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Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church from 1992–2012
Abuna Paulos was known as Father Yohannes when he first came to work on a ThM at Princeton Seminary in 1969. In 1972 he was admitted to the PhD program, but was summoned home to Ethiopia in 1974, consecrated as Bishop Paulos, and put in charge of ecumenical relations and social affairs by His Holiness Patriarch Theophilos. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in a Marxist coup, Bishop Paulos and many other clergy were imprisoned without trial by the new government. Bishop Paulos spent six years in prison and one year under house arrest, unable to leave the country or contact friends from abroad.
“When I was in prison,” he once said, “my dream was always to return to Princeton. When I woke from sleep in those months in my cell, I had often been dreaming about walking across the campus, or reading in the library, or sitting in the dining room eating with my faculty and student friends…”
In 1982 he was released and through the efforts of Princeton Seminary and the World Council of Churches was quickly brought out of Ethiopia to resume his studies in Princeton. He graduated with the Class of 1988, having completed his doctoral work with a dissertation on the understanding of Mary in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He also found time during his studies to work with Ethiopian refugees, beginning in New York City but eventually helping to establish congregations in cities across the country.
In 1992 Bishop Paulos was consecrated as Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the spiritual leader of at that time 37 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. In 2006 he was named one of the seven serving presidents of the World Council of Churches. He was especially concerned to support war-displaced refugees and drought-hit Ethiopians and received the Nansen Refugee Award from the UN.
