The Jesuit Mission and the Sabbath It Tried to End

The dual observance of Saturday and Sunday survived a direct attempt to end it. Portuguese Jesuit missionaries had worked in Ethiopia since the sixteenth century, and in 1622 the reigning emperor, Susenyos, converted to Roman Catholicism and began imposing Latin liturgical practice on the church by decree, including an order that Saturday observance, which the missionaries read as a Judaizing survival rather than a Christian custom, be dropped in favor of Sunday alone. The order provoked open rebellion among a population that read the double Sabbath as inseparable from its own church's identity, and Susenyos abdicated in 1632 in the face of that resistance. His son and successor, Fasilides, expelled the Jesuit mission from the kingdom the same year and restored the traditional practice his father had tried to suppress. The episode is remembered within the tradition as proof that the double observance was never a peripheral custom that could be traded away for closer ties with Rome, and read by outside historians as one of the clearest cases anywhere of a Christian community treating a specific liturgical practice, rather than a creed or a doctrine, as the line it would not let an outside church move.