M
Mar Yohannan Sulaqa.
A monk of Rabban Hormizd elected patriarch in 1552 by bishops who would not accept another hereditary succession, he walked to Rome, made his profession of faith and was consecrated by Julius III in 1553. He returned to Diyarbakir, was denounced to the Ottoman governor by the rival patriarch, imprisoned, and killed in January 1555. The church counts him a martyr and dates itself from him.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
Communion with Rome, without becoming Latin.
The Chaldean Church holds Catholic doctrine and papal primacy and keeps the East Syriac rite: the Qurbana of Addai and Mari, the Hudra, married parish clergy, and a liturgical Syriac older than Latin. Rome's repeated attempts to Latinise the rite were reversed in the twentieth century, and the reformed Chaldean liturgy of 2005 went further back rather than further west.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Chaldean is a name that came with the union.
Rome applied the term Chaldean to the East Syriac Catholics in the sixteenth century; the people it describes are the same people whose relatives in the other church are called Assyrian, speaking the same Neo-Aramaic. Whether Chaldean names a church or a nation is argued inside the church itself, sharply — Patriarch Sako put his own position in writing in 2018 and was contradicted by Chaldeans in Iraq and the diaspora.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
Created, fallen and redeemed, in the East Syriac telling.
After death
Resurrection and judgment; purgatory as taught in the Catholic communion.