M
Mor Ignatius Elias III.
The Patriarch of Antioch came to Kerala in 1931 to reconcile the two Malankara factions, worked at it for a year, and died at Manjinikkara in February 1932 without succeeding. He was buried there. The tomb became a pilgrimage site and the annual feast is now one of the largest Christian gatherings in south India.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
The Patriarch of Antioch is the head of the church in India.
The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church is the Indian archdiocese of the Syriac Orthodox Church, in communion with and under the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, with a Catholicos in India since 2002 acting under him. Everything else — the Qurbana of Saint James, the fifty-day Lent, the Saint Thomas tradition — it holds in common with the church it is at law with.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
The 1934 constitution does not bind our parishes.
The church holds that the constitution adopted by the Malankara Association in 1934 cannot govern parishes that never accepted it, and that the patriarch's authority in India was never surrendered. Indian courts, up to and including the Supreme Court in 1958, 1995, 2017, 2018 and 2019, have consistently held the opposite. The church has continued to contest it.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
The same Syriac Orthodox account of creation, held in Malayalam.
After death
Resurrection and judgment; the dead are prayed for, and where the courts have closed a cemetery to one side, that has become the sharpest grievance of all.