They are two sister Churches. They have the same origin and an identical structure. Let us begin by clarifying the terms: the “Assyrian Church of the East” – as it is officially called – is the ancient Church of Persia that adopted the doctrine of Nestorius in the fifth century. Hence it is also known by the names Persian Church or Nestorian Church. The Chaldean Church, by contrast, is made up of the members who began to unite with Rome from the sixteenth century onward.
A Church beyond the Roman frontiers
The ethnic origins of the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, settled in their traditional homelands of Persia, Mesopotamia and Kurdistan, are uncertain. They present themselves as direct heirs of the Assyrian and Chaldean peoples, well known from the biblical texts.
The evangelization of these territories, beyond the limits of the Roman world, is traditionally attributed to the apostle Thomas and to his disciple Addai, one of the Seventy. It is safer to say, however, that the evangelization of the Assyrians and Chaldeans was the work of Jewish-Christian and Syrian missionaries of the first century who came from Edessa. Evangelization advanced rapidly. In the third century the Church of Mesopotamia already appears with its own liturgy and organized into dioceses dependent on the mother Church in Antioch. A century later, prestigious schools of theology were founded in its territory, the best known being that of Nisibis, later called the “School of the Persians”, a nursery of saints and sages. In the middle of the fourth century, barely after the era of persecutions of the Western Churches had ended, the Persian Sassanid dynasty unleashed an era of persecutions against the Persian Christian community. The cruelest was that of Shapur II, which lasted from 341 to 379 and produced countless martyrs.
It emancipates itself from the tutelage of the Church of Antioch
Far from Hellenistic-Roman influence, the Persian Church felt the temptation, from its very origins, to emancipate itself from Antiochene tutelage, the only hierarchical bond that united it to the Catholic Church. The process was slow but continuous. At the beginning of the fourth century the bishop of the “Royal Cities” of Seleucia-Ctesiphon succeeded in federating under his authority all the dioceses within the Persian empire and then proclaimed himself Catholicos of the Persian Church, but without breaking the bonds with Antioch. Later, in the year 424, a Persian synod took another step in the process of emancipation by declaring itself an autonomous Church. It was, however, the adoption of the Nestorian heresy condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 that caused the break with the Antiochene Church and consequently with catholicity.
Missionary expansion in Asia
| Chaldean Christians (Catholics) | |
| Iraq | 350,000 |
| USA | 50,000 |
| Iran | 15,000 |
| France | 10,000 |
| Turkey | 3,000 |
| Syria | 3,000 |
| Lebanon | 3,000 |
| Syria | 3,000 |
| Belgium | 3,000 |
| Others | 63,000 |
| Total | 500,000 |
| Assyrian Christians | |
| Throughout the world | 150,000 |
| Middle East | 75,000 |
From the sixth century onward the Persian Church underwent an extraordinary process of expansion into the countries of the east and south. It founded dioceses in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. In the eighth century there is evidence of the existence of a Christian kingdom in Kashgar, Central Asia. But it would be in the Abbasid period, when the Muslim empire was governed from Baghdad by semi-Persian caliphs, that Nestorian Christians benefited from special treatment.
This was the period of greatest splendor for the Persian Church. Its monks, “the bearers of the light”, were the protagonists of this epic. They set out along the Silk Road to evangelize Asia. They reached Turkestan, Mongolia, China, Tibet and India, founding Christian communities as they went. By about the ninth century the Nestorian Church had 245 dioceses in places as varied as Cairo, Jerusalem, Samarkand and Beijing. According to Msgr. Alichoran, the Nestorian community numbered between 60 and 80 million faithful, a very high figure for the time.
There is no logical explanation for this phenomenon of missionary expansion, unique in the annals of the Eastern Churches. The accounts of Marco Polo (1254-1324), for example, confirm the solid positions occupied by Nestorian Christians at the court of the Mongols.
The centuries of decline
The situation of Christians deteriorated at the end of the thirteenth century, first in China with the arrival of a nationalist dynasty, and then in Central Asia with the conversion of the Turks to Islam. The brutal persecution of Tamerlane (1360-1405) dealt the final blow to those Central Asian communities that resisted extinction.
As for the regions of ancient Nestorian settlement – Mesopotamia, Persia and Kurdistan – the Ottoman Turkish conquest of present-day Turkey in the fourteenth century, and the emergence of a violently anti-Christian Shiism in Safavid Persia, only weakened Christianity, powerless in the face of the more or less forced conversion of its faithful to Islam. Insecurity was so great for Nestorian Christians in the fifteenth century that they were forced to withdraw into the inaccessible mountains of Hakkari and western Azerbaijan, in present-day Kurdistan. There they lived, in a poor and inhospitable region with a harsh climate, until the First World War.
