when the statutes

of the university were revised. In 1568 the profession of faith in accordance with
the Council of Trent was required of the rector and professors. In 1688 the
teaching in the faculty of philosophy passed entirely in the hands of the Jesuits.
Though the university after this change, in spite of vexations and conflicts
regarding exemption from taxes and juridical autonomy, enjoyed a high degree of
prosperity, its existence was frequently imperilled during the troubles of the Thirty
Years War. But its fame as a home of earning was enhanced by men such as the
theologian, Gregory of Valentia; the controversialist, Jacob Gretser (1558-1610);
the moralist, Laymann (1603-1609); the mathematician and cartographer, Philip
Apian; the astronomer, Christopher Scheiner (1610-1616), who, with the
helioscope invented by him, discovered the sun spots and calculated the ime of
the sun's rotation; and the poet, Jacob Balde, from Ensisheim in Alsacc,
professor of rhetoric. Prominent among the jurists in the seventeenth century
were Kaspar Manz and Christopher Berold.
During the latter half of that century, and especially in the eighteenth, the
courses of instruction were improved and adapted to the requirements of the
age. After the founding of the Bavarian Academy of Science at Munich in 1759,
an anti-ecclesiastical tendency sprang up at Ingolstadt and found an ardent
supporter in Joseph Adam, Baron of Ickstatt, whom the elector had placed at the
head of the university. Plans, moreover, were set on foot to have the university of
the third centenary the Society of Jesus was suppressed, but some of the ex-
Jesuits retained their professorships for a while longer.
A movement was inaugurated in 1772 by Adam Weishaupt, professor of
canon law, with a view to securing the triumph of the rationalistic "enlightment" in
Church and State by means of the secret society of "Illuminati", which he
founded. But this organization was suppressed in 1786 by the Elector Carl
Theodore, and Weishaupt was dismissed. On 25 November, 1799, the elector
Maximilian IV, later King Maximilian I, decreed that the university, which was
involved in financial difficulties, should be transferred to Landshut; and this was
done in the following May. Among its leading professors towards the close were
Winter the church historian, Schrank the naturalist, and Johann Michael Sailer,
writer on moral philosophy and pedagogy, who later became Bishop of Ratisbon.
Oh yeah, Victor “the Doctor” Frankenstein from Mary Shelley's novel
Frankenstein was a fictional student at the University of Ingolstadt.

The University of Ingoldstadt was an intellectual base
for Peter Canisus, S.J.:
Blessed Peter Canisius. Born at
Nimwegen in the Netherlands, 8 May, 1521;
died in Fribourg, 21 November, 1597. His
father was the wealthy burgomaster, Jacob
Canisius; his mother, Ægidia van
Houweningen, died shortly after Peter's birth.
In 1536 Peter was sent to Cologne, where he
studied arts, civil law, and theology at the
university; he spent a part of 1539 at the
University of Louvain, and in 1540 received
the degree of Master of Arts at Cologne.
Nicolaus van Esche was his spiritual adviser,
and he was on terms of friendship with such
staunch Catholics as Georg of Skodborg (the
expelled Archbishop of Lund).
Köln University
Other mentors included Johann Gropper (canon of the cathedral),
Eberhard Billick (the Carmelite monk), Justus Lanspergius, and other Carthusian
monks. Although his father desired him to marry a wealthy young woman, on 25
February, 1540 he pledged himself to celibacy.
In 1543 he visited Peter Faber and, having made the "Spiritual Exercises"
under his direction, was admitted into the Society of Jesus at Mainz, on 8 May.
With the help of Leonhard Kessel and others, Canisius, labouring under great
difficulties, founded at Cologne the first German house of the order; at the same
time he preached in the city and vicinity, and debated and taught in the
university.
In 1546 he was admitted to the priesthood, and soon afterwards was sent
by the clergy and university to obtain assistance from Emperor Charles V, the
nuncio, and the clergy of Liège against the apostate Archbishop, Hermann von
Wied, who had attempted to pervert the diocese. In 1547, as the theologian of
Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg, Bishop of Augsburg, he participated in
the general ecclesiastical council (which sat first at Trent and then at Bologna),
and spoke twice in the congregation of the theologians. After this he spent
several months under the direction of Ignatius in Rome. In 1548 he taught
rhetoric at Messina, Sicily, preaching in Italian and Latin. At this time Duke
William IV of Bavaria requested Paul III to send him some professors from the

Society of Jesus for the University of Ingolstadt; Canisius was among those
selected.
On 7 September, 1549, he made his solemn profession as Jesuit at
Rome, in the presence of the founder of the order. On his journey northward he
received, at Bologna, the degree of doctor of theology. On 13 November,
accompanied by Fathers Jaius and Salmeron, he reached Ingolstadt, where he
taught theology, catechized, and preached. In 1550 he was elected rector of the
university.
In 1552, Peter was sent by Ignatius to the new college in Vienna; there he
also taught theology in the university, preached at the Cathedral of St. Stephen,
and at the court of Ferdinand I, and was confessor at the hospital and prison.
During Lent, 1553 he visited many abandoned parishes in Lower Austria,
preaching and administering the sacraments. The king's eldest son (later
Maximilian II) had appointed to the office of court preacher, Phauser, a married
priest, who preached the Lutheran doctrine. Canisius warned Ferdinand I,
verbally and in writing, and opposed Phauser in public disputations. Maximilian
was obliged to dismiss Phauser and, on this account, the rest of his life he
harboured a grudge against Canisius. Ferdinand three times offered him the
Bishopric of Vienna, but he refused. In 1557 Julius III appointed him
administrator of the bishopric for one year, but Canisius succeeded in ridding
himself of this burden (cf. N. Paulus in "Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie",
XXII, 742-8). In 1555 he was present at the Diet of Augsburg with Ferdinand, and
in 1555-56 he preached in the cathedral of Prague.
After long negotiations and preparations he was able to open Jesuit
colleges at Ingolstadt and Prague. In the same year Ignatius appointed him first
provincial superior of Upper Germany (Swabia, Bavaria, Bohemia, Hungary,
Lower and Upper Austria). During the winter of 1556-57 he acted as adviser to
the King of the Romans at the Diet of Ratisbon and delivered many sermons in
the cathedral. By the appointment of the Catholic princes and the order of the
pope he took part in the religious discussions at Worms. As champion of the
Catholics he repeatedly spoke in opposition to Melanchthon. The fact that the
Protestants disagreed among themselves and were obliged to leave the field was
due in a great measure to Canisius. He also preached in the cathedral of Worms.
During Advent and Christmas he visited the Bishop of Strasburg at
Zabern, started negotiations for the building of a Jesuit college there, preached,
explained the catechism to the children, and heard their confessions. He also
preached in the cathedral of Strasburg and strengthened the Catholics of Alsace
and Freiburg in their faith. Ferdinand, on his way to Frankfort to be proclaimed
emperor, met him at Nuremburg and confided his troubles to him. Then Duke
Albert V of Bavaria secured his services; at Straubing the pastors and preachers
had fled, after having persuaded the people to turn from the Catholic faith.
Canisius remained in the town for six weeks, preaching three or four times a day,

and by his gentleness he undid much harm. From Straubing he was called to
Rome to be present at the First General Congregation of his order, but before its
close Paul IV sent him with the nuncio Mentuati to Poland to the imperial Diet of
Pieterkow; at Cracow he addressed the clergy and members of the university.
In the year 1559 he was summoned by the emperor to be present at the
Diet of Augsburg. There, at the urgent request of the chapter, he became
preacher at the cathedral and held this position until 1566. His manuscripts show
the care with which he wrote his sermons. In a series of sermons he treats of the
end of man, of the Decalogue, the Mass, the prophecies of Jonas; at the same
time he rarely omitted to expound the Gospel of the day; he spoke in keeping
with the spirit of the age, explained the justification of man, Christian liberty, the
proper way of interpreting the Scriptures, defended the worship of saints, the
ceremonies of the Church, religious vows, indulgences. urged obedience to the
Church authorities, confession, communion, fasting, and almsgiving; he censured
the faults of the clergy, at times perhaps too sharply, as he felt that they were
public and that he must avoid demanding reformation from the laity only. Against
the influence of evil spirits he recommended the means of defence which had
been in use in the Church during the first centuries—lively faith, prayer,
ecclesiastical benedictions, and acts of penance. From 1561-62 he preached
about two hundred and ten sermons, besides giving retreats and teaching
catechism. In the cathedral, his confessional and the altar at which he said Mass
were surrounded by crowds, and alms were placed on the altar. The envy of
some of the cathedral clergy was aroused, and Canisius and his companions
were accused of usurping the parochial rights. The pope and bishop favoured the
Jesuits, but the majority of the chapter opposed them. Canisius was obliged to
sign an agreement according to which he retained the pulpit but gave up the right
of administering the sacraments in the cathedral.
In 1559 he opened a college in Munich; in 1562 he appeared at Trent as
papal theologian. The council was discussing the question whether communion
should be administered under both forms to those of the laity who asked for it.
Lainez, the general of the Society of Jesus, opposed it unconditionally. Canisius
held that the cup might be administered to the Bohemians and to some Catholics
whose faith was not very firm. After one month he departed from Trent, but he
continued to support the work of the Fathers by urging the bishops to appear at
the council, by giving expert opinion regarding the Index and other matters, by
reports on the state of public opinion, and on newly-published books. In the
spring of 1563 he rendered a specially important service to the Church; the
emperor had come to Innsbruck (near Trent), and had summoned thither several
scholars, including Canisius, as advisers. Some of these men fomented the
displeasure of the emperor with the pope and the cardinals who presided over
the council. For months Canisius strove to reconcile him with the Curia. He has
been blamed unjustly for communicating to his general and to the pope's
representatives some of Ferdinand's plans, which otherwise might have ended
contrary to the intention of all concerned in the dissolution of the council and in a

new national apostasy. The emperor finally granted all the pope's demands and
the council was able to proceed and to end peacefully. All Rome praised
Canisius, but soon after he lost favour with Ferdinand and was denounced as
disloyal; at this time he also changed his views regarding the giving of the cup to
the laity (in which the emperor saw a means of relieving all his difficulties), saying
that such a concession would only tend to confuse faithful Catholics and to
encourage the disobedience of the recalcitrant.
In 1562 the College of Innsbruck was opened by Canisius, and at that time
he acted as confessor to the "Queen" Magdalena (declared Venerable in 1906 by
Pius X; daughter of Ferdinand I, who lived with her four sisters at Innsbruck), and
as spiritual adviser to her sisters. At their request he sent them a confessor from
the society, and, when Magdalena presided over the convent, which she had
founded at Hall, he sent her complete directions for attaining Christian perfection.
In 1563 he preached at many monasteries in Swabia; in 1564 he sent the first
missionaries to Lower Bavaria, and recommended the provincial synod of
Salzburg not to allow the cup to the laity, as it had authority to do; his advice,
however, was not accepted. In this year Canisius opened a college at Dillingen
and assumed, in the name of the order, the administration of the university which
had been founded there by Cardinal Truchsess. In 1565 he took part in the
Second General Congregation of the order in Rome. While in Rome he visited
Philip, son of the Protestant philologist Joachim Camerarius, at that time a
prisoner of the Inquisition, and instructed and consoled him.
Pius IV sent him as his secret nuncio to deliver the decrees of the Council
of Trent to Germany; the pope also commissioned him to urge their enforcement,
to ask the Catholic princes to defend the Church at the coming diet, and to
negotiate for the founding of colleges and seminaries. Canisius negotiated more
or less successfully with the Electors of Mainz and Trier, with the bishops of
Augsburg, Würzburg, Osnabrück, Münster, and Paderborn, with the Duke of
Jülich-Cleves-Berg, and with the City and University of Cologne; he also visited
Nimwegen, preaching there and at other places; his mission, however, was
interrupted by the death of the pope. Pius V desired its continuation, but Canisius
requested to be relieved; he said that it aroused suspicions of espionage, of
arrogance, and of interference in politics (for a detailed account of his mission
see "Stimmen aus Maria-Laach", LXXI, 58, 164, 301).
At the Diet of Augsburg (1566), Canisius and other theologians, by order
of the pope, gave their services to the cardinal legate Commendone; with the
help of his friends he succeeded, although with great difficulty, in persuading the
legate not to issue his protest against the religious peace, and thus prevented a
new fratricidal war. The Catholic members of the diet accepted the decrees of the
council, the designs of the Protestants were frustrated, and from that time a new
and vigorous life began for the Catholics in Germany. In the same year Canisius
went to Wiesensteig, where he visited and brought back to the Church the

