Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Ethiopian calendar governs the church year here: thirteen months, and a year that runs seven to eight years behind the civil reckoning.

The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church shares the tsenatsil with the Ethiopian church, from which it separated administratively in 1993.

One of the Oriental Orthodox communion of churches that did not accept the Council of Chalcedon.

This church did not receive the Council of Chalcedon and does not use its two-natures formula, holding that Cyril of Alexandria had already stated the matter correctly and that the Definition of 451 divides what should not be divided. This is the single point that separates the Oriental Orthodox churches from the Eastern Orthodox ones.

Universal jurisdiction and papal infallibility are not held here. This church's own autocephaly was granted in 1993 by the Coptic Pope of Alexandria, within the Oriental Orthodox family, and neither Rome nor Constantinople had a part in it.

The creed is recited without the Latin addition. This church had already been separate from the Greek and Latin churches for four centuries before the addition became a dispute between them, and has never received it.

The Eritrean church holds the Tewahedo Christology of its Ethiopian mother church and refuses the Chalcedonian definition with it.

Prayer for the dead is practised. A distinct state of satisfactory punishment is not taught.

Administratively part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church until granted its own autocephaly in 1993.

The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church was one body with the Ethiopian church until 1993 and keeps the practice in the same form, with the same schools behind it.

The Eritrean church shares the tradition and the liturgy but not the site, having become a separate patriarchate after Eritrean independence.

Carried unchanged out of the Ethiopian church when the two separated after Eritrean independence, the division having been jurisdictional and not liturgical.

Sung in Ge'ez as in the Ethiopian church, from the same books and in the same three modes.

The Eritrean church keeps the same sung office with the sistrum, the staff and the drum as the Ethiopian church from which it separated in 1993.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic, Armenian, Syriac and Ethiopian churches keep the same seven mysteries, likewise baptising, chrismating and communicating infants in one service, each with its own rites and its own reckoning of the details.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Each of these churches has its own family of anaphoras, and the Ethiopian church uses more of them, fourteen in the received collection, than any other in Christendom.

Widened rather than duplicated: the Deggua is attributed by every source consulted to Saint Yared, a sixth century composer both the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches claim as their own shared founding musical figure, from before the two sees separated. The Eritrean church did not become autocephalous until 1993, and its Deggua tradition, including the three modes of chant Yared is credited with establishing, was never a separate composition from the Ethiopian church's own.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The epiclesis follows the institution narrative, as in the Byzantine rite.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The fraction is an extended rite here, with a fraction prayer that varies by season and by anaphora.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Each of the Oriental Orthodox churches keeps its own ancient liturgy in its own language, the Coptic of Saint Basil, the Armenian Badarak, the Ethiopian Qeddase, with a substantial fast required beforehand.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The institution narrative stands within the anaphora in each of these rites.

Affirmed at Ephesus in 431, the last of the councils this church receives, and carried through an unusually dense Marian liturgical cycle rather than through a later definition.

Confessed in the words of the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople, which this church receives with the first two ecumenical councils.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian churches keep their own iconographic styles and honour images in worship, though they were not party to the seventh council at which the East settled the question, having separated in the fifth century.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches keep an unusually heavy Marian devotion, with monthly as well as annual feasts and widely reported apparitions such as Zeitoun in 1968, and honour their own martyrs, of whom the Coptic calendar counts very many.

Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The evening office is kept daily, and in the Coptic use the Raising of Incense at Vespers precedes the Liturgy of the following morning.

The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church shares Ge'ez as its liturgical language with the Ethiopian church, from which it separated administratively in 1993.

The miaphysite definition, held since the rejection of Chalcedon in 451.