It is the first Eastern Church expelled from its homeland
During the First World War, Turkish troops threatened the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan with genocide. Faced with the real threat – one need only think of the Armenian genocide in those same years – the Christian population, with the Assyrian Patriarch at its head, abandoned the mountains of Hakkari in June 1915 and moved on foot, like a cruel biblical transmigration, to Russian Azerbaijan. The toll of this exodus was dramatic: 90,000 dead and the destruction of 154 churches. Once the war ended, Turkey prevented the survivors from returning. From that moment on, the Assyrian Church became a refugee community in search of a home. They finally found it in Iraqi Kurdistan, then under British rule. But years later, in 1933, Iraq gained independence and denied the Patriarch recognition of his political role, as “the Sassanid kings, the caliphs of Islam, the Mongol khans and the Ottoman sultans” had done with his predecessors. This rejection meant, for the Nestorians, the abandonment of the idea of forming a nation in Kurdistan.
In August 1933, Iraqi troops entered the Christian refugee camps and murdered men, women and children. The victims numbered in the thousands. The patriarch, held in Baghdad from the beginning of the crisis, was expelled to Cyprus, while the survivors fled to Syria and Lebanon, then under French mandate, and others embarked for the USA.
Today the Assyrians, a total of 150,000 faithful, are settled in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Australia and the USA. As for the Assyrian Patriarch, currently H.H. Denkha IV, he has established his see in Chicago. He is the only Eastern Patriarch residing in the West.
The Assyrians are not represented in Jerusalem, although the Holy Land has attracted the gaze of Persian Christians since the first centuries. Indeed, in the fourth century Raban Idta visited the Holy Places. The Persian Church had a monastery on the Mount of Olives. At the beginning of the ninth century Patriarch Timothy I established a bishopric of his nation in Jerusalem.
A Church with a patriarchal structure
From the fourth century onward, the Assyrian Church has been governed by a Catholicos, a title equivalent to Patriarch among the heads of the Churches constituted outside the limits of Romanity. The Assyrian patriarchal see has changed according to historical vicissitudes. In the sixteenth century the patriarchs settled in Rabban Hormuzd, in Kurdistan, then in Diarbakir (present-day Turkey) and subsequently in Salmas and Urmia (Iran). Finally they settled in the mountains of Hakkari, where they remained until the First World War. The harsh, isolated and tribal life of these mountains shaped the patriarchal dignity in such a way that it became an almost feudal institution, similar to that of an Arab sheikh or a Kurdish agha. In fact, from the year 1450 the patriarchal dignity became hereditary, that is, it passed from uncle to nephew.
To ensure this transfer, a law was established that forbade the person destined to become Patriarch from having tasted meat from the moment of his conception, which also implied abstinence on the part of the mother. Evidently, no one except the one destined for this office can fulfill this law. Fr. Rondot reports the answer given by a Nestorian to an English missionary who asked him about the advantages of this hereditary patriarchal election: “The probabilities of our having a good Patriarch are the same as yours of having a good King”.
In any case, this unusual law has, since its promulgation, created tensions in the Assyrian community, tensions that explain the strength of the unionist movement with the Catholic Church from the sixteenth century onward.
The Catholic branch is formed
The designation in 1538 of a new Assyrian Patriarch, always from the same family, was challenged by some of the bishops, which led to the simultaneous election of two Patriarchs. One of them, John Sulaqa, sought support in Rome against his competitor Simon VIII Denkha and made an act of obedience, through the mediation of the Custos of the Holy Land, to Pope Julius III.
In fact, he was recognized in 1553 by the Pope as Patriarch of the new united Chaldean Church. The new patriarch established his see in Diarbakir, where he consecrated five new bishops in order to organize the structure of the new Church.
It was in the middle of the eighteenth century that the Chaldean Church took root and gained new adherents. The Assyrian metropolitan of Mosul, John Hormez, nephew of the Nestorian Patriarch Rabban Hormuzd, converted to Catholicism with a good part of the bishops and of the influential Nestorian community of the monastery of Rabban Hormuzd. From that date the Catholic community settled in the cities of the Mesopotamian plain: Mosul, Diarbakir, and east of Hakkari: Salmas and Urmia, while the Assyrians, now in the minority, were relegated to the rugged mountains of Hakkari. Mosul became the patriarchal see, and the head of the Chaldean Church received from the Popes the title “Patriarch of Babylon of the nation of the Chaldeans”. Nevertheless, the government of the united Church was carried out under strict control from Rome, which tried to Latinize the Chaldean ecclesiastical structures, an attitude that provoked a crisis under the government of Patriarch Joseph VI Audo (1847-1878), who defended the autonomy of the Eastern Catholic Churches at the First Vatican Council.