Lutheran Count of Helfenstein and his entire countship, and where he prepared
for death two witches who had been abandoned by the Lutheran preachers.
In 1567 he preached the Lenten sermons in the cathedral of Würzburg,
gave instruction in the Franciscan church twice a week to the children and
domestics of the town, and discussed the foundling of a Jesuit college at
Würzburg with the bishop. Then followed the diocesan synod of Dillingen (at
which Canisius was principal adviser of the Bishop of Augsburg), journeys to
Würzburg, Mainz, Speyer, and a visit to the Bishop of Strasburg, whom he
advised, though unsuccessfully, to take a coadjutor. At Dillingen he received the
application of Stanislaus Kostka to enter the Society af Jesus, and sent him with
hearty recommendations to the general of the order at Rome. At this time he
successfully settled a dispute in the philosophical faculty of the University of
Ingolstadt. In 1567 and 1568 he went several times to Innsbruck, where in the
name of the general he consulted with the Archduke Ferdinand II and his sisters
about the confessors of the archduchesses and about the establishment of a
Jesuit house at Hall. In 1569 the general decided to accept the college at Hall.
During Lent of 1568 Canisius preached at Ellwangen, in Würtemberg;
from there he went with Cardinal Truchsess to Rome. The Upper German
province of the order had elected the provincial as its representative at the
meeting of the procurators; this election was illegal, but Canisius was admitted.
For months he collected in the libraries of Rome material for a great work which
he was preparing. In 1569 he returned to Augsburg and preached Lenten
sermons in the Church of St. Mauritius. Having been a provincial for thirteen
years (an unusually long time) he was relieved of the office at his own request,
and went to Dillingen, where he wrote, catechized, and heard confessions, his
respite, however, was short; in 1570 he was obliged again to go to Augsburg. A
year latter he was compelled to move to Innsbruck and to accept the office of
court preacher to Archduke Ferdinand II.
In 1575 Gregory XIII sent him with papal messages to the archduke and to
the Duke of Bavaria. When he arrived in Rome to make his report, the Third
General Congregation of the order was assembled and, by special favour,
Canisius was invited to be present. From this time he was preacher in the parish
church of Innsbruck until the Diet of Ratisbon (1576), which he attended as
theologian of the cardinal legate Morone. In the following year he supervised at
Ingolstadt the printing of an important work, and induced the students of the
university to found a sodality of the Blessed Virgin. During Lent, 1578, he
preached at the court of Duke William of Bavaria at Landshut. The nuncio
Bonhomini desired to have a college of the society at Fribourg; the order at first
refused on account of the lack of men, but the pope intervened and, at the end of
1580, Canisius laid the foundation stone. In 1581 he founded a sodality of the
Blessed Virgin among the citizens and, soon afterwards, sodalities for women
and students; in 1582 schools were opened, and he preached in the parish
church and in other places until 1589.

The canton had not been left uninfluenced by the Protestant movement.
Canisius worked indefatigably with the provost Peter Schnewly, the Franciscan
Johannes Michel, and others, for the revival of religious sentiments amongst the
people; since then Fribourg has remained a stronghold of the Catholic Church. In
1584, while on the way to take part in another meeting of the order at Augsburg,
he preached at Lucerne and made a pilgrimage to the miraculous image of the
Blessed Virgin at Einsiedeln. According to his own account, it was then that St.
Nicholas, the patron saint of Fribourg, made known to him his desire that
Canisius should not leave Fribourg again. Many times the superiors of the order
planned to transfer him to another house, but the nuncio, the city council, and the
citizens themselves opposed the measure; they would not consent to lose this
celebrated and saintly man. The last years of his life he devoted to the instruction
of converts, to making spiritual addresses to the brothers of the order, to writing
and re-editing books. The city authorities ordered his body to be buried before
the high altar of the principal church, the Church of St. Nicolaus, from which they
were translated in 1625 to that of St. Michael, the church of the Jesuit College.
Canisius held that to defend the Catholic truths with the pen was just as
important as to convert the Hindus. At Rome and Trent he strongly urged the
appointment at the council, at the papal court, and in other parts of Italy, of able
theologians to write in defence of the Catholic faith. He begged Pius V to send
yearly subsidies to the Catholic printers of Germany, and to permit German
scholars to edit Roman manuscripts; he induced the city council of Fribourg to
erect a printing establishment, and he secured special privileges for printers. He
also kept in touch with the chief Catholic printers of his time &151; Plantin of
Antwerp, Cholin of Cologne, and Mayer of Dillingen &151; and had foreign works
of importance reprinted in Germany, for example, the works of Andrada,
Fontidonio, and Villalpando in defence of the Council of Trent.
Canisius advised the generals of the order to create a college of authors;
urged scholars like Bartholomæus Latomus, Friedrich Staphylus, and
Hieronymus Torensis to publish their works; assisted Onofrio Panvinio and the
polemic Stanislaus Hosius, reading their manuscripts and correcting proofs; and
contributed to the work of his friend Surius on the councils. At his solicitation the
"Briefe aus Indien", the first relations of Catholic missioners, were published
(Dillingen, 1563-71); "Canisius", wrote the Protestant preacher, Witz, "by this
activity gave an impulse which deserves our undivided recognition, indeed which
arouses our admiration" ("Petrus Canisius", Vienna, 1897, p. 12).
With apostolic zeal he loved the Society of Jesus; the day of his admission
to the order he called his second birthday. Obedience to his superiors was his
first rule. As a superior he cared with parental love for the necessities of his
subordinates. Shortly before his death he declared that he had never regretted
becoming a Jesuit, and recalled the abuses which the opponents of the Church
had heaped upon his order and his person. Johann Wigand wrote a vile
pamphlet against his "Catechism"; Flacius Illyricus, Johann Gnypheus, and Paul

Scheidlich wrote books against it; Melanchthon declared that he defended errors
wilfully; Chemnitz called him a cynic; the satirist Fischart scoffed at him; Andreæ
Dathen, Gallus, Hesshusen, Osiander, Platzius, Roding, Vergerio, and others
wrote vigorous attacks against him; at Prague the Hussites threw stones into the
church where he was saying Mass; at Berne he was derided by a Protestant
mob. At Easter, 1568, he was obliged to preach in the Cathedral of Würzburg in
order to disprove the rumour that he had become a Protestant. Unembittered by
all this, he said, "the more our opponents calumniate us, the more we must love
them".
He requested Catholic authors to advocate the truth with modesty and
dignity without scoffing or ridicule. The names of Luther and Melanchthon were
never mentioned in his "Catechism". His love for the German people is
characteristic; he urged the brothers of the order to practise German diligently,
and he liked to hear the German national hymns sung. At his desire St. Ignatius
decreed that all the members of the order should offer monthly Masses and
prayers for the welfare of Germany and the North. Ever the faithful advocate of
the Germans at the Holy See, he obtained clemency for them in questions of
ecclesiastical censures, and permission to give extraordinary absolutions and to
dispense from the law of fasting. He also wished the Index to be modified that
German confessors might be authorized to permit the reading of some books, but
in his sermons he warned the faithful to abstain from reading such books without
permission. While he was rector of the University of Ingolstadt, a resolution was
passed forbidding the use of Protestant textbooks and, at his request, the Duke
of Bavaria forbade the importation of books opposed to religion and morals. At
Cologne he requested the town council to forbid the printing or sale of books
hostile to the Faith or immoral, and in the Tyrol had Archduke Ferdinand II
suppress such books. He also advised Bishop Urban of Gurk, the court preacher
of Ferdinand I, not to read so many Protestant books, but to study instead the
Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers. At Nimwegen he searched the libraries
of his friends, and burned all heretical books. In the midst of all these cares
Canisius remained essentially a man of prayer; he was an ardent advocate of the
Rosary and its sodalities. He was also one of the precursors of the modern
devotion of the Sacred Heart.
During his lifetime his "Catechism" appeared in more than 200 editions in
at least twelve languages. It was one of the works which influenced St. Aloysius
Gonzaga to enter the Society of Jesus; it converted, among others, Count
Palatine Wolfgang Wilhelm of Neuburg; and as late as the eighteenth century in
many places the words "Canisi" and catechism were synonymous. It remained
the foundation and pattern for the catechisms printed later. His preaching also
had great influence; in 1560 the clergy of the cathedral of Augsburg testified that
by his sermons nine hundred persons had been brought back to the Church, and
in May, 1562, it was reported the Easter communicants numbered one thousand
more than in former years. Canisius induced some of the prominent Fuggers to
return to the Church, and converted the leader of the Augsburg Anabaptists.

In 1537 the Catholic clergy had been banished from Augsburg by the city
council; but after the preaching of Canisius public processions were held,
monasteries gained novices, people crowded to the jubilee indulgence,
pilgrimages were revived, and frequent Communion again became the rule. After
the elections of 1562 there were eighteen Protestants and twenty-seven
Catholics on the city council. He received the approbation of Pius IV by a special
Brief in 1561. Great services were rendered by Canisius to the Church through
the extension of the Society of Jesus; the difficulties were great: lack of novices,
insufficient education of some of the younger members, poverty, plague,
animosity of the Protestants, jealousy on the part of fellow-Catholics, the
interference of princes and city councils. Notwithstanding all this, Canisius
introduced the order into Bavaria, Bohemia, Swabia, the Tyrol, and Hungary, and
prepared the way in Alsace, the Palatinate, Hesse, and Poland.
Even opponents admit that to the Jesuits principally is due the credit of
saving a large part of Germany from religious innovation. In this work Canisius
was the leader. In many respects Canisius was the product of an age which
believed in strange miracles, put witches to death, and had recourse to force
against the adherents of another faiih; but notwithstanding all this, Johannes
Janssen does not hesitate to declare that Canisius was the most prominent and
most influential Catholic reformer of the sixteenth century (Geschichte des
deutschen Volkes, 15th and 16th editions, IV, p. 406). "Canisius more than any
other man", writes A. Chroust, "saved for the Church of Rome the Catholic
Germany of today" (Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, new series,
II, 106). It has often been declared that Canisius in many ways resembles St.
Boniface, and he is therefore called the second Apostle of Germany. The
Protestant professor of theology, Paul Drews, says: "It must be admitted that,
from the standpoint of Rome, he deserves the title of Apostle of Germany"
("Petrus Canisius", Halle, 1892, p. 103).
Soon after his death reports spread of the miraculous help obtained by
invoking his name. His tomb was visited by pilgrims. The Society of Jesus
decided to urge his beatification. The ecclesiastical investigations of his virtues
and miracles were at first conducted by the Bishops of Fribourg, Dillingen, and
Freising (1625-90); the apostolic proceedings began in 1734, but were
interrupted by political and religions disorders. Gregory XVI resumed them about
1833; Pius IX on 17 April, 1864, approved of four of the miracles submitted, and
on 20 November, 1869, the solemn beatification took place in St. Peter's at
Rome. In connection with this, there appeared between 1864-66 more than thirty
different biographies. On the occasion of the tercentenarv of his death, Leo XIII
issued to the bishops of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland his much-discussed
"Epistola Encyclica de memoria sæculari B. Petri Canisii"; the bishops of
Switzerland issued a collective pastoral; in numerous places of Europe and in
some places in the United States this tercentenary was celebrated and about fifty
pamphlets were published.

