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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