By Jose Kavi
New Delhi, March 14, 2024: Archbishop Geevaghese Mar Ivanios, the first head of the Syro-Malankara Church, advanced on the sainthood path on March 14 when Pope Francis elevated him as a Venerable.
Archbishop Ivanios, who is known as the Newman of the East, is currently a Servant of God, the first stage in the four-phase canonization process.
A statement from the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints says the Pope has accepted the heroic virtues of the archbishop, who founded the Order of the Imitation of Christ, also known as Bethany Ashram, for men, and the Sisters of the Imitation of Christ, (Bethany Madhom) for women.
The archbishop died July 15, 1953, aged 70, in Thiruvananthapuram, capital of the southern Indian state of Kerala.
He is among 13 people who progressed in the canonization process on March 14.
Archbishop Ivanios was declared a Servant of God in 2007.
Archbishop Ivanios led a spiritual movement in the Syrian Orthodox Church that was received into full communion with the Catholic Church on September 20, 1930. He is thus considered the father of the Syro-Malankara Church, one of the 23 Eastern Churches in communion with Rome.
The Malankara Church sees a parallel between the “Reunion Movement” of the 1920s and the Oxford Movement of the 1830s led by Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), who is now a saint.
Like Cardinal Newman, Archbishop Ivanios was part of a broader grouping that sought to discover the sources of unity in their own traditions, Anglican and Orthodox. When the time came, though, it was not a corporate unity that was possible but an individual conversion.
The Indian archbishop dedicated himself to Catholic education. He founded a college, which is now named after him, in Thiruvananthapuram. The campus now includes schools of law, engineering, education, management and information technology, as well as a major seminary.
In 2020, the Syro-Malankara Church marked the 90th anniversary of its reunion with Rome.
Archbishop Ivanios was born on September 21, 1882, in a Malankara Syrian Orthodox family. Baptised as Geevarghese, he joined the minor seminary before going to Madras (now Chennai) for higher studies. He was ordained a priest in 1908, and served first as principal of the minor seminary at Kottayam before going to Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a professor. In Calcutta, he founded a monastic community in the Orthodox tradition.
The 1920s saw a “Reunion Movement” in the Malankara Orthodox Church, and Mar Ivanios, who took that name upon being consecrated a bishop, was appointed to lead it. The movement towards corporate unity with Rome faltered, and Mar Ivanios found himself increasingly alone. In 1930, he and four others – a bishop, a priest, a deacon and a layman – entered into full communion with Rome.
The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church experienced tremendous growth under the leadership of Mar Ivanios, its first bishop. The Church is now established as a major archiepiscopal Church and has its own patriarch or “major archbishop,” Cardinal Baselios Cleemis. The Church has some half million members, mostly in Kerala, but also spread in diaspora communities in Europe and North America.
The Syro-Malankara, like Syro-Malabar Catholics, trace their history to Saint Thomas the Apostle, who is believed to have preached Christianity in southern India.