In the history of Christianity, the African Rite refers to a now defunct Catholic, Western liturgical rite, and is considered a development or possibly a local use of the primitive Roman Rite. It used the Latin language.
The African Rite may be considered in two different periods:
- The ante-Nicene period when Christians were persecuted and could not freely develop forms of public worship, and when the liturgical prayers and acts had not become fixed.
- The post-Nicene period when the simple, improvised forms of prayer gave way to more elaborate, set formularies, and the primitive liturgical actions evolved into grand and formal ceremonies.
Read more about African Rite: Background, Ante-Nicene Period, Post-Nicene Period
Famous quotes containing the words african and/or rite:
“The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.”
—Thylias Moss, African American poet. As quoted in the Wall Street Journal (May 12, 1994)
“[T]he Congregational minister in a neighboring town definitely stated that ‘the same spirit which drove the herd of swine into the sea drove the Baptists into the water, and that they were hurried along by the devil until the rite was performed.’”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)