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Chaldean Catholic Church
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The Chaldean Catholic Church or the Chaldean Church of Babylon () is an Eastern particular church of the Catholic Church, maintaining full communion with the Bishop of Rome and the rest of the Catholic Church. The Chaldean Catholic Church presently comprises an estimated 600,000 - 700,000 Chaldean Christians.
ancient history of the Chaldean Church is the history the Church of the East. Before the 1553 consecration of Shimun VIII Yohannan Sulaqa, the term Chaldeans has been previously officially used by the Council of Florence in 1445 as a new name for a group of Nestorians of Cyprus who entered in Full Communion with the Catholic Church.
After the massacres of Tamerlane around 1400 had devastated several bishoprics the Church of the East, that previously extended up to China, the Church of the East was reduced to a handful of survivors who lived in the triangular area between Amid, Salmas and Mosul.
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The Chaldean Catholic Church or the Chaldean Church of Babylon () is an Eastern particular church of the Catholic Church, maintaining full communion with the Bishop of Rome and the rest of the Catholic Church. The Chaldean Catholic Church presently comprises an estimated 600,000 - 700,000 Chaldean Christians.
History
The ancient history of the Chaldean Church is the history the Church of the East. Before the 1553 consecration of Shimun VIII Yohannan Sulaqa, the term Chaldeans has been previously officially used by the Council of Florence in 1445 as a new name for a group of Nestorians of Cyprus who entered in Full Communion with the Catholic Church.
After the massacres of Tamerlane around 1400 had devastated several bishoprics the Church of the East, that previously extended up to China, the Church of the East was reduced to a handful of survivors who lived in the triangular area between Amid, Salmas and Mosul. The See was moved to Alqosh, in the Mosul's region and Patriarch Mar Shimun IV Basidi (1437-1493) made the office of patriarch hereditary within his own family
Yohannan Sulaqa
Dissent over the hereditary succession grew until in 1552, when a group of bishops, from the Northern regions of Amid and Salmas, elected Mar Yohannan Sulaqa as a rival Patriarch. To look for a bishop of metropolitan rank to consecrate him patriarch, Sulaqa traveled to the pope in Rome, entered into communion with the Catholic Church and in 1553 he was consecrated bishop and elevated to the rank of patriarch taking the name of Mar Shimun VIII. He was granted the title of "Patriarch of Mosul and Athur (Assyria)", a title soon changed in "Patriarch of the Chaldeans".
Mar Shimun VIII Yohannan Sulaqa returned in the Near East in the same year and fixed his seat in Amid. Before to be put to death by the partisan of the patriarch of Alqosh, he ordained five metropolitan bishops thus beginning a new ecclesiastical hierarchy, the patriarchal line known as Shimun line. The area of influence of this patriarchate soon moved from Amid towards East, fixing the See, after many places, in the isolated village of Qochanis.
The connections with Rome loosened up under Sulaqa's successors: the last patriarch to be formally recognized by the Pope died in the 1600, the hereditary of the office was reintroduced and in 1692 the communion with Rome was formally broken. The patriarchate of the present-day Assyrian Church of the East, with its See in Chicago, forms the continuation of this line.
The Josephite line of Amid
A new start of the Chaldean Patriarchate happened in 1672 when Mar Joseph I, Archbishop of Amid, entered in communion with Rome, separating from the the Patriarchal see of Alqosh. In 1681 the Holy See granted him the title of "Patriarch of the Chaldean nation deprived of its patriarch".
All Joseph I's successors took the name of Joseph. The life of this patriarchate was difficult: at the beginning due to the vexations from the traditionalists, under which they were subject from a legal point of view, and later it struggled with financial difficulties due to the tax burden imposed by the Turkish authorities.
Nevertheless its influence expanded from the original towns of Amid and Mardin towards the area of Mosul. The Josephite line merged in 1830 with the Alqosh patriarchate that in the meantime entered in Full communion with Rome.
The Alqosh Patriarchate in Communion with Rome
The largest and oldest patriarchal see of the Church of the East was based at the Rabban Hormizd monastery of Alqosh. It spread from Aqrah up to Seert and Nisibis, covering in the South the rich plain of Mosul. Already in the short period between 1610 and 1617 it entered in communion with Rome, and in 1771 the patriarch Eliya Denkha signed a Catholic confession of faith, but no formal union resulted. When Eliya Denkha died, his succession was disputed by two cousins: Eliyya Isho-Yab, who got the recognization from Rome but soon broke the communion, and Yohannan Hormizd, who considered himself a Catholic.
