The West Syriac rite, in communion with Rome, out of Mosul and Aleppo.
The Syriac church in full communion with Rome, with a patriarch of Antioch resident in Beirut. It prays the Anaphora of Saint James in Syriac like the Syriac Orthodox church it came out of, it was hollowed out by the Sayfo of 1915, and its Baghdad cathedral was the site of the 2010 massacre of Our Lady of Deliverance.
DeitiesOne God in three persons; Chalcedonian christology in the West Syriac liturgy.
Founded1782 CE · Aleppo, and later Beirut
FounderMichael Jarweh, who declared union with Rome in 1782
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; Catholic teaching, with the Syriac commemorations of the dead.
TextsThe Peshitta · The Anaphora of Saint James · The Shhimo
The map
The Syriac Catholic Church’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1596 CE The Eastern Catholic Churches 1782 CE The Syriac Catholic Church
The same rite, in Roman communion.
The Syriac Catholic Church prays the Anaphora of Saint James in Syriac and Arabic, keeps the West Syriac calendar and the Shhimo hours, and holds Catholic doctrine including papal primacy. Its patriarch bears the same title as the Syriac Orthodox patriarch — of Antioch and All the East — and resides in Beirut.
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The martyr list is not closed.
The church counts 1915 among its founding catastrophes and does not treat martyrdom as a historical category. Its Baghdad cathedral was stormed during Sunday evening Mass in 2010; its people were driven out of Mosul and the Nineveh plain in 2014. The commemorations are annual and the names are recent.
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I
Ignatius Michael III Jarweh.
Elected Syriac Orthodox patriarch in 1782, he declared his communion with Rome almost immediately, was repudiated by his own synod, and fled to Lebanon, where he refounded the line at the monastery of Our Lady at Sharfeh. Every Syriac Catholic patriarch since has taken the name Ignatius. The union he made had been attempted intermittently since 1662 and had never held.
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The Nineveh fast, and the Qurbono.
Three days of strict fasting before Lent, kept with the East Syriac churches even though the rite is West Syriac, and then the year's Qurbono in the modes of the Beth Gazo. The Syriac Catholic Church is one of the few places where the two Syriac traditions' calendars overlap in practice.
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