APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTION

ECCE TABERNACULUM

OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF ATHANASIUS

ON THE TRANSFER OF THE ROMAN CURIA AND OF THE RESIDENCE OF THE APOSTOLIC SEE TO THE CITY OF ESZTERGOM

ATHANASIUS, BISHOP, SERVANT OF THE SERVANTS OF GOD, FOR AN EVERLASTING MEMORIAL

1.Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men (Rev 21:3). Before ever there was a temple, there was a tent. Before the cedar and the gold of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant went upon poles through a wilderness, and the glory of God was not ashamed to travel. When Israel struck camp, God struck camp with Israel. Let this be the first word of this Constitution, and let it be understood by every church in every land: the House of God has not fallen. It has been folded, and lifted, and carried.

2.All the world knows what has been done in these two years, and We will not adorn it. Voices from the stones have spoken to mankind in every tongue that mankind has ever spoken, commanding our withdrawal from the great waters, from their coasts, from the sky, and from the dark beyond the sky. The commanded withdrawal has been enforced with a precision that spares nothing it names and names nothing it spares. Rome, the city of the Apostles, lies within the forbidden coast. Our predecessor of holy memory, MARCELLUS III, would not leave his city until his city had, in truth, left him; he bore the bombardment of the Vatican’s precincts as a shepherd bears weather, and he died of it. We ask the whole Church to hold his name in honour and to imitate his courage while declining, as he would now command, his position: for the shepherd may die at his post, but he may not lead the flock to die at theirs.

3.Gathered in extraordinary conclave upon the road, in circumstances the Church did not choose and canonists will long examine, Our brothers saw fit — God forgive them and reward them — to place this burden upon a son of Ethiopia. We record this not as a wonder. The faith came to Ethiopia by shipwreck: a boy, Frumentius, cast up by the violence of the sea upon the Red Sea coast, became Abba Salama, Father of Peace, and the apostle of my people. God has done this before. He has made a beginning out of what the sea destroyed. He is doing it again, and this time the wreck is general, and the shore on which we are cast up is the whole interior of the earth.

4.The Church has been called from her infancy a ship — the barque of Peter. We know what is being asked in every place where this is read: what is a ship, when the sea is forbidden? We answer: a ship is a thing that can be carried. The peoples of the rivers have always known the portage — the stretch where the water fails and the boat goes up on the shoulders of the crew, and the crew does not on that account cease to be a crew, nor the voyage a voyage. The Church is now portaging. Let no one be ashamed of the portage. Let no one mistake it for the end of the voyage.

5.Therefore, having implored the light of the Holy Spirit, having heard the College of Cardinals in that portion which could be assembled, and having received from the Government and people of Hungary a welcome whose generosity We shall presently acknowledge, We establish and decree as follows:

I. The Roman Curia, together with the offices, tribunals, and dicasteries of the Apostolic See, is transferred to the city of Esztergom, in Hungary, which is constituted the seat of residence of the Supreme Pontiff and of the government of the universal Church, until it shall please God to alter the age.

II. The See of Rome is neither abolished, nor vacated, nor transferred. A see is not an address. We remain, by the unmerited mercy of God, Bishop of Rome; Our cathedral remains the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour at the Lateran; and We shall enter Our city as the law of the day permits — by daylight, as a pilgrim enters — and leave it before nightfall, as a guest leaves. We commend this discipline, which the faithful have begun to call the lex diei, to every bishop whose cathedral stands within the forbidden coasts.

III. Every church, chapel, shrine, and altar within the forbidden coasts remains consecrated. Nothing is to be deconsecrated by reason of the withdrawal alone. What was built for God shall not be unbuilt by us; if it must fall, let it fall consecrated, and let the wilderness that receives it receive holy ground. The celebration of the sacred liturgy within such churches by day, where it can be done without peril and without overnight remaining, is permitted and is encouraged.