In order to encourage the veneration of Canisius there is published at
Fribourg, Switzerland, monthly since 1896, the "Canisius-Stimmen" (in German
and French). The infirmary of the College of St. Michael, in which Canisius died,
is now a chapel. Vestments and other objects which he used are kept in different
houses of the order. The Canisius College at Buffalo possesses precious relics.
In the house of Canisius in the Broersstraat at Nimwegen the room is still shown
where he was born. Other memorials are: the Canisius statue in one of the public
squares of Fribourg, the statue in the cathedral of Augsburg, the Church of the
Holy Saviour and the Mother of Sorrows, recently built in his memory in Vienna,
and the new Canisius College at Nimwegen. At the twenty-sixth general meeting
of German Catholics held at Aachen, 1879, a Canisius society for the religious
education of the young was founded. The general prayer, said every Sunday in
the churches originated by Canisius, is still in use in the greater part of Germany,
and also in many places in Austria and Switzerland. Various portraits of Canisius
exist: in the Churches of St. Nicolaus and St. Michael in Fribourg; in the vestry of
the Augsburg Cathedral; in the Church of St. Michael at Munich; in the town hall
at Nimwegen; in the town hall at Ingolstadt; in the Cistercian monastery at Stams.
The woodcut in Pantaleo, "Prosopographia", III (Basle, 1566), is worthless.
Copper-plates were produced by Wierx (1619), Custos (1612), Sadeler (1628),
Hainzelmann (1693), etc. In the nineteenth century are: Fracassini's painting in
the Vatican; Jeckel's steel engraving; Leo Samberger's painting; Steinle's
engraving (1886). In most of these pictures Canisius is represented with his
catechism and other books, or surrounded by children whom he is instructing.

Peter Canisus was sent forth by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the
Society of Jesus – “the Jesuits” – who worked with
his brothers, Francis Xavier and his
conferes, to revive orthodoxy
beyond the Suez:
University of Paris in 1529,
Pierre Favre, Francisco Xavier, and Iñigo
de Loyola began sharing a room. They
went on to change the world. Early 16thcentury
Paris was a time of major changes.
Influenced by the discovery of the
Americas and an ongoing European
Renaissance, the culture began
embodying the new values of a modern
world. Economies were shifting, and a time
of scientific innovation was dawning.
Stirred by the advent of the printing press,
information spread with hitherto unmatched
ease. Similar to how the Internet is
influencing our times, mass-produced
printed materials fueled a new level of
literacy, as publications of the Bible,
theological concepts, and philosophical
musings blew a spirit of inquiry through the
Church.
University of Paris
“the Sorbonne”
Long before electricity had been discovered and harnessed, the urban
landscape of The emblematic image of University of Paris today—an edifice
constructed as part of a rebuilding of the university, launched the same year
Loyola and Xavier were canonized.
This was the city into which Iñigo Lopez de Oñaz y Loyola (Ignatius of
Loyola) trekked, on fire with a desire to attend the University of Paris and expand
his own intellectual and spiritual horizons. He was assigned to a room with two
younger men—Pierre Favre (Peter Faber) and Francisco de Isaau de Xavier
(Francis Xavier). The friendship of these three college roommates would
profoundly affect the times in which they lived and all the centuries since.
Historians usually search for deep causes of developments that reshape
the world, but sometimes luck or chance play the major role. Such was the case
in 1525 when fate, fortune, or maybe the mysterious working of divine providence
assigned Pierre Favre and Francisco Xavier to the same room at the University
of Paris, which they shared until 1536. A third roommate, Iñigo de Loyola, joined
them for six years (1529-35) until returning to Spain.

From their relationship, the Society of Jesus arose. The blessings that
have flowed from this event reach down to our day and affect more than half the
nations of our world. St. Francisco Xavier and Blessed Pierre Favre were both
born in 1506, so this is the 500th anniversary of their births. St. Ignatius of Loyola
died 450 years ago, in 1556. We celebrate all three of these anniversaries in
In 1534, the three roommates and four friends celebrated Mass in a
chapel atop Montmarte. All seven took a vow to work for souls in Jerusalem.
2006.
Of peasant origins, Favre worked as a shepherd in the hill country of
Savoy in his youth and was fortunate to receive an excellent education in the
cities of Thônes and La Roche, both near his home village of Villaret. His training
included Latin, Greek, philosophy, and some theology—a fine combination for
success at Europe’s finest university. A degree from Paris would open many
doors for a peasant lad. An accomplished student, and almost certainly more
learned than his more famous roommates, he helped Loyola grapple with the
Greek text of Aristotle. Loyola more than returned the favor.
Favre was a devout student but tortured by scruples till Loyola opened his
eyes to see and rejoice in the God of mercy and forgiveness. After returning to
Paris from a seven-month visit to Villaret, Favre spent 30 days in 1534 on retreat
making the Spiritual Exercises under the direction of Loyola, their originator.
Favre was ordained a priest in May of the same year and became a superb
director of retreats. St. Peter Canisius made the Spiritual Exercises under
Favre’s direction in 1541 and wrote, “Never have I seen nor heard such a learned
or profound theologian, nor a man of such shining and exalted virtue.... I can
hardly describe how the Spiritual Exercises transformed my soul and senses...I
feel changed into a new man.”
Xavier and Favre made an odd pair. Favre was a peasant, pious and
studious; Xavier was a Basque nobleman—dark haired, tall, a fine athlete,
outgoing. Noblemen of that era seldom took university degrees, but Xavier had
few career opportunities in Spain since his family had fought against Charles V
during the same French invasion in which Loyola was wounded. This
undoubtedly influenced Xavier’s decision to seek an academic career in Paris.
While Favre was pious, Xavier was worldly, so Loyola, who wanted to recruit
others to serve God, needed a different strategy to win over Xavier. Loyola
attended some classes in philosophy taught by Xavier at the College of St.
Bauvais and helped pay some of his debts. Several accounts relate that he kept
asking Xavier the question of Jesus: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole
world and suffer the loss of his soul?”

Gradually Loyola won Favre and Xavier over to his own plan to spend
their lives in Jerusalem working for souls. Once won over, Xavier, with his usual
enthusiasm, wanted to cancel his three-year commitment to teach at Paris.
Loyola and Favre dissuaded him, but as a result he could not devote 30 days to
making the Spiritual Exercises until late 1534.
Meanwhile Loyola was winning other gifted students to his Jerusalem
plan. On the feast of the Assumption 1534, the three roommates plus four new
companions (Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, Simón Rodrigues, and Nicolás
Alonso Bobadilla) climbed up to a chapel atop Montmarte in central Paris. Favre,
the only priest among them, celebrated a Mass at which all seven took a vow to
work for souls in Jerusalem. From these seven companions sprang the Society
of Jesus, the religious order of priests and brothers commonly called the Jesuits.
Loyola always regarded the original seven as the Society’s co-founders.
Loyola returned to Spain while the others completed their academic
degrees and recruited three more students for the Jerusalem project. They
gathered at Venice in 1537, where all but the previously ordained Favre and
Salmerón became priests.
Again chance and luck intervened. Bad luck: War between Venice and the
Ottoman Empire (which controlled Palestine) broke out. There would be no ship
to Palestine. Good luck: The Turks would never have allowed 10 companions to
proselytize in Jerusalem. They would have been executed or made into galley
slaves, never to be heard from again.
Fortunately, the Montmarte vow had a backup clause: If the companions
could not go to Jerusalem, they would put themselves at the pope’s disposal to
work for souls. They waited several months, preaching and helping the needy,
before they went to Rome and undertook work suggested by Pope Paul III. Favre
lectured on scripture at the University of Rome. Loyola directed people through
the Spiritual Exercises. Later the pope assigned others of the companions to
preaching in various Italian towns. While this arrangement offered opportunities
to serve God, it placed their companionship at risk, prompting them to form a
religious order whose rules and goals would bind them together, however
dispersed their work.
In 1540 they requested and received papal approval for the Society of
Jesus. Loyola remained in Rome as superior general of the Jesuits until his
death in 1556. The others brought the good news of Christ to the far corners of
the world.
Favre helped reform the diocese of Parma in north-central Italy before
being sent to the famous Colloquy of Regensburg in Germany, which tried and
failed to work out a doctrinal agreement between Lutherans and Catholics.
There, Favre gave the Spiritual Exercises to bishops and priests. His next stops

were his native Savoy, then on to Madrid where he spent three months
preaching, hearing confessions, and explaining that new order—the Jesuits. He
also lectured on the psalms at the University of Cologne, where he gave the
Exercises to Peter Canisius, who then entered the Jesuits. Favre’s next
assignment was Portugal. Paul III also appointed him a papal theologian at the
Council of Trent. He went to Rome where he conversed with Loyola for the first
time in seven years. But his health was broken, and he died at age 40 on Aug. 1,
1546, with his old roommate, Loyola, at his bedside.
Xavier’s travels dwarfed those of Favre. King John III of Portugal asked for
two Jesuits to serve as missionaries in India. Loyola appointed Rodrigues and
Bobadilla, but Bobadilla fell ill. Loyola then asked Xavier, who had been serving
in Rome as his secretary, if he would take Bobadilla’s place. Xavier volunteered
enthusiastically, left Rome on March 15, 1540, and never saw Loyola or Favre
again.
Xavier sailed from Lisbon on a 13-month journey, six of them working in
He set up confraternities to help ex-prostitutes find better lives and
another confraternity to prevent poor young women from falling into prostitution.
Mozambique, before arriving at Goa, the main Portuguese base in India.
At Goa he preached to the Portuguese and tried, not very successfully, to
learn the Tamil language. Therefore he required translators during two years of
work along the south coast of India where it is believed he baptized more than
10,000 converts. In September 1545 he sailed to Malaysia and spent the next
year working in Indonesia. In 1549 he and several other Jesuits sailed to Japan
where they converted some 700 Japanese, a people who impressed him as
extremely intelligent. He returned to Malaysia and then India in 1551, almost
perishing in a typhoon.
Back in India, he reorganized Jesuit work there, then departed for China at
a time when foreigners were forbidden to enter. He tried persuading Chinese
smugglers to take him ashore, but they considered it too risky. He died on the
little island of Sancian near Hong Kong on Dec. 3, 1552, at age 46.
Xavier pioneered and organized Jesuit missionary work in Asia and the
Pacific islands. The publication of his letters in Europe attracted many young
men to missionary work. Xavier is considered the greatest missionary since St.
Paul.
So it was from the Archdiocese of Goa, or Goanensis, that Xavier sailed to
evangelize to Asia and his conferes worked to reunited Christian Ethiopia with
the West, bridging the divided caused by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire
and its allies in the Maghreb. Goa was therefore the Patriarchate of the East

