Syro-Chaldean Catholic Church

The Chaldean Catholic Church is an Eastern Catholic particular church (''sui iuris'') in full communion with the Holy See and the rest of the Catholic Church, and is headed by the Chaldean Patriarchate. Employing in its liturgy the East Syriac Rite in the Syriac dialect of the Aramaic language, it is part of Syriac Christianity. Headquartered in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Sorrows, Baghdad, Iraq, since 1950, it is headed by the Catholicos-Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako. In the late 2010s, it had a membership of 616,639, with a large population in diaspora and its home country of Iraq.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reports that, according to the Iraqi Christian Foundation, an agency of the Chaldean Catholic Church, approximately 80% of Iraqi Christians are of that church. In its own 2018 Report on Religious Freedom, the United States Department of State put the Chaldean Catholics at approximately 67% of the Christians in Iraq. The 2019 Country Guidance on Iraq of the European Union Agency for Asylum gives the same information as the United States Department of State.

The majority of Chaldean Catholics (), today are ethnic Assyrians, also known as Chaldo-Assyrians. In the Assyrian homeland, Chaldean Catholics primarily inhabited villages and cities that are located in what is now modern day Iraq, such as Alqosh, Ankawa, Araden, Baqofah, Batnaya, Karamlesh, Mangesh, Shaqlawa, Tesqopa, Tel Keppe, Dawodiya, Faysh Khabur and Zakho. Other Assyrian communities such as those from southeastern Turkey, as well as a minority in Syria and Iran, also adhere to the church.

Terminology

Neither before nor after the 15th century did the term "Chaldean" indicate a supposed ethnic connection of the Church of the East with ancient south Babylonian Chaldea and its inhabitants, which emerged during the 9th century BC after Chaldean tribes migrated from the Levant region of Urfa in Upper Mesopotamia to southeast Mesopotamia, and disappeared from history during the 6th century BC: it referred instead to the use by Christians of that church of the Syriac language, a form of the biblical Aramaic language, which was then and indeed until the 19th century generally called Chaldean.

Outside of Catholic Church usage, the term "Chaldean" continued to apply to all associated with the Church of the East tradition, whether they were in communion with Rome or not. It indicated not race or nationality, but only language or religion. Throughout the 19th century, it continued to be used of East Syriac Christians, whether "Nestorian" or Catholic, and this usage continued into the 20th century.

Historical usage

4th century

For many centuries, from at least the time of Jerome (c. 347 – 420), the term "Chaldean" was a misnomer that indicated the Biblical Aramaic language and was still the normal name in the nineteenth century. Jerome did know that Aramaic was in the Bible, where he designated the biblical Aramaic (or Old Aramaic) by the term 'Chaldean.' Jerome implied that one reason the books of Tobit and Judith are undeserving of inclusion within the biblical canon is because they were written in Chaldean. Because he translated the Hebrew Bible to Chaldean.

In Porphyry's ''Philosophy from Oracles'', quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in ''Praeparatio Evangelica'', from the early 4th century AD, the term "Chaldean" was mentioned as a synonym for "Assyrian": "The discovery was ascribed by the god to Egyptians, Phoenicians, Chaldeans (for these are the Assyrians), Lydians, and Hebrews."

15th–16th century

Only in 1445 did it begin to be used to mean Aramaic speakers in communion with the Catholic Church, on the basis of a decree of the Council of Florence, which accepted the profession of faith that Timothy, metropolitan of the Aramaic speakers in Cyprus, made in Aramaic, and which decreed that "nobody shall in future dare to call ..Chaldeans, Nestorians".

In the 16th century, Spanish cleric Francis Xavier used the term "Chaldean" for the Syriac language in this statement: "Not even the Caciz themselves understand the prayers which they recite: which are in a foreign language (I think Chaldean). They render special honours to the Apostle St. Thomas, claiming to be descendants of the Christians begotten to Jesus Christ by that Apostle in these countries."

19th century

A letter from November 14, 1838, states: “The so-called “Chaldeans" of Mesopotamia received that title, as you know, from the pope, on their becoming Catholics.” Previously, when there were as yet no Catholic Aramaic speakers of Mesopotamian origin, the term "Chaldean" was applied with explicit reference to their "Nestorian" religion. Thus Jacques de Vitry wrote of them in 1220/1 that "they denied that Mary was the Mother of God and claimed that Christ existed in two persons. They consecrated leavened bread and used the 'Chaldean' (Syriac) language". The decree of the Council of Florence was directed against use of "Chaldean" to signify "non-Catholic."

In 1852 George Percy Badger distinguished those whom he called Chaldeans from those whom he called Nestorians, but by religion alone, never by language, race or nationality.

The Assyrian ethnicity of Chaldean Catholics is also attested by Assyriology. In 1881, archeologist and author Hormuzd Rassam stated: “The inhabitants of Assyria consist now of mixed races, Arabs, Turkomans, Koords, Yezeedees, Jews, and Christians called Chaldeans and Syrians. The last two-named denominations doubtless belong to one nationality, the Assyrian, and they were only distinguished by these two names when they separated consequent upon the theological dispute of the age, namely, Monophisites or Jacobites, and Nestorians.”

Contemporary

In 1920, Herbert Henry Austin stated: “It may not be out of place, therefore, to point out that there were exceedingly few Roman Catholic Assyrians or “Chaldeans" as they are generally termed when they embrace Rome, amongst the refugees at Baqubah. The very large majority of the Roman Catholic Assyrians in the Mosul vilayet did not join the mountaineers and fight against the Turks and in consequence were permitted by the Turks to continue to dwell practically unmolested in their homes about Mosul."

Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid of the Chaldean Catholic Church (1989–2003), who accepted the term Assyrian as descriptive of his nationality and ethnicity, commented: "When a portion of the Church of the East became Catholic in the 17th Century, the name given to the church was 'Chaldean' based on the Magi kings who were believed by some to have come from what once had been the land of the Chaldean, to Bethlehem. The name 'Chaldean' does not represent an ethnicity, just a church ..We have to separate what is ethnicity and what is religion ..I myself, my sect is Chaldean, but ethnically, I am Assyrian." Earlier, he said: "Before I became a priest I was an Assyrian, before I became a bishop I was an Assyrian, I am an Assyrian today, tomorrow, forever, and I am proud of it."

Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Urmia, Mar Toma Audo (1854-1918), considered the most elegant Syriac writer of his time, also stressed the remnants of the ancient Assyrians were the East Syrians (''Suryāyē Madənkhāyē).'' Commenting in his Syriac work ''The Selected Readings,'' published in 1906, he wrote: "We too, the East Syrians, descend from the aforementioned Assyrians, we are children of the Assyrians or Ashur son of Shem and on account of this we are also Semites. We have preserved until today the language of our ancestors with of course some changes which have entered it." He then continues and explains how "Syrian" (''Surāyā)'' is simply a shortened abbreviation of "Assyrian," and notes that some scholars contemporary to him believed that the Assyrians adopted the name "Syrian" after converting to Christianity.

History

The Church of the East

The Chaldean Catholic Church traces its beginnings to the Church of the East, which was founded in the Parthian Empire. The Acts of the Apostles mentions Parthians as among those to whom the apostles preached on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:9). Thomas the Apostle, Thaddeus of Edessa, and Bartholomew the Apostle are reputed to be its founders. One of the modern Churches that boast descent from it says it is "the Church in Babylon" spoken of in 1 Peter 5:13 and that he visited it.

Under the rule of the Sasanian Empire, which overthrew the Parthians in 224, the Church of the East continued to develop its distinctive identity by use of the Syriac language and Syriac script. One "Persian" bishop was at the First Council of Nicaea (325). There is no mention of Persian participation in the First Council of Constantinople (381), in which also the Western part of the Roman Empire was not involved.

The Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon of 410, held in the Sasanian capital, recognized the city's bishop Isaac as Catholicos, with authority throughout the Church of the East. The persistent military conflicts between the Sasanians and the by then Christianized Roman Empire made the Persians suspect the Church of the East of sympathizing with the enemy. This in turn induced the Church of the East to distance itself increasingly from that in the Roman Empire. Although in a time of peace their 420 council explicitly accepted the decrees of some "western" councils, including that of Nicaea, in 424 they determined that thenceforth they would refer disciplinary or theological problems to no external power, especially not to any "western" bishop or council.Cross, F.L. & Livingstone E.A. (eds), Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 351

The theological controversy that followed the Council of Ephesus in 431 was a turning point in the history of the Church of the East. The Council condemned as heretical the Christology of Nestorius, whose reluctance to accord the Virgin Mary the title ''Theotokos'' "God-bearer, Mother of God" was taken as evidence that he believed two separate persons (as opposed to two united natures) to be present within Christ. The Sasanian Emperor provided refuge for those who in the Nestorian schism rejected the decrees of the Council of Ephesus enforced in the Byzantine Empire. In 484 he executed the pro-Roman Catholicos Babowai. Under the influence of Barsauma, Bishop of Nisibis, the Church of the East officially accepted as normative the teaching not of Nestorius himself, but of his teacher Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose writings the 553 Second Council of Constantinople condemned as Nestorian but some modern scholars view them as orthodox. The position thus assigned to Theodore in the Church of the East was reinforced in several subsequent synods in spite of the opposing teaching of Henana of Adiabeme.

After its split with the West and its adoption of a theology that some called Nestorianism, the Church of the East expanded rapidly in the medieval period due to missionary work. Between 500 and 1400, its geographical horizon extended well beyond its heartland in present-day northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey, setting up communities throughout Central Asia and as far as China—as witnessed by the Xi'an Stele, a Tang dynasty tablet in Chinese script dating to 781 that documented 150 years of Christian history in China. Their most lasting addition was of the Saint Thomas Christians of the Malabar Coast in India, where they had around 10 million followers.

However, a decline had already set in at the time of Yahballaha III (1281–1317), when the Church of the East reached its greatest geographical extent, it had in south and central Iraq and in south, central and east Persia only four dioceses, where at the end of the ninth century it had at least 54, and Yahballaha himself died at the hands of a Muslim mob.

Around 1400, the Turco-Mongol nomadic conqueror Timur arose out of the Eurasian Steppe to lead military campaigns all across Western, Southern and Central Asia, ultimately seizing much of the Muslim world after defeating the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria, the emerging Ottoman Empire, and the declining Delhi Sultanate. Timur's conquests devastated most Assyrian bishoprics and destroyed the 4000-year-old cultural and religious capital of Assur. After the destruction brought on by Timur, the massive and organized Church of the East structure was largely reduced to its region of origin, with the exception of the Saint Thomas Christians in India.

1552 schism

The Church of the East has seen many disputes about the position of Catholicos. A synod in 539 decided that neither of the two claimants, Elisha and Narsai, who had been elected by rival groups of bishops in 524, was legitimate. Similar conflicts occurred between Barsauma and Acacius of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and between Hnanisho I and Yohannan the Leper. The 1552 conflict was not merely between two individuals but extended to two rival lines of patriarchs, like the 1964 schism between what are now called the Assyrian and the Ancient Church of the East.

Dissent over the practice of hereditary succession

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