Catholic Sensibility

I am writing on Sunday afternoon, after reading Benedict XVI’s homily for his Inauguration Mass. I was struck by the Pope’s call for Christian unity: “Both the image of the shepherd and that of the fisherman issue an explicit call to unity. ‘I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must lead them too, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd’ (Jn 10:16); these are the words of Jesus at the end of his discourse on the Good Shepherd. And the account of the 153 large fish ends with the joyful statement: ‘although there were so many, the net was not torn’ (Jn 21:11).” Earlier, the Pope had told us that this unity will not be achieved through power: “God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.” Any unity, then, must not be centered on power, but on “God’s sign: he himself is love.” And Benedict XVI began his homily by suggesting that we can see “God’s sign” when we contemplate the communion of saints. “In the suffering that we saw on the Holy Father’s face in those days of Easter, we contemplated the mystery of Christ’s Passion and we touched his wounds.” I want to reflect upon one other saint today: Gudina Tumsa, general secretary of the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekan Yesus (EECMY) from 1966 to 1979, who was abducted and then killed by a hostile Marxist military dictatorship in July, 1979. I am indebted to a recent lecture by Tasgara Hirpo, an Evangelical pastor who worked with Gudina Tumsa (Word and World 25 [2005]). Gudina was born in 1929, the son of farmers, part of the Oromo society, which had been reduced to a second-class status in the Ethiopian empire. He was ordained in 1958 and a year later, the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekan Yesus was founded with 20,000 members. Today it has 4.4 million (it joined the Lutheran World Federation in 1963). The church managed to transcend the ethnic divisions of Ethiopian by remembering, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). The church transcended the feudal system of Ethiopia by adopting a democratic framework in which the highest authority was a general assembly that elected a president, vice-president, and other church officers. The first two presidents were laymen. Their theology transcended the ideologies of Ethiopia without any sort of escapism from an often unbearable social, political, and economic situation. For, as Gudina wrote in 1975, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ is God’s power to save everyone who believes it. It is the power to save from eternal damnation, from exploitation, from political oppression, etc. Because of its eternal dimension the Gospel of Christ could never be replaced by any of the ideologies invented by men throughout the centuries. It is the only voice telling about a loving Father who gave His Son as a ransom for many.” Prior to the Ethiopian revolution, Gudina had omitted the name of Emperor Haile Selassie from the intercessions during the Sunday liturgy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ was simply incompatible with the recognition of an absolute monarch who claimed the power to eliminate anyone who disagreed with him. When the revolution came, the EECMY released a pastoral letter that said that, since complete allegiance was only due to God alone, ideologies could never be considered absolute. This meant that Christians could not support animosities and differences, but had to work for peace and reconciliation. In 1977, the second phase of the revolution started. Mengistu Haile Mariam eliminated his opponents and claimed absolute power. The closing of churches began. Gudina was arrested twice before he was finally abducted and killed. His wife was arrested, tortured, and jailed for ten years. Gudina could have left earlier. But, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer before him, Gudina said, “I cannot leave my country and my church.” Gudina’s absolute adherence to Jesus Christ before any ideology whatsoever meant that he had risked his life under the Emperor only to be killed by Marxist revolutionaries. A week before his death, he had said, “To be a Christian is not to be a hero to make history for oneself. A Christian goes as a lamb to be slaughtered only when he knows that this is in complete accord with the will of God who has called him to his service.” During his life, Gudina Tumsa was called to struggle against ideologies that claimed the total life of Ethiopian society. He also struggled against those who claimed, on the basis of the “two kingdoms,” that Christians had nothing to say against these “ideologies of power.” Gudina struggled against those who suggested that there should be a moratorium on accepting resources and personnel from the former colonial powers, because, as he said, Christianity needed to transcend self-pride and national feeling to recognize that the church of Christ is one, all believers belong to it, and the Lord Jesus is the head of the church. Eventually, Gudina Tumsa went as a lamb to be slaughtered. I am sure that Gudina Tumsa and Pope Benedict XVI would have important theological differences. But Gudina, I think, would have understood what the Holy Father meant when he said, “The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.” We will not become one flock through an “ideology of power” that would counsel “the destruction of whatever would stand in the way.” We do not even necessarily need heroes - only those who, like Christ Jesus and his follower Gudina, will stand “on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed.” This is “God’s sign” for us. Is it premature to find yourself mentally reciting, when you hear the name Gudina Tumsa, “Tu illum adiuva”?