Indies, the chief see of the Portuguese dominions in the East; metropolitan to the
province of Goa, which comprised as suffragans the sees of Cochin, Mylapore,
and Damão (or Damaun) in India, Macao in China, and Mozambique in East
Africa. Mozambique was the gateway to Ethiopia.
The archbishop, who resided at Panjim, or New Goa, had the honorary
titles of Primate of the East and (from 1886) Patriarch of the East Indies. He
enjoyed the privilege of presiding over all national councils of the East Indies,
which were originally be held at Goa (Concordat of 1886 between the Holy See
and Portugal, art. 2). The Patronage of the see and of its suffragans belonged to
the Crown of Portugal.
The history of the Portuguese conquests in India dates from the arrival of
Vasco da Gama in 1498, followed by the acquisition of Cranganore in 1500,
Cochin in 1506, Goa in 1510, Chaul in 1512, Calicut in 1513, Damao in 1531,
Bombay, Salsette, and Bassein in 1534, Diu in 1535, etc.
From the year 1500, missionaries of the different orders (Franciscans,
Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians, etc.) flocked out with the conquerors, and
began at once to build churches along the coast districts wherever the
Portuguese power made itself felt. In 1534 was created an episcopal see
suffragan to Funchal in the Madeiras, with a jurisdiction extending potentially
over all past and future conquests from the Cape of Good Hope to China. In
1557 it was made an independent archbishopric, and its first suffragan sees were
erected at Cochin and Malacca. In 1576 the suffragan was added; and in 1588,
that of Funai in Japan. In 1600 another suffragan see was erected at Angamale
(transferred to Craganore in 1605) for the sake of the newly-united Thomas
Christians; while, in 1606 a sixth suffragan see was established at San Thome,
Mylapore, near the modern Madras. In 1612 the prelacy of Mozambique was
added, and in 1690 two other sees at Peking and Nanking in China. By the Bulls
establishing these sees the right of nomination was conferred in perpetuity on the
King of Portugal, under the titles of foundation and endowment.
The limits between the various sees of India were defined by a papal Bull
in 1616. The suffragan sees comprised roughly the south of the peninsula and
the east coast, as far as Burma inclusive, the rest of India remaining potentially
under the jurisdiction of the archdiocese and this potential jurisdiction was the
actually exercised even outside Portuguese dominions wherever the Faith was
extended by Portuguese missionaries. Missionary work progressed on a large
scale and with great success along the western coasts, chiefly at Chaul,
Bombay, Salsette, Bassein, Damao, and Diu; and on the eastern coasts at San
Thome of Mylapore, and as far as Bengal etc. In the southern districts the Jesuit
mission in Madura was the most famous. It extended to the Kistna river, with a
number of outlaying stations beyond it. The mission of Cochin, on the Malabar
Coast, was also one of the most fruitful. Several missions were also established
in the interior northwardds, e.g., that of Agra and Lahore in 1570 and that of Tibet
in 1624. Still, even with these efforts, the greater part even of the coast line was

y no means fully worked, and many vast tracts of the interior northwards were
practically untouched.
The decline of Portuguese power in the seventheenth century, followed as
it was by a decline in the supply of missionaries, etc., soon put limits to the
extension of missionary work; and it was sometimes with difficulty that the results
actually achieved could be kept up. Consequently, about this time the Holy See
began, through the Congregation of Propaganda to send out missionaries
independently of Portugal--appointing vicars Apostolic over several districts (The
Great Mogul, 1637; Verapoly, 1657; Burma, 1722; Karnatic and Madura, after the
suppression of the Jesuits in 1773; Tibet, 1826; Bengal, Madras, and Ceylon,
1834, and others later). In certain places where these vicars Apostolic came into
contact with the Portuguese clergy, there arose a conflict of jurisdiction. This was
particularly the case in Bombay, which had been ceded to the British in 1661.
The city of Goa, originally a fortress in the hands first of the Hindus and
then of the Mohammedans, was taken by the Duke of Albuquerque in 1510. As
soon as he became master of the place he built the first church--that of St.
Catherine, who thus became the patron of the new city. This was the beginning
of a vast series of churches, large and small, numbering over fifty, with convents,
hospices and other institutions attached, which made Goa one of the most
interesting ecclesiastical cities in the world. The civil splendour was in keeping
with the ecclesiastical. But the situation was an unfortunate one. Lying on a low
stretch of coast-land, surrounded on two sides by shallow creeks and on the
other two by miasmic marshes, the place was soon found unhealthy to such a
degree that, after several ravages by epidemics, it was gradually abandoned in
favour of Panjim, five miles nearer the sea. The transfer of the Government in
1759 soon led to the total desertion of the old city. In consequence the civil
buildings gradually fell into decay or were demolished for the sake of building
materials, and, especially after the expulsion of the religious orders in 1835,
many churches and monasteries followed suit. In place of houses thick
palmgroves gradually grew up, which now, with the exception of a few open
spaces, occupy the whole area. The original city extended almost two miles from
east to west along the river, and comprised three low hills crowned with religious
edifices.
Most of the churches have disappeared, leaving nothing but a cross to
mark their site. Others are in various stages of decay, while a few are kept in
repair. The finest of those still standing are grouped about the great square: the
cathedral (built 1571), in which alone the full liturgy is kept up by a body of
resident canons, and adjoining which is an archiepiscopal palace, the Bom Jesus
church (Jesuit, built c. 1586), containing the body of St. Francis Xavier incorrupt
in a rich shrine; St. Cajetan's, built about 1655, belonging to the Theatines; the
Franciscan church of St. Francis of Assisi, built on the site of a mosque 1517-21:
and finally the little chapel of St. Catherine, built in 1510. Farther away, on the
western hill, stand the great nunnery of St. Monica (1598), still in full repair,

formerly occupied by a large community of native nuns --the only female religious
in Goa; the Augustinian church and convent built in 1572, now in ruins; convent
and church of St. John of God (1685), now partly in ruins; the Rosary church of
the Dominicans, built before 1543; the viceregal chapel of St. Anthony, of about
the same date. The last two were still in full repair at the turn of the nineteenth
century.
To the south are the ruins of the Jesuit college of St. Paul, built about
1541, and the Carmelite church and convent, built about 1612, occupied after
1707 by Oratorians. The chapel of St. Francis Xavier, the scene of the "Domine,
satis est", built before 1542, is still in repair. The following either have entirely
disappeared or their sites are marked only by ruins: the chapel of St. Martin, built
shortly after 1547; college and church of St. Bonaventure (about 1602); Nossa
Senhora de Serra (1513); convent and church of St. Dominic, built about 1548,
rebuilt 1550, Santa Luzia at Daujim (about 1544); church of St. Thomas, built to
receive the relics of St. Thomas brought from Mylapore in 1560; church of St.
Alexis, built before 1600; church of the Holy Trinity, built about the same time;
convent and church of Cruz dos Milagres, built after 1619; Nossa Senhora da
Luz built before 1543; new college and church of St. Paul (alias convent of St.
Roch) used as a college in 1610, church rebuilt later. From the church of Our
Lady of the Mount, on the eastern hill, which is still in repair, a magnificent
panorama is obtained.
As for Francis Xavier, he was born in the Castle of Xavier near Sanguesa,
in Navarre, 7 April, 1506; died on the Island of Sancian near the coast of China, 2
December, 1552. In 1525, having completed a preliminary course of studies in
his own country, Francis Xavier went to Paris, where he entered the collège de
Sainte-Barbe. Here he met the Savoyard, Pierre Favre, and a warm personal
friendship sprang up between them. It was at this same college that St. Ignatius
Loyola, who was already planning the foundation of the Society of Jesus, resided
for a time as a guest in 1529. He soon won the confidence of the two young men;
first Favre and later Xavier offered themselves with him in the formation of the
Society. Four others, Lainez, Salmerón, Rodríguez, and Bobadilla, having joined
them, the seven made the famous vow of Montmartre, 15 Aug., 1534.
After completing his studies in Paris and filling the post of teacher there for
some time, Xavier left the city with his companions 15 November, 1536, and
turned his steps to Venice, where he displayed zeal and charity in attending the
sick in the hospitals. On 24 June, 1537, he received Holy orders with St. Ignatius.
The following year he went to Rome, and after doing apostolic work there for
some months, during the spring of 1539 he took part in the conferences which St.
Ignatius held with his companions to prepare for the definitive foundation of the
Society of Jesus. The order was approved verbally 3 September, and before the
written approbation was secured, which was not until a year later, Xavier was
appointed, at the earnest solicitation of the John III, King of Portugal, to
evangelize the people of the East Indies. He left Rome 16 March, 1540, and

eached Lisbon about June. Here he remained nine months, giving many
admirable examples of apostolic zeal.
On 7 April, 1541, he embarked in a sailing vessel for India, and after a
tedious and dangerous voyage landed at Goa, 6 May, 1542. The first five months
he spent in preaching and ministering to the sick in the hospitals. He would go
through the streets ringing a little bell and inviting the children to hear the word of
God. When he had gathered a number, he would take them to a certain church
and would there explain the catechism to them. About October, 1542, he started
for the pearl fisheries of the extreme southern coast of the peninsula, desirous of
restoring Christanity which, although introduced years before, had almost
disappeared on account of the lack of priests. He devoted almost three years to
the work of preaching to the people of Western India, converting many, and
reaching in his journeys even the Island of Ceylon. Many were the difficulties and
hardships which Xavier had to encounter at this time, sometimes on account of
the cruel persecutions which some of the petty kings of the country carried on
against the neophytes, and again because the Portuguese soldiers, far from
seconding the work of the saint, retarded it by their bad example and vicious
habits.
In the spring of 1545 Xavier started for Malacca. He laboured there for the
last months of that year, and although he reaped an abundant spiritual harvest,
he was not able to root out certain abuses, and was conscious that many sinners
had resisted his efforts to bring them back to God. About January, 1546, Xavier
left Malacca and went to Molucca Islands, where the Portuguese had some
settlements, and for a year and a half he preached the Gospel to the inhabitants
of Amboyna, Ternate, Baranura, and other lesser islands which it has been
difficult to identify. It is claimed by some that during this expedition he landed on
the island of Mindanao, and for this reason St. Francis Xavier has been called
the first Apostle of the Philippines. But although this statement is made by some
writers of the seventeenth century, and in the Bull of canonization issued in 1623,
it is said that he preached the Gospel in Mindanao, up to the present time it has
not been proved absolutely that St. Francis Xavier ever landed in the Philippines.
By July, 1547, he was again in Malacca. Here he met a Japanese called
Anger (Han-Sir), from whom he obtained much information about Japan. His zeal
was at once aroused by the idea of introducing Christanity into Japan, but for the
time being the affairs of the Society demanded his presence at goa, whither he
went, taking Anger with him. During the six years that Xavier had been working
among the infidels, other Jesuit missionaries had arrived at Goa, sent from
Europe by St. Ignatius; moreover some who had been born in the country had
been received into the Society. In 1548 Xavier sent these missionaries to the
principal centres of India, where he had established missions, so that the work
might be preserved and continued. He also established a novitiate and house of
studies, and having received into the Society Father Cosme de Torres, a spanish
priest whom he had met in the Maluccas, he started with him and Brother Juan

