The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s focus should have been on theology instead of being an economic and political instrument that provides a way of life. In the name of religious teaching, the Orthodox Church made it possible for the Amharic language to expand across the empire of Ethiopia while at the same time allowing the Amharas to take any land they want anywhere in Oromia and elsewhere.
Beyond providing them a chance to control resources, it helped them dominate the empire’s political, economic, and cultural structures, and that underpinned to stay strong over all kinds of social life. Through the Church teachings, it served as an essential tool to achieve psychological superiority over 80+ ethnic groups. While it is the legal means that they use to resurrect their cultural value, it also served as an instrument to degrade other nations’ and nationalities’ self-worth and identity.
Because the Ethiopian Orthodox Church remains to be Amhara’s weapon of mass confusion, it forced others to lose confidence in their institution such as Waaqeffanna, the Oromo traditional religion. It slowly replaced the Oromo social value and norms with the Amhara norms thereby making Oromummaa less and less important.
Although it pretended to be a faith-based undertaking, it used the state powers to the full to create a process much like the one the Australian whites used to assimilate the Aboriginal people into the British identity. It strengthened Amhara’s attitude of looking down on others so fiercely helping them keep the political and social upper hand, and yet made them have insufficient and underdeveloped social skills, an impediment to forming a better relationship with others. As such, they avoid carrying an honest conversation with their fellow Church leaders making it difficult to solve administrative and operational matters.
They wrestle against logical principles because they think they will lose power if they open an honest dialog and come to a logical and just consensus. As a result, spiritual wickedness became a norm inside the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the definition of being religious got replaced by rampant mental corruption as they became more and more desensitized to the truth.
This is what has precipitated the event of January 22, 2023, for the Oromo senior clergy to take a radical step in calling upon the Oromo and South peoples to rise and defend the Church’s doctrine and reinforce its original value.
