By Rajiv Theodore
New Delhi, Dec 22, 2019: Long before Christianity reached many parts of Europe, it came to Kerala along the thriving spice trade routes crossing the Arabian Sea.
Today, about 7 million people, a fifth of Kerala’s population, call themselves St. Thomas Christians after Jesus’ apostle, who many believe arrived in India in 52 A.D.
Even today, parts of liturgies of some of these group are sung in Syriac, close to the Aramaic language spoken by Christ. Although Christians have lived and worshiped in Kerala for some 2,000 years, the last century especially has been marked by a bitter feud in some Churches.
The protracted inter-church strife is being played out in the streets of Kerala. The latest incident was in September when clashes took place between Orthodox and Jacobite factions in Piravom, a suburb of Kochi. The police took into custody the head of the Jacobite Church, Joseph Mar Gregorios which further escalated the violence.
In the eye of the storm was a 6th century church, one of Kerala’s oldest. A 2017 Supreme Court order had allowed the Orthodox Church to offer prayers there, much to the dismay of the Jacobites.
The Kerala Malankara Orthodox Church and Jacobite Syrian Christian Church are among the oldest Christian communities existing in the world.
The fight among the Kerala Christians could be traced back to 1599 when a Synod was held in Udayamperoor (Diamper) in the current Ernakulam district. The Synod came out with rules and regulations for the St Thomas Christians and formally united them with the Catholic Church owing allegiance to the Pope. But in 1653, some Saint Thomas Christians revolted and declared allegiance to the Patriarch of Antioch. They came to be known as the Syrian Orthodox Christians or the Malankara Church.
In 1912, the Malankara Church split into the Malankara Orthodox Church and the Jacobite Syrian Church on the question of the supreme head. The Malankara Orthodox Church considers the Malankara metropolitan based in Kottayam as its head while the Jacobite Syrian Church recognizes the patriarch of Antioch as its spiritual head.
The two groups came together in 1934 to elect a bishop and believed all powers should be vested with the Bishop Baselious Geevarghese Catholicos of Kottayam. But things soured after 1970 as the Patriarch of Antioch got involved in the daily church affairs in India. He even appointed three bishops in Kerala which finally triggered a protracted period of violence and ugly church politics.
The Supreme Court intervened and In 1995 the court ruled that the 1934 agreement will stand – which was in favor of the Orthodox church. Now as a reaction to the Court verdict, in 2002 the faction which supported the Patriarch of Antioch named themselves Jacobite Syrian Christians. Again, large scale violence enveloped the church landscape as the two factions fought each other on the streets, captured churches that had belonged to them for centuries.
In the St Mary’s church case the Supreme Court in 2017 allowed the Orthodox Church to offer prayers at the church, much to the dismay of the Jacobites. The Court also dismissed petitions filed by the Jacobites seeking a review of the court’s earlier verdict giving the Orthodox group control over more than 1,100 parishes and their churches. The Jacobites claim the court’s verdict deprives 1.2 million devotees of a place of worship. The Supreme Court’s earlier verdicts had also gone in favor of the Orthodox faction, which counts 2.5 million members.
‘’Other religious communities too have not been spared from such divisions and violence. Indian Christianity is a like a multi-layered cake…theologically hybrid– that there are so many actors and power struggles. The focus of the Kerala christian groups are personality based and many times even revolved around powerful families,’’ Bernardo Michael, professor and co-chair, Department of History, Messiah College, Pennsylvania, told Matters India over phone.
It must be recalled here that long before Christianity had reached the outskirts of Europe, Kerala had a full-fledged Christian community and a tradition that surpassed the Portuguese who had always boasted of a rich Roman Catholicism. Despite brazen street fights today, Kerala is home to nearly a third of all Indian Christians and has a rich legacy to boot –that perhaps for 15 centuries of the first millennium, the Kerala Christians enjoyed a degree of exclusivity with the churches of western Asia including the Patriarchate of Antioch and were devoid of any links with Rome.
They developed the Eastern or Syriac liturgy, said mass in Malayalam and were influenced by the Nestorian doctrine regarded by Rome as heresy of the indivisibility of Christ’s nature. When the Portuguese arrived in the Kerala coast for dominating the spice trade the soon found the harsh truth that the Malayali Christians were totally ignorant of the Vatican but owned allegiance to the Nestorian Church headed by the Patriarch of Antioch in modern-day Turkey.
Similarly, their liturgical language was not Latin but Syriac, by virtue of which they were known as Syrian Christians. The liturgical language Syriac, a formation of Aramaic was the dialect of Jesus and St Thomas. Besides the common tag of being all ‘Christians’ they were unlike the Portuguese and observed a branch of the faith that Roman Catholicism neither approved of nor upheld.
The following centuries saw many of the erstwhile Kerala Christians being compelled to accept the Catholic faith and denounce the Eastern Orthodox rites of their ancestors. Also a wave of European missions struck Kerala, many new brands of the faith were established along with churches having their own distinctive features especially in the northern parts.