Roman Catholic Church in Ethiopia

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The Roman Catholic Church in Ethiopia is part of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church .

There are around 800,000 Catholics in Ethiopia - just under 1 percent of the total population. They are the third largest Christian denomination after the members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Protestants in Ethiopia .

There are two particular churches of their own right with their own hierarchy, the Catholic Church ( Roman Rite ) with eight apostolic vicariates and an apostolic prefecture, and the Ethiopian Catholic Church united with Rome ( Ethiopian Rite ) with an archparchy and three eparchies. The Ethiopian rite is a special form of the Alexandrian rite .

The Holy See and Ethiopia have full diplomatic relations. Apostolic Nuncio has been Archbishop Antoine Camilleri since October 2019 .

structure

Latin Church
Ethiopian Catholic Church

history

The Portuguese voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century paved the way for direct contacts between the Church in Rome and the Ethiopian Orthodox Eastern Church in the Abyssinian Empire . The Portuguese Alfonso Mendez was appointed Patriarch of Ethiopia by Pope Urban VIII in 1622.

Emperor Fasilides drove the patriarchs and European missionaries, including Jerónimo Lobo , out of the country in 1636 . The previously good contacts that the emperor had with Rome came to a standstill.

However, the Ethiopian Catholic Church emerged with the ecclesiastical province of Addis Ababa , which is united with the Roman Catholic Church in Rome.

At the time of the occupation of Ethiopia by Italian troops after the Italian-Ethiopian War in 1936 and the unification of Ethiopia with the colony of Italian-Eritrea , attempts were made to force the Ethiopians to convert to Catholicism.

See also

swell