How a false death report split an ancient Christian church in two
In 1553 Roman officials were told, wrongly, that the elderly patriarch of the Church of the East had died. The pope appointed a rival, Yohannan Sulaqa, and centuries of competing patriarchal lines followed, eventually producing both the Chaldean Catholic Church and today's Assyrian Church of the East.
The Assyrian Church of the East traces itself to Christian communities among Assyrians in Upper Mesopotamia and northwestern Persia during the first century AD, founded, by its own account, by the apostles Thomas and Bartholomew and by Addai of Edessa. It worships in Classical Syriac, an Eastern Aramaic dialect, using the liturgy of Saints Addai and Mari. It stands outside communion with the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, and its catholicos-patriarch, Mar Awa III, consecrated in September 2021, is based in Erbil, Iraq. The World Christian Encyclopedia estimated its membership at 413,000 in 2020.
The rupture began under Patriarch Shemon VII Ishoyahb, who ruled from 1539 at the Rabban Hormizd Monastery near Alqosh. Disputes over hereditary succession and union with Rome, stoked by Franciscan missionaries, led Sulaqa to travel to Rome and join the Catholic Church in February 1553. He returned as Patriarch Shimun and began appointing his own bishops, while the old patriarch's nephew Eliya continued a traditionalist line.
Loyalties then kept flipping. Sulaqa's successors made their office hereditary, which Rome refused to accept, and ties loosened. Patriarch Shimun XIII Dinkha rebuffed a papal approach in 1670, cut all links with Rome by 1672 and moved his seat from Amid to Qochanis. Meanwhile the Eliya line's monastery was looted in 1743 at the start of an Ottoman and Persian war, and in 1780 a faction from Alqosh chose a patriarch who joined Rome, founding what became the Chaldean Catholic leadership. When Eliya XII died in 1804 his followers elected no successor, leaving the Qochanis line as the sole traditionalist primacy.
Among the tribes, each local lord answered to the patriarch, who dealt with Ottoman authorities on behalf of Christian Assyrians. Uncle-to-nephew succession to the patriarchate, a custom since the 14th century, lasted until 1975. The present name was adopted in 1976.
Source: Assyrian Church of the East