In 1804 after Eliyya Isho-Yab death, Yohannan Hormizd remained the only patriarch of Alqosh. There was thus two patriarchates in Communion with Rome, the larger one in Alqosh and the Amid's one ruled by Augustine (Yousef V) Hindi. Rome chose not to choose between the two candidates, and granted to no one of them the title of Patriarch, even if from 1811 it was Augustine Hindi who in reality ruled the Church. After Hindi's death, on the July 5, 1830 Yohannan Hormizd was formally confirmed Patriarch by Pope Pius VIII with the title of Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans, and the merge of the patriarchates of Alqosh and of Amid was completed.
Expansion and disaster
The following years of the Chaldean Church were signed by external violences: in 1838 the monastery of Rabban Hormizd and the town of Alqosh was attacked by the Kurds of Soran and hundreds of Christian Syrians died and in the 1843 the Kurds started to collect as much money as they could from Christian villages, killing who refused: more than ten thousand Christians were killed and the ikons of the Rabban Hormizd monastery defaced.
In 1846 the Chaldean Church was recognized by the Ottoman Empire as a millet, a distinctive religious community within the Empire, thus obtaining its civic emancipation. The most famous patriarch of the Chaldean Church in the 19th century was Joseph VI Audo who is remembered also for his clashes with Pope Pius IX mainly about his attempts to extend the Chaldean jurisdiction over the Indian Syro-Malabar Catholic Church. This time was anyway a period of expansion for the Chaldean Catholic Church.
In the early 20th century the Russian Orthodox missionaries established two dioceses in North Assyria, and many people believe that Russians could protect them better than the Englishes and the Frenchs. Hoping in the support of Russians, the World War I was seen as the right time to rebel against the Ottoman Empire, which answered fighting the Assyrians as military enemies. On 4 November 1914 the Turkish Enver Pasha announced the Jihad, the holy war, against the Christians. The defeat of Russia in 1917 called an halt to the hope of political freedom. All the North Assyria was overrun by the Turkish army and the people forced to flee: most who escaped the massacres died from winter cold or hunger. The disaster struck mainly the regions of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean dioceses in North Assyria (Amid, Siirt and Gazarta) were ruined (the Chaldeans metropolitans Addai Scher of Siirt and Philip Abraham of Gazarta were both killed in 1915).
Recent times
A recent development in the Chaldean Catholic Church has been the creation in 2006 of the Eparchy of Oceania, with the title of 'St Thomas the Apostle of Sydney of the Chaldeans'. This jurisdiction includes the Chaldean Catholic communities of Australia and New Zealand, and the first Bishop, named by Pope Benedict XVI on 21 October 2006, is Archbishop Djibrail Kassab, until this date, Archbishop of Bassorah in Iraq.
The church's relations with the Assyrian Church of the East have improved in recent years. A meeting in 1996 between H.H Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Church and Mar Raphael I Bidawad of the Chaldean Catholic Church began an effort to bring the two churches into eventual communion.
The current Patriarch is Cardinal Mar Emmanuel III Delly, elected in 2003 on the death of Mar Bidawid. In October 2007 Delly became the first Chaldean Catholic to be elevated to the rank of Cardinal within the Catholic Church.
There has been a large immigration to the United States particularly to Southeast Michigan. There is also a population in parts of California and Arizona. Several thousands are stranded in passage . The church's best-known member is Saddam Hussein's former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz.
Liturgy
The Chaldean Catholic Church uses the East Syrian Rite.
A slight reform of the liturgy was effective since 6 January 2007. The aims are to uniform the many different uses of each parish, to clean up the things added in the centuries simply to imitate the Roman rite, and for pastoral reasons. The main elements of variations are: the Anaphora said aloud by the priest, the return to the ancient architecture of the churches, the restore of the ancient use to prepare the bread and wine before the beginning of the service, the removal from the creed of the words Filioque
Hierarchy
Chaldean-Assyrian Catholic Church in Iran
Chaldean Christian Martyrs
- Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni, with subdeacons Basman Yousef Daud, Wahid Hanna Isho, and Gassan Isam Bidawed, 3 June 2007, Mosul, Iraq.
- Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho and three companions, 29 February 2008, Mosul, Iraq.
See also
External links
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