A 1930 crossing, with the Qurbana carried over intact.
The Kerala church formed when Archbishop Mar Ivanios and part of the Malankara Orthodox community entered communion with Rome in 1930 while keeping their West Syriac liturgy whole. It has been a major archiepiscopal church since 2005, its head bears the title Catholicos, and its seat is at the Catholicate Centre in Trivandrum.
DeitiesOne God in three persons; Chalcedonian christology in the West Syriac rite the church brought with it.
Founded1930 CE · Trivandrum, Kerala
FounderGeevarghese Mar Ivanios
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; Catholic teaching, with the Malankara commemorations of the dead.
TextsThe Bible in Malayalam · The Qurbana of Saint James · The Shhimo
The map
The Syro-Malankara 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 1930 CE The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church
The liturgy crossed intact.
The terms of 1930 were that the community would keep its West Syriac rite, its Malayalam, its married clergy and its discipline, and it did. The Qurbana of Saint James is celebrated in this church substantially as it is in the Malankara Orthodox and Jacobite churches, which is unusual: most reunions of the period cost the incoming church its liturgy.
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Reunion, or departure.
Rome and this church call 1930 a reunion — a return to a communion broken in the seventeenth century. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church calls it the departure of a metropolitan who took part of a diocese with him. The facts are agreed; the word is not.
⚖ contested within
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G
Geevarghese Mar Ivanios.
A professor and principal before he was a bishop, he founded the Bethany Ashram at Perunad in 1919 to give the Malankara church an indigenous monasticism, was authorised by his synod in 1926 to open negotiations with Rome, and on 20 September 1930 entered the Catholic communion with Bishop Mar Theophilos and a small group. He was made archbishop of Trivandrum in 1932. Rome declared him Venerable in 2024.
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The Qurbana of Saint James, in Malayalam.
The West Syriac liturgy, sung, with the Shhimo hours kept daily in the ashrams and by many households. The church has resisted Latinisation more successfully than most Eastern Catholic churches, in part because it arrived with its books in 1930 and in part because two large churches next door are celebrating the same rite and would notice any drift.
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