History & overview · every faith gets one
Thomas Christians in Roman communion — arguing about which way the priest faces.
The second-largest Eastern Catholic church, five million strong in Kerala and its diaspora, East Syriac in rite and Catholic in communion. Latinised by the Portuguese from 1599, given its own hierarchy in 1887 and its own liturgy back in stages, it spent four years in an open liturgical revolt that ended in a compromise in 2025.
The founding
The Saint Thomas Christians were an East Syriac church under the Church of the East until the Portuguese arrived. The Synod of Diamper in 1599 cut them from their patriarch and subjected them to Goa; the 1653 Coonan Cross Oath split the community, and the party that stayed with Rome became the Syro-Malabar Church. It regained an indigenous hierarchy in 1887, a separate province in 1923, and major archiepiscopal status in 1992.
No single founder — The Syro-Malabar Church accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. Created and blessed; Kerala Christianity keeps the household and the harvest inside the religion..
The divine. One God in three persons; Catholic doctrine in an East Syriac liturgical form..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the Catholic teaching on purgatory, with Kerala's own long commemorations of the dead..