c. 1998 Religion News Service

LALIBELA, Ethiopia _ Laden with treasure and hand-carved from solid rock, the 11 churches of this impoverished mountain village are a wonder of the medieval ingenuity that created them and the religious devotion that maintained them for centuries.

They also are the scene of a sickening betrayal that has left many wondering if there is something rotten at the heart of one of Christendom’s oldest churches.

A priest, whose forefathers have preserved the Lalibela churches since they were carved from the mountainside in the 12th century, last year stole one of the church’s most priceless relics: a 15-pound solid gold cross that had been kept safely in Lalibela for more than 700 years.

The priest and a market trader to whom he gave the cross are in jail, but no trace of the priceless cross has been found.

Home to Judaism from the 9th century B.C. and to Christianity since 34 A.D., Ethiopia has some of the most historically valuable Judeo-Christian relics, manuscripts and art in the world. With increasing frequency, such priceless artifacts are disappearing from the thousands of Ethiopian monasteries and churches.

Concerned the nation is losing its heritage, the Ministry of Culture has proposed a plan to move the artifacts out of churches and monasteries into secure museums. Patriarch Abune Paulos, head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, agrees in principle but wants to build secure display places in each church and monastery. For now neither side has enough money to do either and parish priests and monks strongly resist anything denying them access to treasures they have guarded for centuries.

Making matters worse is the bitter border dispute with Eritrea, which has radically cut the number of tourists visiting Ethiopia and upon whose donations many priests and monks are completely dependent.”Those things were kept for centuries. The monks stayed _ never with a full salary, without a full stomach ever. No one ever dared to come and take anything. Things began to happen in our time after we began to cross paths with our modern visitors,”Patriarch Paulos said in an interview.

What makes the trend harder to understand is the church’s long ascetic tradition of monastic life and the observance of many fast days. The patriarch resists blaming priests for theft but said the isolation and simple life of the clergy has been warped by easy money bestowed by tourists.

The theft of church treasure, however, also reflects a broader crisis.

Once able to create magnificent works, the church is filled with worrying signs of ignorance and neglect.

In one Lalibela church, for example, treasures are kept in a carved 12th century wooden box designed to be opened with an arm-sized wooden screw. A few years ago, priests decided the original mechanism was too slow so they cut a hole in the box and fitted a crude wooden door held on with nails and rude hinges. Cut to the wrong size, the door left a gap that was sloppily filled

with wire window screen.

The crisis is not confined to remote churches and monasteries. In Axum, the most important cultural city in Ethiopia, a lone monk guards the most holy relic in the church, which Ethiopians believe to be the original Arc of the Covenant which held the Ten Commandments. Two years ago, according to the local member of parliament, the monk was dismissed after allegations that he stole items from the temple.

A special committee of the church synod was appointed to investigate allegations against the patriarch himself.”The committee has expelled large numbers of appointees of the Patriarch, who were considered a source of the problem,”said Taddesse Tamrat, a religious historian at Addis Ababa University.

Ironically, the troubles of the church come at a time of broad religious revival that no one can truly explain. During 17 years of hard-line Marxist rule, which ended in 1991, religion was suppressed and a generation grew up under an official reign of atheism. Now those same young people are flocking to church, with many attending Mass daily, observing fast days once only observed by priests, and forming lay organizations to press for church reform.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is benefiting from the revival as are the Jehovah’s Witnesses and a variety of Protestant and Pentecostal churches that have been aggressively seeking new members. Evangelists seek out students on campus, the bereaved at funerals and Ethiopia’s rural poor.

With Western financial backing the Orthodox Church cannot match, the new churches have established development organizations offering food aid, training, road building and water projects to help win new converts.

In the contest for church members, relics are both a strength and weakness for Orthodoxy. Every Orthodox Church contains an inner chamber for special relics and the”holy of holies,”a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, which is wrapped in cloth and paraded through the streets each January 19 for Timkat, the Ethiopian celebration of the arrival of the wise men in Bethlehem after Christ’s birth.

Traditionalists flock to Timkat, but new churches try to win converts by arguing such celebrations show the Orthodox Church fosters reverence for objects over biblical principles.

The Orthodox Church still claims 65 percent of the population as parishioners, while estimates of Protestant support range from 5 to 11 percent. The church has fought back with its own development arm but remains short of resources. Before Emperor Haile Sellasie was overthrown in 1974 the church controlled about a third of the land and enjoyed government support as the official state religion.

Competition between faiths has led to a few violent clashes. And the Orthodox Church, which controls most burial grounds, refuses to allow non-Orthodox Christians to be buried in Orthodox cemeteries.

In his interview, the patriarch placed great emphasis on the need to modernize the Orthodox Church and reach out to young people with vocational training and improved education.

A century ago, the church resisted efforts by Emperor Menelik to modernize the nation with railroads and telephones. That image of resistance to change continues to dog the church and lead modern-minded youth into the arms of Protestants and Pentecostal churches.”Whatever the patriarch says, the changes are only superficial. If you listen to ordinary sermons, they still sound like priests of the medieval period. There is no effort to illuminate the problems of the 20th century,”said Tamrat, an Orthodox Church member.

The patriarch’s efforts at reform have improved church finances but are unpopular with conservative clergy. When he visited the important church center in the western town of Gondar last year, local priests left the church locked and stayed away.”The patriarch’s reign has been very filled with conflict within the church. You see quite a lot of problems: the decline in morale of the clergy, negligence in following their duties and priests becoming more interested in material gain,”Tamrat said.

DEA END HERBERT