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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