The Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate (1)

The “Church of the East” is the official title that was given to the Church in the ancient Persian empire, which had its seat in the city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, near present-day Baghdad. The Gospel has been preached in Mesopotamia since apostolic times with the passage of St. Thomas to India and the preaching of Addai and Mari, two of the 72 disciples of Our Lord, according to tradition.

Traces of a church built in Seleucia around 70 AD have been discovered. Around 90 AD, the Church was well established in Erbil (Arbela) and Adiabene, in the northern part of present-day Iraq. At the beginning of the 4th century, hierarchical unification took place, while the Church was wounded by Persian persecutions.

Great catechetical and theological schools also appeared with centers of production for spiritual and liturgical literature. In the 3rd century, in Edessa (present-day Urfa or Şanlıurfa, Turkey), St. Lucian founded the prestigious School of Antioch. The 4th century saw the birth of the famous School of Nisibis, later transferred to Edessa, which had the great St. Ephrem as an illustrious theologian and poet.

But in the 5th century, the Church of the East embraced Nestorianism, a heresy that affirmed two persons in Christ: one divine and one human. The Church, having become heretical, spread to China, the steppes of Mongol Asia, and the Malabar Coast of India. In the early 14th century, it counted it had 60 to 80 million faithful and 250 bishops (representing, at the time, around half of Christianity).

Starting in 1363, Nestorianism suffered the general persecution of Christians by the Turco-Mongol leader Timur (Tamerlane), who completely destroyed the Nestorian Church located in eastern Iraq, with the exception of what was in India.

A factor of decline for the Nestorian Church in Iraq would be the constitution of a hereditary Patriarchate, the charge remaining in the same family. This situation would gradually lead to a loss of vitality. It was then that three bishops sent to the Pope a monk, superior of Rabban Hormizd Monastery, to be consecrated Patriarch and to establish communion with Rome.

Britannica summarizes the results: “Union with Rome was first realized in 1551, when the elected patriarch John Sulaka went to Rome and made his profession of the Catholic faith. From this period on, those Nestorians who became Catholics were referred to as Chaldeans. Other unions were realized in 1672, 1771, and 1778, the current unbroken line of ‘patriarchs of Babylonia’ originating in 1830.

“The patriarchal residence was at first in the monastery Rabbān Hormizd, then in Mosul, and finally in Baghdad. Besides the patriarchal diocese of Baghdad, there are four archdioceses (Basra, Kirkuk, Sehna, Iran—residence at Tehrān—and Urmia, to which is united the diocese of Salmas) and seven dioceses (Aleppo, Alkosh, Amadya, Akra, Beirut, Mosul, and Zakho).”

The Chaldean Church today has more than 800,000 faithful, with the particularity that the number of Chaldeans who have emigrated is greater than those present in the lands of origin—namely, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iran.

The diaspora is scattered across five continents: 200 to 220,000 in the United States, 110 to 120,000 in Europe (20,000 in France), 45 to 50,000 in Australia, 35 to 40,000 in Canada, 20 to 30,000 in New Zealand, 30 to 40,000 in the former USSR: notably in Russia (Moscow, Rostov-on- Don), Ukraine, Georgia (Tbilisi), Armenia (Yerevan).

In 2020, there were less than 400,000 Christians (by optimistic estimates) in Iraq (while there were still 800,000 before the Gulf War in 1991) and less than 100,000 in the rest of the Arab countries (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, mainly in Istanbul).

“The Church of the East” is divided today into five main branches: the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church (non-Catholic), the Syro-Malabar (Catholic) and Syro-Malankara Churches (with the latter having two branches: Catholic and Orthodox), and the Ancient Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East (a dissident branch of the Assyrian Church, emerging in 1964, present in Iraq, non-Catholic).

The trials that the Chaldean Church has suffered over the centuries are terrible: the genocide of 1915 in Turkey, which claimed more than 250,000 victims among the Assyrian Chaldeans; the Iran-Iraq War in which more than 10,000 young people are said to have perished; the Gulf War (1991), which claimed as many victims; the embargo which caused the death of thousands of children and elderly people.

The fall of Saddam Hussein and the unrest which followed, with the rise of Daesh [ISIS], has sent hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, particularly Christians, into exile (nearly half of Christians in Iraq have fled their country over the last 15 years). There have also been close to 1,300 Christians who have paid with their lives for their commitment to their Faith (since August 2004).

The Chaldean Church is headed by the Patriarch of the Chaldeans, His Beatitude Louis Sako, elected on January 31, 2013, during a Synod in Rome. The seat has been located in Baghdad since 1947. In 2021, the Synod of Bishops decided to remove the mention of the city of Babylon from the title of Patriarch. Cardinal Sako now bears the title of “Patriarch of the Chaldeans.”