page_title: Early African church
section_title: Liturgy
hierarchical_section_title: Early African church / Liturgy
caption_attribution_description: English: Rogatianus epitaph, cevitas popthensis, notice the Chi Rho
context_page_description: The name Early African Church is given to the Christian communities inhabiting the region known politically as Roman Africa, and comprised geographically somewhat around the area of the Roman Diocese of Africa, namely: the Mediterranean littoral between Cyrenaica on the east and the river Ampsaga on the west; that part of it that faces the Atlantic Ocean being called Mauretania, in addition to Byzacena. Thus corresponding somewhat to contemporary Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. The evangelization of Africa followed much the same lines as those traced by Roman civilization.
  Informal primacy was exercised by the Archdiocese of Carthage, a metropolitan archdiocese also known as "Church of Carthage".
context_section_description: The liturgy of the African Church is known to us from the writings of the Fathers, but there exists no complete work, no liturgical book, belonging to it. The writings of Tertullian, of St. Cyprian, of St. Augustine are full of valuable indications that indicate the liturgy of Africa presented many characteristic points of contact with the liturgy of the Roman Church. The liturgical year comprised the feasts in honour of Our Lord and a great number of feasts of martyrs, which are offset by certain days of penance. Africa, however, does not seem to have conformed rigorously, in this matter, with what was else customary. The station days. The fast of these days was not continued beyond the third hour after noon. Easter in the African Church had the same character as in other Churches; it continued to draw a part of the year into its orbit by fixing the date of Lent and of the Paschal season, while Pentecost and the Ascension likewise gravitated around it. Christmas and the Epiphany were kept clearly apart, and had fixed dates. The cultus of the martyrs is not always to be distinguished from that of the dead, and it is only by degrees that the line was drawn between the martyrs who were to be invoked and the dead who were to be prayed for. The prayer (petition) for a place of refreshment, refrigerium, bears witness to the belief of an interchange of help between the living and the departed. In addition, moreover, to the prayer for the dead, we find in Africa the prayer for certain classes of the living.
caption: Epitaph of a berber patriarch found in the actual Ouled Moumen, Souk Ahras Province
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