Baghdad, 1968.
The clergy in Iraq had no bishops willing to keep the old reckoning and a patriarch thirty-five years absent in America. They invited Mar Thoma Darmo from India; he consecrated bishops, they elected him patriarch, and the Church of the East had two hierarchies. Mar Addai II succeeded him in 1972 and led the church for fifty years.
The 1968 consecrations left the Church of the East with two patriarchs, two synods and a set of parishes and properties in dispute, especially in Iraq. Mar Addai II, elected in 1972 at the age of twenty-four, held the church together through the Iran-Iraq war, the sanctions years, the American invasion and the rise of Islamic State, and was widely respected across the Iraqi Christian community; he died on 11 February 2022. The church is small, concentrated in Baghdad and northern Iraq, with dioceses in Australia, Europe and North America, and it has never published a membership figure that anyone outside has been able to verify.
The same ground, other faiths
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