The old calendar is not a detail.
The church keeps the Julian reckoning for the fixed feasts, so its Nativity falls on 7 January by the civil calendar. The reforms of 1964 that moved the Assyrian church to the Gregorian calendar and shortened the fasts are, in this church's account, exactly the kind of decision a patriarch living abroad should not have taken alone.
Calendar disputes are rarely only about calendars. Mar Shimun XXIII had been in exile since 1933 and by 1964 had been out of Iraq for three decades; the clergy who objected were in Baghdad, Kirkuk and the villages, living under an Iraqi state that had already killed Assyrians in 1933, and they experienced the reforms as decisions taken over their heads by a patriarch answerable to a diaspora. The hereditary succession, which the Assyrian church itself abolished in 1976, was a further grievance. The two churches keep the same liturgy in every other respect, so at a service an outsider could not tell them apart.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.