Fernández for Japan towards the end of June, 1549. The Japanese Anger, who
had been baptized at Goa and given the name of Pablo de Santa Fe,
accompanied them.
They landed at the city of Kagoshima in Japan, 15 Aug., 1549. The entire
first year was devoted to learning the Japanese language and translating into
Japanese, with the help of Pablo de Santa Fe, the principal articles of faith and
short treatises which were to be employed in preaching and catechizing. When
he was able to express himself, Xavier began preaching and made some
converts, but these aroused the ill will of the bonzes, who had him banished from
the city. Leaving Kagoshima about August, 1550, he penetrated to the centre of
Japan, and preached the Gospel in some of the cities of southern Japan.
Towards the end of that year he reached Meaco, then the principal city of Japan,
but he was unable to make any headway here because of the dissensions the
rending the country. He retraced his steps to the centre of Japan, and during
1551 preached in some important cities, forming the nucleus of several Christian
communities, which in time increased with extraordinary rapidity.
After working about two years and a half in Japan he left this mission in
charge of Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernández, and returned to
Goa, arriving there at the beginning of 1552. Here domestic troubles awaited
him. Certain disagreements between the superior who had been left in charge of
the missions, and the rector of the college, had to be adjusted. This, however,
being arranged, Xavier turned his thoughts to China, and began to plan an
expedition there. During his stay in Japan he had heard much of the Celestial
Empire, and though he probably had not formed a proper estimate of his extent
and greatness, he nevertheless understood how wide a field it afforded for the
spread of the light of the Gospel. With the help of friends he arranged a
commission or embassy the Sovereign of China, obtained from the Viceroy of
India the appointment of ambassador, and in April, 1552, he left Goa. At Malacca
the party encountered difficulties because the influential Portuguese disapproved
of the expedition, but Xavier knew how to overcome this opposition, and in the
autumn he arrived in a Portuguese vessel at the small island of Sancian near the
coast of China. While planning the best means for reaching the mainland, he was
taken ill, and as the movement of the vessel seemed to aggravate his condition,
he was removed to the land, where a rude hut had been built to shelter him. In
these wretched surroundings he breathed his last.
At the time when Ignatius founded his order Portugal was in her heroic
age. Her rulers were full of enterprise, her universities were full of life, her trade
routes extended over the then known world. The Jesuits were welcomed with
enthusiasm, and made good use of their opportunities. St. Francis Xavier,
traversing Portuguese colonies and settlements, proceeded to make his splendid
missionary conquests. These were continued by his confreres in such distant
lands as Abyssinia, the Congo, South Africa, China, and Japan, by Fathers
Nunhes, Silveria, Acosta, Fernandes, and others. At Coimbra, and afterwards at

Evora, the Society made the most surprising progress under such professors as
Pedro de Fonseca (d. 1599), Luis Molina (d. 1600), Christovão Gil, Sebastão de
Abreu, etc., and from here also comes the first comprehensive series of
philosophical and theological textbooks for students. With the advent of Spanish
monarchy, 1581, the Portuguese Jesuits suffered no less than the rest of their
country. Luis Carvalho joined the Spanish opponents of Father Acquaviva, and
when the apostolic collector, Ottavio Accoramboni, launched an interdict against
the government of Lisbon, the Jesuits, especially Diego de Arida, became
involved in the undignified strife. One the other hand, they played an honorable
part in the restoration of Portugal's liberty in 1640, and on its success, the
difficulty was to restrain King João IV from giving Father Manuel Fernandes a
seat in the Cortes, and employing others in diplomatic missions. Among these
Fathers were Antonio Vieira, one of Portugal's most eloquent orators. Up to the
Suppression, Portugal and her colonists supported the following missions, of
which further notices will be found elsewhere, Goa (originally India), Malabar,
Japan, China, Brazil, Maranhao.
It is truly a matter of wonder that one man in the short space of ten years
(6 May, 1542 - 2 December, 1552) could have visited so many countries,
traversed so many seas, preached the Gospel to so many nations, and
converted so many infidels. The incomparable apostolic zeal which animated
him, and the stupendous miracles which God wrought through him, explain this
marvel, which has no equal elsewhere. The list of the principal miracles may be
found in the Bull of canonization. St. Francis Xavier is considered the greatest
missionary since the time of the Apostles, and the zeal he displayed, the
wonderful miracles he performed, and the great number of souls he brought to
the light of true Faith, entitle him to this distinction. He was canonized with St.
Ignatius in 1622, although on account of the death of Gregory XV, the Bull of
canonization was not published until the following year.
The body of the saint is still enshrined at Goa in the church which formerly
belonged to the Society. In 1614 by order of Claudius Acquaviva, General of the
Society of Jesus, the right arm was severed at the elbow and conveyed to Rome,
where the present altar was erected to receive it in the church of the Gesu.

Working in the Jesuit tradition, brother Paez served the royal
dynasty of Ethiopia, participating in its rich
theological traditions:
Pedro Páez or Pêro Pais (1564 - May
25, 1622) was a Jesuit missionary in Ethiopia.
He was the first European who saw and
described the source of the Blue Nile. He was
born in Olmeda de las Cebollas (now Olmeda
de las Fuentes, near Madrid) sixteen years
before the union of the Spanish and the
Portuguese crowns (1580-1640). He studied at
Coimbra. Sent from Goa to Ethiopia as a
missionary in 1589, Páez was held captive in
Yemen for seven years, from 1590 to 1596,
where he used his time to learn Arabic. He
finally arrived at Massawa in 1603, and made
his way to Fremona, which was the Jesuit base
in that land. Unlike his predecessor, Andre de
Oviedo, Paul Henze describes him as "gentle,
learned, considerate of the feelings of others".
University of Comibra
When summoned to the court of the young negusä nägäst Za Dengel, his
knowledge of Amharic and Ge'ez, as well as his knowledge of Ethiopian customs
impressed the sovereign so much that Za Dengel decided to convert from the
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church to Catholicism -- although Páez warned
him not to announce his declaration too quickly. However, when Za Dengel
proclaimed changes in the observance of the Sabbath, Páez retired to Fremona,
and waited out the ensuing civil war that ended with the emperor's death.
This caution benefited Páez when Susenyos assumed the throne in 1607.
Sissinios invited him to his court, where the two became friends. Sissinios made
a grant of land to Páez on the peninsula of Gorgora on the north side of Lake
Tana, where he built a new center for his fellow Jesuits, starting with a stone
church. Paez is believed to be the first European to have discovered the source
of the Blue Nile on april 21.st 1618. (Sir Wallis Budge , A history of Ethiopia, p.
397.) Eventually Páez also converted Sissinios to Catholicism shortly before his
own death in 1622.
Some of the Catholic churches he designed are still standing, most
importantly at Bahir Dar and Gorgora, and were an influence on Ethiopian
architecture.
Páez was the first European to visit Lake Tana, one of the sources of the
Blue Nile, and to write about tasting coffee. His account of Ethiopia, História da
Ethiópia in 1620, has been printed as Volumes II and III of Beccari's Rerum

Aethiopicarum Scriptores occidentales Inedtii (Rome, 1905-17). His work was
published in 1945 at Porto in a new edition by Sanceau, Feio and Teixeira, Pêro
Pais: História da Etiópia.
In addition to translating the Roman Catechism into Ge'ez, Paez is
believed to be the author of the treatise De Abyssinorum erroribus. Páez's
writings are one of the few works in Portuguese about Ethiopia that have not
been translated into English.

New York Alpha’s intellectual and brother Paez’s
predecessor, brother Oviedo served God
and Emperor Susenyos of Ethiopia . . .
Andrés de Oviedo was born in
Illescas, Spain, about 1517, he entered the
Society in Rome in 1541. After his studies he
was appointed (1545) rector of the Jesuit
college at Gandía, and it was he who led
Francisco de Borja through his novitiate and
received his vows on February 1, 1548. In
1550 Oviedo travelled to Rome with the duke
and participated in the discussions on the
Constitutions. He became (1551) rector of the
new college in Naples and was later assigned
to the mission in Ethiopia. He was ordained
bishop on May 5, 1555, and became Patriarch
of Ethiopia on December 20, 1562. In Ethiopia
he lived amid extreme poverty; he died in
1577. The background to brother Oviedo’s
mission to Ethiopia lay in the divide occurring
as Islam moved west, absorbing early
Christian communities along the north coast
of Africa into the Caliphate. Ethiopia was cut
off from its Christian community.
The Arms of Gandia,
Kingdom of Spain
Communication between Rome and Abyssinia became more difficult, and
from the end of the eleventh to the beginning of the thirteenth century one could
see no bond existing between Abyssinia and the centre of Catholicism. The
Sovereign Pontiffs, nevertheless, have bestowed a constant solicitude on the
Christians of Ethiopia.
The first missionaries sent to their aid were the Dominicans, whose
success, however, roused the fanaticism of the Monophysites against them, and
caused their martyrdom. For more than a hundred years silence enfolded the
ruins of this Church. At a later period, the fame of the Crusades having spread,
pilgrim monks, on their return from Jerusalem, wakened once more, by what they
told in the Ethiopian court, the wish to be reunited to the Church.
The Acts of the Council of Florence tell of the embassy sent by the
Emperor Zéra-Jacob with the object of obtaining this result (1452). The union
was brought about; but on their home journey, the messengers, while passing
through Egypt, were given up to the schismatic Copts, and to the Caliph, and put
to death before they could bring the good news to their native land.

