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 shared center — held across the tradition
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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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
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.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
The Malankara reading of creation, unchanged by the crossing.
After death
Resurrection and judgment; Catholic teaching, with the Malankara commemorations of the dead.