_____In
the 1940s, a Garveyite bishop named Edwin Collins set up what he said was
a legitimate Coptic church under the Patriarch of Alexandria. However the
Garveyite Coptics were tied more closely to the African Orthodox Church
than to Egypt, and their canonicity was widely doubted. In 1952 the Garveyite
Coptic diocese of Trinidad and Tobago broke away and placed itself under
Addis Ababa. Clergy were imported from Africa and a fully canonical church
was organised in the islands. Trinidad is an Ethiopian Orthodox success
story: native- born clergy (including old-time Garveyite leaders) were rapidly
ordained and parishes were founded all over the country and in Guyana. ABBA
LAIKE MANDEFRO: In 1959 the central Garveyite Coptic organisation in New
York tried to improve its canonical status. The archbishop went to Ethiopia,
where he was supposedly ordained chorepiscopos, and returned with a group
of young Ethiopian priests and deacons who were to study in American universities.
These clergy almost immediately broke with the Garveyites, however, and
set up parishes more oriented to the needs of Ethiopian immigrants; the
Garveyite Coptic church which had sponsored them went into an evidently
irreversible decline. One of the young priests who came over at this time
soon became Ethiopian Orthodoxy's main representative abroad. He is Laike
M. Mandefro, now Archbishop Yesehaq, exarch of the Western Hemisphere and
many would add Apostle to the Caribbean.
|