In the rural plateaux of northern Ethiopia, one can still find scattered ruins
of monumental buildings alien to the country's ancient architectural tradition. This
little-known and rarely studied architectural heritage bears silent witness to a
fascinating if equivocal cultural encounter that took place in the 16th-17th
centuries between Orthodox Ethiopians and Catholic Europeans. The Indigenous
and the Foreign explores the enduring impact of the encounter on the religious,
political and artistic life of Christian Ethiopia, one not readily acknowledged, not
least because the public conversion of the early 17th-century King Susenyos to
Catholicism resulted in a bloody civil war enveloped in religious intolerance.
Included in this tradition are the surviving architecture of a number of religious
and stately buildings of early 17th-century Ethiopia, a period when a mission of
Jesuits from Goa, in Western India, was most active at the Ethiopian Christian
king's Court. This important heritage, known as pre-Gondarine, is scarcely known
outside of Ethiopia.
The Christian kingdom that controlled the Ethiopian high plateaux suffered
a series of very deep political, economic, military and religious crises in the
period between the late 15th century and the expulsion of the Jesuit missionaries
in 1633. The Somali and Afari armies led by Ahmad ibn Ibrahim, called the Gragñ
(or “left-handed”) seriously threatened the very existence of the Christian state
from 1529 to 1543, when they were finally defeated by the Abyssinians with the
help of a small Portuguese expeditionary force sent from Goa, India.
Subsequently, parties of Borana and Barentuma Oromo pastoralists began
raiding deeper and deeper into Abyssinian territory and, by the end of the 16th
century, many had settled in Gojam and Shoa and had become the main
adversaries of royal power in Abyssinia.
The Portuguese military collaboration with the Christian Ethiopians served
their own strategic interests in their regional rivalry with the Ottoman Turks for
control of the trade routes in the Red Sea and the north-western sector of the
Indian Ocean. But the Portuguese rulers, together with the Pope in Rome and
the head of the Company of Jesus, had the additional intention of establishing a
mission in Ethiopia to encourage the population to switch from their Orthodox
faith to Catholicism – an intention that made sense in the light of the Counter-
Reformation concerns in Southern Europe.
More than a hundred years later, in 1557, the Jesuit Father Oviedo
penetrated into Ethiopia. Father Andrés de Oviedo and his mission first entered
Ethiopia in 1557, only to find that the conversion project was too utopian. They
began visiting the royal court, where they participated in a number of theological
discussions with the Orthodox clergy.
They were eventually persecuted and expelled to Tigray where, in May
Gwagwa, they preached and gave support to the Portuguese community that had
stayed in Ethiopia in the wake of the Gragñ wars. As the years passed and the

Portuguese either dwindled in numbers or converted to Orthodoxy, the mission
became almost extinct.
By the end of the century, when Philip II, King of Spain, inherited the
Portuguese royal crown and the Ethiopian jurisdiction, so he decided to revive
the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia. A new priest, Father Pedro Páez, was sent from
Goa. Once in Ethiopia, he forced his way into the royal court. Other priests joined
him and together they gradually gained the favour of the new Ethiopian King
Susneyos and, very importantly, converted his brother the Ras Sela Krestos to
Catholicism. Father Paëz, succeeded in converting the Emperor Socinios
himself.
On December 11, 1624, the Church of Abyssinia, abjuring the heresy of
Eutyches and the schism of Dioscorus, was reunited to the true Church, a union
which, unfortunately, proved to be only temporary.
In 1632, the Negus Basilides mounted the throne. Committed as he was to
polygamy and other practices, he rejected Catholicism and its law. The Jesuits
were handed over to the axe of the executioner, and Abyssinia remained closed
to the missionaries until 1702. In that year, three Franciscans got as far as
Gondar, the capital, where they converted several princes. The Negus wrote with
his own hand to Clement XI, professing his submission to His Holiness. Once
more the hope proved futile. A palace revolution overthrew the Negus, and
heresy again assumed the reigns of power. From then until the middle of the
nineteenth century, a silence as of death lay on the Church of Abyssinia.

. . . New York Alpha’s intellectual Brother Oviedo served God
and Susenyos of Ethiopia, below . . .
Susenyos (also Sissinios, as in
Greek, Ge'ez sūsinyōs; throne name Malak
Sagad III, Ge'ez, mal'ak sagad, Amh.
mel'āk seged, "to whom the angel bows";
1572 - September 7, 1632) was nəgusä
nägäst (1606 - 1632) of Ethiopia. His father
was Abeto (Prince) Fasilides, a grandson
of Dawit II; as a result, while some
authorities list him as a member of the
Solomonic dynasty, others consider him,
instead of his son, as the founder of the
Gondar line of the dynasty (ultimately a
subset, however, of the Solomonic
dynasty). Manoel de Almeida, a Jesuit who
lived in Ethiopia during Susenyos' reign,
described him as "tall, with the features of
a man of quality, large handsome eyes,
pointed nose and an ample and well
groomed beard.
The Lion of Judah
“ . . . He was wearing a tunic of crimson velvet down to the knee, breeches
of the Moorish style, a sash or girdle of many large pieces of fine gold, and an
outer coat of damask of the same colour, like a capelhar"
As a boy, a group of marauding Oromo captured him and his father,
holding them captive for over a year until they were rescued by the Dejazmach
Assebo. Upon his rescue, he went to live with Queen Admas Mogasa, the mother
of Sarsa Dengel and widow of Emperor Menas.
In 1590s, Susenyos was perceived as one of potential successors, as
Emperor Sarsa Dengel's sons were very young. At the death of his one-time ally,
Emperor Za Dengel, he was proclaimed his successor, although the fight against
Emperor Yaqob continued.
Susenyos became ruler following the defeat of first Za Sellase, then
Yaqob at the Battle of Gol, located in southern Gojjam, in 1607. However, he
delayed being crowned until March 18, 1608, in a ceremony at Axum described
by Joao Gabriel, the captain of the Portuguese in Ethiopia. Because the body of
Yaqob had never been found after the Battle of Gol, for the first few years of his
reign Susenyos was troubled by revolts from a number of men claiming to be the
dead king.

Susenyos campaigned against the Agaw in the north, the encroaching
Oromo in the south, and is said in his Royal Chronicle to have made his power
felt along his western frontier from Fazogli north to Suakin.
He was interested in Catholicism, in part due to Pedro Páez' persuasion,
but also hoping for military help from Portugal and Spain (in union at the time of
Susenyo's reign). Some decades earlier, in 1541, Christopher da Gama (son of
the legendary Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama) had been in charge of a
military expedition to save the Ethiopian emperor Gelawdewos from the
onslaught of Ahmed Gragn, a Muslim Imam who almost destroyed the existence
of the Ethiopian state. Susenyos hoped to receive a new contingent of wellarmed
European soldiers, this time against another enemy, the Oromo who were
invading from the south, and to put down constant internal rebellion. He showed
the Jesuit missionaries his favor by a number of land grants, most importantly
those at Gorgora, located on a peninsula on the northern shore of Lake Tana.
In 1613, Susenyos sent a mission heading for Madrid and Vatican City,
led by Fr. Antonio Fernandes. The plan was to head south, in an attempt to reach
Malindi, a port on the Indian Ocean in what is Kenya today, hoping to break
through the effective blockade that the Ottoman conquests had created around
the Ethiopian empire by sailing all the way around the southern tip of Africa.
However, they failed to reach Malindi, due to delays caused by local Christians
hostile to the mission.
Despite several letters from Susenyos to the King of Spain (and Portugal),
Philip III, asking for military help, no Spanish or Portuguese soldiers ever arrived.
Even so, Susenyos at last converted to Catholicism in 1622 in a public
ceremony, and separated himself from all of his wives and concubines except for
his first wife. However, the tolerant and sensitive Pedro Paez died soon
afterwards, and his replacement Alfonso Mendez, who arrived at Massawa on
January 24, 1624, proved to be haughty and less tolerant of traditional practices.
Strife and rebellions over the enforced changes began within days of Mendez'
public ceremony in 1626, where he proclaimed the primacy of Rome and
condemned local practices, suppressing even the use of the Ethiopian calendar.
In 1630, the Viceroy of Begemder, Sarsa Krestos, proclaimed Susenyos's
son Fasilides emperor; Sarsa Krestos was promptly captured and hanged. Two
years later, Susenyos's brother Malta Krestos revolted in Lasta, which was put
down at the cost of 8,000 lives. This purposeless loss of life depressed
Susenyos, and on returning to his palace at Dankaz, he granted his subjects
freedom of worship, in effect restoring the traditional Ethiopian Church.
In 1621, Susneyos publicly announced his adherence to the Latin faith, a
strategy to reinforce his political power and his independence from the influential
Orthodox clergy. A consequence of the public conversion of the king was the
arrival of a growing number of Jesuit priests intent on rapidly introducing Catholic

eforms into Ethiopia. In 1626, the Catholic Patriarch Afonso Mendes imposed a
number of changes on the ancestral religious practices of the Ethiopians. Social
unrest and civil war followed and Susneyos was forced to resign. His son
Fasiladas, who succeeded him, rejected Catholicism upon his accession to the
throne and, in 1633, expelled or killed all Jesuit missionaries. He ended his reign
by abdicating in favor of his son, Fasilides. He was buried at the church of
Genneta Iyasus.
The Emperor ran afoul of Zara Yacob, a seventeenth century Ethiopian
philosopher and religious thinker, whose treatise, in the original Ge'ez language
known as the Hatata (1667), has often been compared to Descartes' Discours de
la methode (1637). In the period, when African philosophical literature was
significantly oral in character, Yacob's inquiry, transmitted by writing, was one of
the few exceptions.
"Behold, I have begun an inquiry such as has not been attempted
before. You can complete what I have begun so that the people of
our country will become wise with the help of God and arrive at the
science of truth, lest they believe in falsehood, trust in depravity, go
from vanity to vanity, that they know the truth and love their brother,
lest they quarrel about their empty faith as they have been doing till
now."
From The Treatise of Zara Yacob.
Zara Yacob (spelled also Zar'a Ya'aqob or Zar'a Ya'eqob) was born into a
farmer's family near Aksum, the capital of the ancient Greek-influenced kingdom
in northern Ethiopia. Yacob's name means "The Seed of Jacob"; "Zara" is the
Aramaic word for "seed." "By Christian baptism I was named Zara Yacob, but
people called me Warqye," he wrote later in the Treatise. Although his father was
poor, he supported Yacob's education. Yacob attended the traditional schools
and became acquainted with the Psalms of David, which deeply influence his
thought. After having returned to his native Aksum, Yacob taught there for four
years.
Yacob was educated in the Coptic Christian faith, but he was also familiar
with other Christian sects, Islam, Judaism, and Indian religion. A truth seeker,
who decided to rely on his own inner voice, Yacob was denounced before King
Negus Susenoys (r. 1607-1632), who had turned to the Roman Catholic faith and
ordered his subjects to follow his own example. Attempts to change the age-old
rituals were met with resistance and tens of thousands were martyred.
Yacob fled into exile with some gold and the Book of Psalms. On his way
to Shoa in the south he found at the foot of the Takkaze River a cave. Yacob
lived there alone for two years, praying and developing his philosophy, which he
presented in the Hatata. In this book Yacob later said, that "I have learnt more

while living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars. What I wrote in
this book is very little; but in my cave I have meditated on many other such
things."
After the death of the king, his son Negus Fasiladas (r. 1632-1667), a firm
adherent of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, took power. He expelled the Jesuits,
and extirpated the Catholic faith in his kingdom in 1633. In this new situation,
Yacob left his cave and settled in Enfraz. He found a patron, a rich merchant
named Habtu, and married a maidservant of the family, whose name was Hirut.
"... she was not beautiful," confessed Yacob, "but she was good natured,
intelligent and patient." The monastic life did not appeal to Yacob, who stated
that, "the law of Christians which propounds the superiority of monastic lifeover
marriage is false and can’t come from God." He also rejected polygamy because
"the law of creation orders one man to marry one woman."
Returning to his former profession, Yacob became the teacher of Habtu's
two sons. At the request of his patron's son Walda Heywat, Yacob wrote his
famous Treatise, in which he recorded his life and thoughts. The self-portrait was
completed in 1667. Yacob's basic method, which he applied to his investigation,
was the light of the reason.
Although Yacob is essentially a religious thinker, he defends his belief on
rational grounds and rejects subjectivism. "God created us intelligent so that we
can meditate on his greatness," Yacob wrote. Truth can be discovered by the
power of analytical thinking: "... truth is one." But Yacob also believes that truth is
immediately "revealed" to the person who seeks it. "Indeed he who investigates
with the pure intelligence set by the creator in the heart of each man and
scrutinizes the order and laws of creation, will discover the truth."
Following in the footsteps of great church fathers, Yacob applied the idea
of the first cause to his proof for the existence of God. "If I say that my father and
my mother created me, then I must search for the creator of my parents and of
the parents of my parents until they arrive at the first who were not created as we
[are] but who came into this world in some other way without being generated."
However, the knowability of God do not depend on human intellect, but "Our soul
has the power of having the concept of God and of seeing him mentally. God did
not give this power purposelessly; as he gave the power, so did he give the
reality."
Little is know of Yacob's later life but Enfraz, where he lived harmonious
and happy family life, remained his home town for the next twenty-five years. He
also saw that husband and wife are equal in marriage, "for they are one flesh and
one life." Yacob died in 1692. Walda Heywat, his successor, published later an
treatise, in which he followed Yacob's lines of thought. The first scholar, who
introduced Yacob's thought to the English-speaking world, was Professor Claude
Sumner, who moved from Canada to Ethiopia in the 1950s. Summer proved that