Needless to say, the foundation of the Chaldean Church and its opening toward the West brought with it the support of French diplomacy and the arrival of Carmelite, Capuchin and Dominican missionaries. With them came schools, seminaries, dispensaries and printing presses that contributed to the strengthening of this Church.
Attempts at total union failed
If the official constitution of the Chaldean Church dates back to the sixteenth century, already in the thirteenth century there had been an attempt to unite the Nestorian Church to the Roman Church through Dominican missionaries sent to the East by the Popes. Famous is the journey made by Rabban Bar Sauma, sent to Europe by the Nestorian patriarch Mar Yaballaha between 1287 and 1288, in order to sign a pact between the partly Christianized Mongols and the kingdoms of France and England, with a view to the reconciliation of the two Churches. What is strange about the visit is that the Nestorian prelate freely celebrated Mass in Catholic churches and cathedrals and even received Easter Communion from the hands of Pope Nicholas IV. A year later, in 1289, the same Pope sent the Franciscan John of Montecorvino to the East with letters for the kings of Armenia and Persia, the latter governed by the Mongols, and for the emperor of China.
If these journeys did not obtain the expected results, they did allow the two Churches to know one another. In 1445, following the Council of Florence, the Nestorian bishop of Cyprus and his entire community passed over to Catholicism. From then on, by decision of Pope Eugene IV, the Assyrians united to the Holy See have been called Chaldeans.
A martyr Church
The Chaldean Church, like her Assyrian sister, also knew a period of cruel violence during the Second World War. The Turks, who had proclaimed holy war, killed some 30,000 defenseless Chaldeans, three bishops and 20 priests. The survivors took refuge in northern Iraq under English control. The Chaldean Church, more cautious than the Assyrian Church in the crisis that set them against the Iraqi government in 1933, managed to avoid the massacres of which the Assyrians were victims. This different behavior illustrates the alternative to which Christians in the land of Islam are forced: either to defend their most elementary rights to the point of confrontation, or to accept painful compromises with Islamic power.
Today the majority of Chaldeans are in Iraq. But the instability reigning in Iraqi Kurdistan, their secular homeland, is forcing them to flee Kurdish fanaticism and settle in the cities. Those who can emigrate to the West. The Patriarchal See was transferred in 1958 from Mosul to Baghdad, a city with 28 Chaldean parishes and a major seminary. Saddam Hussein’s government shows a certain sympathy for the Chaldean Church, to the point that it has offered a plot of 23,000 square meters for the construction of the patriarchal see. A sign of the times.
The Chaldeans in the Holy Land
The Chaldean Patriarchate – since 1989 the patriarchal see has been occupied by H.B. Raphael Bidawid – is elected by an assembly of bishops and the superior of the monastery of Mar Hormizdas. The election is confirmed by the Holy See. The Chaldean Church has 17 dioceses: nine in Iraq, three in Iran, one in Turkey, another in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
In the Holy Land there is a patriarchal vicariate founded in 1908, currently held by Msgr. Paul Collin, with jurisdiction over the Chaldeans of Haifa and Jordan. In that country there is a notable Chaldean community, estimated at about 10,000, refugees as a result of the Gulf War. The faithful established in the Americas depend on the respective Latin bishops, except in the USA, where there is a Chaldean bishopric in Detroit.
The Chaldean Church has five male monasteries – four in Iraq, one in Rome – with about a hundred monks of the order of Mar Hormizdas. It likewise has two women’s congregations: that of the Immaculate Conception, founded in Baghdad in 1922, with 40 sisters, and that of the Sacred Heart, with 30 sisters.
Ecumenical relations
Ecumenical relations are excellent. In 1995 a document was signed between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church in which an end was put to the theological controversy that goes back to the Council of Ephesus, where the doctrine of Nestorius, which confessed two persons in Christ, was condemned. Now, after 15 centuries, it has been confirmed that, despite divergences in terminology and cultural diversity, the two Churches confessed the same Christological faith: two natures in Christ and the unity of the person of the Word. The document states: “Our Lord Jesus Christ is true God and true man, perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity… The divinity and the humanity are united in the person of one and the same Son of God and Lord Jesus Christ”. The document points out, however, that full unity has not yet been attained and therefore “we cannot yet celebrate together the Eucharist, the sign of fully restored ecclesial communion”.
Author: Fr. Ignacio Peña
