The Coonan Cross Oath.
On 3 January 1653 a crowd of Saint Thomas Christians gathered at the stone cross outside the church at Mattancherry, and because they could not all touch the cross they tied ropes to it and held those instead, swearing never again to submit to the Portuguese archbishop or the Jesuits. The cross is said to have bent under the pull, which is where the name comes from. Within months the community had consecrated its own metropolitan and Kerala Christianity had split in two.
The Portuguese had cut the Saint Thomas Christians off from their East Syriac bishops and, at the Synod of Diamper in 1599, subjected them to the archbishop of Goa and burned Syriac books. The immediate trigger for 1653 was the disappearance of a bishop, Ahatallah, sent from the East, who the community believed had been drowned or handed to the Inquisition by the Portuguese. The oath is remembered as the founding act of Kerala Christian self-government and is claimed by the Orthodox, Jacobite and Mar Thoma churches alike; the Syro-Malabar Church, descended from those who stayed with Rome, tells it as the beginning of a tragedy. The bent cross still stands at Mattancherry.
The same ground, other faiths
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