the author of the Treatise was not an Italian Capuchin Giusto d'Urbino, who lived
in Ethiopia in the 19th century; Giusto d'Urbino himself never said the work was
his own but told that he had bought the manuscript.
After the rule of Emperor Susenos, Ethiopia returned to civil war between
its oligarchs. Under Minas (1159-63), Sarsa Dengel (1563-97), and Ya'eqob Za
Dengel (1597-1607), civil war was incessant. There was a brief respite under
Susneos (1607-32), but war broke out afresh under Fasiladas (1632-67), and the
Ethiopian clergy, moreover, increased the trouble by their theological disputes as
to the two natures of Christ.
These disputes, often, indeed, but a cloak for ambitious intrigues, were
always occasions of revolution. Under the successors of Fasiladas the general
disorder passed beyond all bounds. Of the seven kings that followed him but two
died a natural death. There was a short period of peace under Bakafa (1721-30),
and Yasu II (1730-55), Yoas (1755) and Yohannes were again victims of an everspreading
revolution.
The end of the eighteenth century left Ethiopia a feudal kingdom. The land
and its government belonged to its Ras, or feudal chieftains. The unity of the
nation had disappeared, and its kings reigned, but did not govern. The Ras
became veritable Mayors of the Palace, and the monarchs were content to be
rois fainéants. Side by side with these kings who have left in history only their
names, the real masters of events, as the popular whim happened to favour
them, were Ras Mikael, Ras Abeto of the Godjam, Ras Gabriel of the Samen,
Ras Ali of Begameder, Ras Gabra of Masqal of Tigré, Ras Walda-Sellase of the
Shoa, Ras Ali of Amhara, Ras Oubié of Tigré, and the like. But war among these
chiefs was incessant; ever dissatisfied, jealous of each other's power, each one
sought to be supreme, and it was only after a century of strife that peace was at
length established. A son of the governor of Kowara, named Kasa, succeeded in
bringing it about, to his own profit; and he made it permanent by causing himself
to be named king under the name of Theodore (1855). With him the ancient
Ethiopia took its place as one of the nations to be reckoned with in the
international affairs of the West, and Abyssinia may be said to date its origin from
his reign.

. . . Susenyos of Ethiopia ruled in succession from Emperor
Yekuno Amlak, below, of the Solomid dynasty . . .
Emperor Yekuno Amlak (throne
name Tasfa Iyasus) was nəgusä nägäst
(10 August 1270 - 19 June 1285) of
Ethiopia and restorer of the Solomonic
dynasty. He traced his ancestry through his
father, Tasfa Iyasus, to Dil Na'od, the last
king of Axum. Much of what we know
about Yekuno Amlak is based on oral
traditions and medieval hagiographies.
Most sources state that his mother was the
slave of an Amhara chieftain in Sagarat
(located in the modern Dessie Zuria district
of the Amhara Region). Yekuno Amlak
was educated at Lake Hayq's Istifanos
Monastery near Amba Sel, where later
medieval hagiographies state Saint Tekle
Haymanot raised and educated him, and
helped him to depose the last Zagwe king.
The Lion of Judah
Earlier hagiographies, however, state that it was Iyasus Mo'a, the abbot of
Istifanos Monastery in Lake Hayq, who helped him achieve power (Istifanos was
the premier monastery at that time, while Tekle Haymanot's Debre Libanos
become more prominent in the later medieval period; it is from this period the
traditions that ascribe the deed to Tekle Haymanot date), although neither of
these traditions is contemporary.
Traditional history further reports that Yekuno Amlak was imprisoned by
the Zagwe king Za-Ilmaknun ("the unknown, the hidden one") in Malot, but
managed to escape. He gathered support in the Amhara provinces and in
Shewa, and with an army of followers, defeated the Zagwe king. Taddese Tamrat
argued that this king was Yetbarak, but due to a local form of damnatio
memoriae, his name was removed from the official records. A more recent
chronicler of Wollo history, Getatchew Mekonnen Hasen, flatly states that the last
Zagwe king deposed by Yekuno Amlak was none other than Na'akueto La'ab
himself. [4]
Yekuno Amlak is also said to have campaigned against the Kingdom of
Damot, which lay south of the Abbay River.

Recorded history affords more certainty as to his relations with other
countries. For example, E.A. Wallis Budge states that Yekuno Amlak not only
exchanged letters with the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII, but sent to him
several giraffes as a gift. At first, his interactions with his Muslim neighbors were
friendly; however his attempts to be granted an Abuna for the Ethiopian Orthodox
Church strained these relations. A letter survives that he wrote to the Mamluk
Sultan Baibars, who was suzerain over the Patriarch of Alexandria (the ultimate
head of the Ethiopian church), for his help for a new Abuna in 1273; the letter
suggests this was not his first request. When one did not arrive, he blamed the
intervention of the Sultan of Yemen, who had hindered the progress of his
messenger to Cairo.
Taddesse Tamrat interprets Yekuno Amlak's son's allusion to Syrian
priests at the royal court as a result of this lack of attention from the Patriarch.
Taddesse also notes that around this time, the Patriarchs of Alexandria and
Antioch were struggling for control of the appointment of the bishop of Jerusalem,
until then the prerogative of the Patriarch of Antioch. One of the moves in this
dispute was Patriarch Ignatius III David's appointment of an Ethiopian pilgrim as
Abuna. This pilgrim never attempted to assume this post in Ethiopia, but --
Taddesse Tamrat argues -- the lack of Coptic bishops forced Yekuno Amlak to
rely on the Syrian partisans who arrived in his kingdom.
Yekuno Amlak ordered the construction of the Church of Gennete Maryam
near Lalibela, which contains the earliest surviving dateable wall paintings in
Ethiopia.

. . . Emperor Yekuno Amlak of the Solomid dynasty was
supported by a line of Ethiopian theologians: Tekle Haymanot,
Iyasus Mo'a and the Abbot Yohannes . . .
Tekle Haymanot or Takla
Haymanot (Ge'ez takla hāymānōt, modern
tekle hāymānōt, "Plant of Faith"; known in
the Coptic Church as Saint Takla
Haymanot of Ethiopia) (c. 1215 – c. 1313)
was an Ethiopian monk who founded a
major monastery in his native province of
Shewa. He is considered a saint by both
the Coptic and Ethiopian Churches. His
feast day is August 17, and the 24th day of
every month in the Ethiopian calendar is
dedicated to Tekle Haymanot. Tekle
Haymanot was born in the district of Bulga
on the eastern edge of Shewa, the son of
the priest Sagaz Ab ("Gift of Faith") and his
wife Egzi'e Haraya ("Choice of God"), who
is also known as Sarah. According to
tradition, his ancestors had been Christian
who had settled in Shewa ten generations
before.
The Lion of Judah
His father gave Tekle Haymanot his earliest religious instruction; later he
was ordained a priest by the Egyptian bishop Qerilos. During his youth, Shewa
was subject to a number of devastating raids by Motalami, the pagan king of
Damot. As a result, the morale of Christians in Shewa had weakened, and the
practice of paganism increased. There are a number of traditions, some of less
historical value than others, that describe Tekle Haymanot's interactions with
Motalami.
The first significant point in his life was when Tekle Haymanot, at the age
of 30, travelled north to settle at the monastery of Iyasus Mo'a, who had only a
few years before founded a monastery on an island in the middle of Lake Hayq in
the district of Amba Sel (the present-day Amhara Region). There he studied
under the abbot for nine years before travelling to Tigray, where he visited Axum,
then stayed for a while at the monastery of Debre Damo, where he studied under
Abbot Yohannes, Iyasus Mo'a's spiritual teacher. By this point, a small group of
followers began to attach themselves around him.

Eventually Tekle Haymanot left Debre Damo with his followers to return to
Shewa. On his return route, he stopped at Iyasus Mo'a's monastery in Lake
Hayq, where tradition states he received the full investiture of an Ethiopian
monk's habit. The historian Taddesse Tamrat sees in the existing accounts of
this act an attempt by later writers to justify the seniority of the monastery in Lake
Hayq over the followers of Tekle Haymanot.
Once in Shewa, he introduced the spirit of renewal that Christianity was
experiencing in the northern provinces. He settled in the central area between
Shilalish and Grarya, where he founded in 1284 the monastery of Debre Atsbo
(renamed in the 15th century Debre Libanos). This monastery became one of the
most important religious institutions of Ethiopia, not only founding a number of
daughter houses, but its abbot became one of the principal leaders of the
Ethiopian Church called the Echege, second only to the Abuna.
Tekle Haymanot lived for 29 years after the foundation of this monastery,
dying in the year before Emperor Wedem Arad did; this would date Tekle
Haymanot's death to 1313. He was first buried in the cave where he had
originally lived as a hermit; almost 60 years later he was reinterred at Debre
Libanos. In the 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie constructed a new church at
Debre Libanos Monastery over the site of the Saint's tomb. It remains a place of
pilgrimage and a favored site for burial for many people across Ethiopia.
Tekle Haymanot is frequently represented as an old man with wings on his
back and only one leg visible. There are a number of explanations for this
popular image. C.F. Beckingham and G.W.B. Huntingford recount one story, that
the saint "having stood too long, one of his legs broke, whereupon he stood on
one foot for seven years." Paul B. Henze describes his missing leg as appearing
as a "severed leg ... in the lower left corner discreetly wrapped in a cloth." The
traveller Thomas Pakenham learned from the Prior of Debre Damo how Tekle
Haymanot received his wings:
One day he said he would go to Jerusalem to see the Garden of
Gethsemane and the hill of blood that is called Golgotha. But
Shaitan (Satan) planned to stop Teklahaimanot going on his
journey to the Holy Land, and he cut the rope which led from the
rock to the ground just as Teklahaimanot started to climb down.
Then God gave Teklahaimanot six wings and he flew down to the
valley below ... and from that day onwards Teklahaimanot would fly
back and forth to Jerusalem above the clouds like an airplane.
Many traditions hold that Tekle Haymanot played a significant role in
Yekuno Amlak's ascension as the restored monarch of the Solomonic dynasty,
following two centuries of rule by the Zagwe dynasty, although historians like
Taddesse Tamrat believe these are later inventions. (A few older traditions credit

