By Matters India Reporter
Kochi, May 30, 2023: The Vatican has directed the Synod of Bishops of the Syro-Malabar Church to hold an emergency meeting to resolve the controversy over celebration of Mass in the archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly.
According to a press release, the synod will meet June 12-16 at Mount St. Thomas, the Oriental Church’s headquarters in Kakkanad, a suburb of Kochi.
Vincentian Father Antony Vadakkekara, the Church’s public relations officer and secretary of its media commission, says Cardinal George Alencherry, the major archbishop, has issued an official decree urging all bishop members of the Synod to attend the conference.
The decision follows a recent meeting of the members of the Permanent Synod of the Syro-Malabar Church in the Vatican, says May 28 press release.
Father Vadakkekara says the main objective of the conference is to find a solution to the existing problems related to the implementation of the unified Eucharist in the Archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamaly. Cardinal Alencherry has requested all members of the Church to pray for the synod’s success.
The conference will take place six months after the archdiocese’s St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica was closed because of a stand-off between two groups.
The nearly five-decade-old row over the way the Mass is celebrated is mostly centered on the Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese. It was revived after the Syro-Malabar Church synod imposed in August 2021 that all its 35 dioceses should celebrate the Mass in a uniform way. After initial resistance, all other dioceses began celebrating the synod-approved Mass from November that year.
However, the Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese, the second-largest Catholic diocese in India with 10 percent of nearly 5 million Syro-Malabar Catholics, rejected the synod Mass and demanded that the Vatican accept their traditional Mass as a liturgy variant.
The priests and laity of the archdiocese have boycotted the Vatican-appointed administrator Archbishop Andrews Thazhath.
The latest in a string of recent incidents is the protest organized by lay people’s group Alamaya Munnettam (Laity front) before a premier religious house close to Kochi where Archbishop Thazhath met representatives of the Catholic religious congregations serving the archdiocese.