IV. There is established the Office of the Recovery (Officium Recuperationis), charged with the retrieval, by daylight labour, of the sacred archives, relics, libraries, and patrimony of the Church from the forbidden coasts, and with their conveyance to Esztergom and to the continental archives now being prepared among the nations. Its labourers are to observe the withdrawal scrupulously. We will not purchase parchment with lives.

V. To the Government and people of Hungary, who have opened to the successor of Peter the city of Saint Stephen, primatial seat of a thousand years, We express a gratitude that this document is too poor to contain. We accept their hospitality as it has been offered: without condition upon Our office, without price upon Our freedom. The Apostolic See in Esztergom is guest, not subject; and Hungary, in this, is host, not master — as her own government has nobly insisted before We could ask.

VI. Concerning the dead of these two years — the drowned of the thirteen towns, the crews of the ships, the dead of Rome, and all whom the withdrawal has cost — We command their names to be gathered and their souls to be commended at every altar. We do not declare them martyrs, for martyrdom is witness unto death for the faith, and this was death of another kind, which has not yet told us its name. But We forbid, absolutely, the preaching of vengeance in their memory. There is no vengeance to preach. There is no one within our reach to strike, and We say plainly: even were there, the Cross has already instructed us.

VII. Concerning those who have spoken from the stones, We say what can be said, and no more.

They are creatures, or they are instruments; they are not God. Their word, whatever it is, adds nothing to the deposit of faith, which was closed with the apostles and is not reopened by astronomy. The Church does not baptize the stones, and the Church does not anathematize them. We will not worship them: latria belongs to God alone, and We admonish the faithful against every cult, divination, and superstition now sprouting beneath that motionless sky. And We will not curse them: for We do not know what We would be cursing, and the Church does not spend her anathemas in the dark.

Let it be recorded, because it is true, that they spoke to every tongue of man without exception and without precedence — to the tongue of the palace and the tongue of the fishing village in the same breath, at the same hour — which no throne of this earth has ever done. Let it also be recorded, because it is true, that they have killed men, women, and children of those same tongues, which every throne of this earth has done. Both truths stand. We decline to shave either one to make an idol or a demon of the remainder.

Nothing they have commanded requires of us sin. To abstain is not to apostatize. The sea is his, and he made it (Ps 95:5); we were told we might have dominion, but we were never told we were heirs, and Our own Scriptures have called us what their message called us — tenants — with this difference, that Scripture said it first (Lev 25:23). If their command is of creatures only, it will fail, as every such command has failed since Babel. If it is otherwise — if it moves, in ways We are not given to see, within the permission of Providence — then We shall not be found contending against what God has allowed (cf. Acts 5:38–39). Between these two possibilities the Church can live, and pray, and wait. She has waited out empires before. She can wait out silence.

6.To Our brothers and sisters of the coasts, who have lost the streets of their childhood and the graves of their parents: the Church of my own mothers and fathers keeps more days of fast than of feast, and has never on that account held God to be distant. Ethiopia has long known what the world now learns — that a commanded abstention can, by grace, become a chosen love. In my country there is a holy mountain, Debre Damo, that can be entered only by a rope let down from above, and it has been full of prayer for fourteen centuries. The whole Church now lives at the foot of such a mountain. Very well. We know what is done at the foot of such mountains: one calls up, and one waits, and one is not ashamed.

7.It was written of old, and We take it now not as a boast but as a burden of service: Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God (Ps 68:31). She stretches them out today holding what she never sought — the keys of Peter — and she opens them over all the peoples of the between, of every tongue the stones have spoken and every tongue they have not.

ስብሐት ለእግዚአብሔር — Glory be to God.

Given at Esztergom, at the tomb-side of holy predecessors not Our own who have become Our own, on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord — Timkat, the feast of the blessing of the waters we may no longer keep — the 19th day of January in the year 2031, of the Ethiopian reckoning the 11th of Ṭərr 2023, the first of Our pontificate.

ATHANASIUS PP.