Iyasus Mo'a with this honor) Another tradition credits Tekle Haymanot as the only
Abuna born in Ethiopia until the church was granted autocephaly in the 1950s.
Tekle Maymanot studied under Iyasus Mo'a (Iyäsus Mo'a, "Jesus has
Conquered" c. 1214 – c. 1294). Iyasus Mo'a is a saint of the Ethiopian Orthodox
Tewahedo Church; his feast day is 26 Hedar (or 5 December). In life he was an
Ethiopian monk and abbot of Istifanos Monastery in Lake Hayq of Amba Sel.
At the age of 30, he travelled to the monastery of Debre Damo during the
abbacy of Abba Yohannis where he was made a monk, and was given arduous
tasks by the abbot. After seven years, he left Debra Damo and came to live with
a hermetic community living around the 8th century church of Istanafanos at
Lake Hayq, and organized this group into a monastery with rules and a school.
One of the students of this school was Saint Tekle Haymanot, who stayed at the
monastery for 10 years.
His biography, the Gadla Iyasus Mo`a ("Acts of Iyasus Mo`a"), records
that Yekuno Amlak had fled from the authorities in Amba Sel and hid in the
church because of a prophecy (tinbit) that he would become a king. His mother,
upon hearing such prediction, brought him to Istifanos Monastery in Lake Hayq
and begged the priests there to hide her son and save him from being killed.
Iyasus Mo'a protected and educated the boy, and in return, Emperor Yekuno
Amlak built the structure to house his community. Later hagiographies state that
Yekuno Amlak was helped by Tekle Haymanot, but the critical researches of
Carlo Conti Rossini suggest that the Gadla Iyasus Mo`a is closer to the correct
version of events.
Abbot Johannes ministered in a long religious tradition. The Ethiopian
Orthodox Church, or Tewhado, dates the coming of Christianity to Ethiopia to the
fourth century AD, when a Christian philosopher from Tyre named Meropius was
shipwrecked on his way to India. Meropius died but his two wards, Frumentius
and Aedesius were washed ashore and taken to the royal palace. Eventually
they became king Ella Amida’s private secretary and royal cupbearer
respectively. They served the king well, and Frumentius became regent for the
infant prince Ezana when Ella Amida died. Frumentius and Aedesius were also
permitted to prosyletize the new religion in Aksum (as modern Ethiopia was then
known). After some time, Frumentius and Aedesius returned to the
Mediterranean, travelling down the Nile through Egypt to do so. When they
reached Egypt, Frumentius contacted bishop Athanasius of Alexandria and
begged him to send missionaries back to Aksum, since the people there had
proved so ready to receive the gospel.
Athanasius agreed that the need was urgent, and immediately appointed
Frumentius to the task, which needed someone fluent in the language and
sensitive to the customs of Aksum. He ordained Frumentius the first abuna or
bishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Frumentius has since come to be

known as the Abuna Salama or bishop of peace. His mission was successful
and, with the support of king Ezana, Ethiopia became a Christian nation.
The link between the Ethiopian church and the Patriarch of Alexandria
was not broken until the 20th century, since the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria
has sent Ethiopia each of its suceeding Abunas. This has meant that the
Ethiopian church has been ruled by Egyptians for sixteen centuries.
Towards the end of the 5th century nine monks arrived, probably from
Syria, though perhaps from Egypt, and introduced monasticism into Ethiopia.
Monasticism has remained a dominant feature of the Ethiopian church to this
day.
These monks may have been driven out of Syria after the Council of
Chalcedon for being Monophysite (my page) Christians. Monophysites
(mono=one, phusis = nature) believe that the divine and human natures of Christ
were fused into a single nature at his birth. The Ecumentical Council of
Chalcedon, on the other hand distinguished between the divine nature of Christ
and his human nature, declaring that Jesus had two distinct natures, and in the
process declaring the the Monophysites heretical. At any rate, whether or not it
was due to the Nine Saints, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, along with the
Coptic Church of Egypt, and smaller churches in Syria,Turkey and Arminia, have
remained non-Chalcedonian.. These non-Chalcedonian churches have formed a
distinctively Southern branch of the worldwide church.
The nine monks also encouraged the translation of the Bible into Ge’ez,
which was the language of the people at the time. The Ethiopian church
continues to use Ge’ez as its liturgical language, though it is no longer a living
language.
During the seventh century, the Muslim conquests cut the Ethiopians off
from the rest of the Christian world, except for the Ethiopian monastary in
Jerusalem, which continued to be a pilgrimage site for pious Ethiopian monks,
and the continuing thread of contact with Egypt maintained because the Coptic
Patriarch of Alexandria supplied the Ethiopian Church with its Abuna. Initially
relations between the Ethiopians and the Muslims were cordial, with mutual trade
and mutual religious toleration, some of which grew out of real religious
similarities. The prophet Mohammed also instructed his followers to be kind to
the Ethiopians, since they had been kind to several of Mohammed’s companions
who had fled there
Eventually, however, relations deteriorated and Ethiopia slid into its dark
ages, retreating into the securitity of the mountains to defend themselves against
the Muslims. They did, however, maintain their independence, their culture, their
identity and their faith.

In the 12th century Ethiopia emerged from the dark ages under the
leadership of a new Zagwe (Zague) dynasty. The Zagwes were from central
Ethiopia and of dubious background. Later ecclesiastical texts accuse them of
not being of the pure Solomonid lineage -- that is not being descended from
Menelik, the son of the biblical king Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, who
supposedly founded the royal house of Ethiopia. In part to establish their
religious credentials, in part to stake a claim to God’s favor, in part to create a
focus for religious devotion inside Ethiopia and particularly at the Zagwe capital,
in part to re-direct the energies of pilgrims from Jerusalem, and in part out of
genuine religous devotion. King Lalibela had a set of ten churches built in his
capital of Roha, which has since be renamed Lalibela. These churches, carved
out of the living rock, deserve to be one of the wonders of the world and are a
remarkable monument to the skill and craftsmanship of the 13th century
Ethiopians.
In the sixteenth century Ethiopia was nearly overrun by the armies of the
Muslim general Ahmed Gran who waged jihad on Ethiopia with great success.
He took control of the country, but when he was killed by a Portuguese musket in
an Ethiopian counter-attack in 1543 the incipient Muslim state in Ethiopia simply
fell apart for lack of leadership. Portguese military support was critical to the
success of the counter-attack, though it had not been enough to prevent Ahmed
Gran from overrunning Ethiopia in the first place.
John Bermudez, a Portuguese who had been visiting Ethiopia during
Ahmed Gran’s conquest, and who had slipped through to appeal for Portuguese
aid, took advantage of the death of the abuna to claim that the dying patriarch
had appointed him successor, and that the pope has appointed him Archbishop
of Ethiopia when John Bermudez had been in Europe. There is no evidence that
either claim was true, but the Portuguese in Ethiopia believed him and pressured
king Galawdewos to adopt the Latin Roman Catholic Liturgy. A mission of Jesuits
was sent out to further pressure the Ethiopian court, which resisted any thought
of joining the Roman Catholic Church
The following century, king Suseynos (1607-32) became Catholic in the
hope of an advantgeous militry alliance with the west, but his successor drove
the Catholic missionaires out of Ethiopia again when they tried to assert fullblown
Catholicism. Alphonsus Mendes, who was sent out as patriarch of
Ethiopia, demanded that all Ethiopian Christians be re-baptized, and the priests
re-ordained, though he permitted the married priests to remain married. He
prohibited the Ethiopian custom of circumcision, and insisted that Saturday be
turned from the Sabbath as observed by the Ethiopians to a fast day as observed
by Ethiopian Christians.
Orthodox Christianity lost considerable ground in ninetheenth century
Ethiopia, in part due to the expansion of the pagan or Muslim Galla, especially in
the southern regions of Ethiopia, which had been a Christian stronghold. Many of

the monastaries survived, because they were so inaccessable, but as pockets
within a greater Muslim or pagan whole. Ethiopian Orthodoxy, which had very
little by way of evangelistic impetus, had little appeal to the newcomers, who
found Orthodox fasts odd an onerous and who no more understood the Ge’ez of
the liturgy than their Christian neighbours did. The Church also suffered from the
lack of leadership and ordiantions for much of the nineteenth century, since the
Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, himself in deep difficulties, did not provide the
Ethiopian church with its abuna, and when he did the abuna found himself
powerless in the face of the distintegration of the Ethiopian state. Without a
strong king to hold it together and direct the abuna, the church was essentially
rudderless.
The fortunes of the church turned in the latter half of the century, when
Egypt provided a new abuna, and when Ethiopia was once again centralized by a
succession of kings who were genuinely devout and looked after the interests of
the church. The most important of these kings was Menelik II, who succeeded in
holding off and defeating the Italian attempts to colonize Ethiopia. His efforts and
skills meant that Ethiopia was the only African state whose full sovereignty
continued to be recognized by the European powers throughout the Scramble for
Africa.
In the 20th century Ethiopia has seen the influx of Roman Catholic and
Protestant missionaries and the foundation of a number of Protestant churches.
Internally, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church won the right to appoint their own
Abuna, rather than have the Abuna always be an Egyptian Copt appointed by the
Patriarch of Alexandria.
Ethiopia is a land of churches. Most village churches are round or
octagonal, with a conical grass roof. Monastic churches and older churches are
larger and typically rectangular. This reflects the fact that Ethiopian local church
architecture adapted itself to the African hut form, though at the same time, it
also reflects the fact that the Ethiopian church liturgy, with its emphasis on the
holy mysteries in the center of the church, the Tabot (or the ark) also in the
center, and with the participation of multiple priests and lay clerks chanting and
drumming, simply works better in a round church.
Ethiopian Orthodox Churches typically consist of three concentric rings:
the innermost ring, called the sanctuary, holds the ark, typically a small wooden
coffer. Priests and the emperor take the Eucharist, which is a part of every
service [check] in the sanctuary. The second ring is the "holy place" where the
congregation receives the sacrament, while the outer ring is called the "choir, "
where the priests chant the scriptures in Ge’ez.
The Ethiopian Church has maintained many more Jewish practices than
most other Christian Churches, every Ethiopian Christian male is circumcised,
devout Ethiopian Christians keep Sabbath (as well as Sunday), an ark is an

essential part of every church, and is carried out of the church for festivals , and
priests will sacrifice a goat or a lamb for the sick. Ethiopian Christians claim a
long Jewish heritage before the coming of Christianity. They trace the royal line
back to Menelik (my page)the son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon,
though that claim cannot be independently verified. They also claim that the true
Ark of the Covenant still exists and is kept safe in an Ethiopian monastary.
Conclusion of the Gondar intellectual line
So what is the lesson of the Gondar line’s intellectual legacy within New York
Alpha?
The Gondar line proves that our reach with the Sankore line was not a
token embrace of diversity after 1969. New York Alpha’s intellectual tradition
touches down in both west and east Africa, in both the Muslim and Christian
traditions of the continent.
The Gondar intellectual line is part of New York Alpha’s local Chapter lore, first recorded by
brother Cadwalader E. Linthicum (1885)(1889) and preserved by
Walter Sheppard (’29)(’32) and Fred E. Hartzch (’28)(’31).
“To know the lore, is to tend the Tree.”