Assyrian Church of the East Beliefs

1. Who the Assyrian Church of the East Is

The Assyrian Church of the East is a self-governing Christian Church of the East Syriac tradition, headed by a Catholicos-Patriarch, whose bishops stand in apostolic succession and whose liturgy is celebrated in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic close to the language Jesus spoke. Its full formal name is the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, and it traces its foundation to the preaching of the Apostle Thomas along with Addai and Mari in Mesopotamia. For most of its history it was known simply as the Church of the East, because it lived east of the Roman imperial frontier, inside the Persian and later the Islamic world, and developed largely outside the reach of the Byzantine emperors who convened the great councils.

Its ancient patriarchal seat was Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the Tigris, near modern Baghdad. Persecution, war and mass emigration have moved the see repeatedly in the last hundred years, through Iraq, Cyprus and the United States, and in 2015 the Holy Synod returned the patriarchal seat to Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The present Catholicos-Patriarch, Mar Awa III Royel, was elected in September 2021. Dioceses now exist across Iraq, Syria, Iran, India, Australia, Europe and North America, and a very large share of the Church's members live outside its historic homeland.

Published estimates of Assyrian Church membership vary widely, and no independent census of the Church exists. Displacement from Iraq and Syria since 2003, and again after 2014, has made any figure provisional. The honest statement is that this is a small Church by world Christian standards and an old one, with a continuous liturgical and episcopal life reaching back to the earliest Christian centuries in Mesopotamia.

No adherent figure is given here on purpose. Membership counts for the Assyrian Church of the East circulate widely online without a published methodology behind them, and the displacement of Iraqi and Syrian Christians since 2003 has made older counts unreliable. Where a specific number matters to you, look for the source that produced it and the year it was collected.

2. Why the Word "Nestorian" Misleads

"Nestorian" is the word most English sources have attached to the Church of the East for centuries, and the Church itself rejects it. Two separate claims travel inside that single word, and they need to be separated before anything useful can be said. The first claim is that the Church of the East holds the doctrine condemned at Ephesus in 431, namely that Christ is two persons, a divine Son and a human son, joined by moral association rather than by a real union. The second claim is that the Church of the East honours Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople whom that council deposed, and has never accepted his condemnation.

The second claim is true. Nestorius is named among the Greek doctors in the Assyrian liturgical tradition, one of the three anaphoras in use bears his name, and the Church has consistently refused to anathematise him. The first claim is denied by the Church itself, in its own doctrinal statements, and the denial is what the historic quarrel now turns on.

What the Church Says About Itself

The Assyrian Church of the East confesses that Jesus Christ is one, the eternal Son of God who took a complete human nature and a complete human life, and that this one Christ is the single subject of everything the Gospels report of him. It denies teaching two sons, two Christs, or a merely moral conjunction of God with a man. Assyrian theologians point out that the Church was already a distinct body outside the Roman Empire before Nestorius was born, with its own synods, its own patriarch and its own theological schools, so it cannot in any real sense have been founded by him or derived from him.

Its Christological vocabulary comes from the Antiochene school and above all from Theodore of Mopsuestia, called simply "the Interpreter" in East Syriac writing, and it was given its settled form by Babai the Great in the seventh century, two centuries after Nestorius died. Historians of Syriac Christianity now generally use "Church of the East" or "East Syriac" for this reason, keeping "Nestorian" for the specific fifth-century controversy rather than as a name for a living Church.

What Nestorius Actually Argued

Nestorius objected to calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, on the ground that the word could suggest the divine nature had a beginning in her womb, and he preferred Christotokos, Christ-bearer, or a compound formula. Cyril of Alexandria answered that the child in the womb is one person, the eternal Word, so the title belongs to Mary by right and refusing it splits Christ in two. The Council of Ephesus in 431 sided with Cyril, affirmed Theotokos, and deposed Nestorius. Whether Nestorius personally held the doctrine condemned in his name has been debated by scholars since the rediscovery of his own late work, the Bazaar of Heracleides, in the nineteenth century, and Catholic teaching on the point defined at Ephesus has not changed.

3. What the Assyrian Church Believes

The doctrine of the Assyrian Church of the East is the Nicene faith, received through the Syriac tradition and expressed in Syriac terms. An Assyrian Christian confesses one God in three qnome, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one in being; the Son eternally begotten of the Father; the Incarnation, the Passion, the bodily Resurrection, the Ascension and the coming judgment; the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic; baptism for the forgiveness of sins; and the resurrection of the dead with the life of the world to come. A Catholic reading a translation of the Assyrian creed finds a text he recognises.

The Councils Received

The Assyrian Church of the East receives the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381, and it does not receive the Council of Ephesus in 431 or the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Its own synodal tradition carries much of the weight that later councils carry elsewhere: the Synod of Isaac at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410 formally adopted the Nicene canons for the Church in Persia, the Synod of Dadisho in 424 declared that the Catholicos of the East would be judged by no bishop outside his own Church, and the Synod of 486 under Catholicos Acacius set out the dyophysite Christology the Church has held since.

Scripture

The Assyrian Church reads the Peshitta, the ancient Syriac Bible, whose New Testament omits 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation from the standard liturgical canon. Those five books are known in the tradition and are printed in modern Syriac Bibles, and they are not used in the lectionary. The Peshitta Old Testament was translated from Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint, which distinguishes the East Syriac inheritance from the Byzantine one. For the wider Catholic question of which books belong to Scripture and why, see our guide to the deuterocanonical books.

Grace, Sin and the Last Things

East Syriac theology speaks of the human condition after Adam in terms of inherited mortality, weakness and a will inclined to sin, and it puts less weight than Latin theology on inherited guilt. Salvation is worked by Christ and applied through baptism, the Eucharist, repentance and a life of ascetic effort. The Church prays for the dead and holds an intermediate state in which the departed await the resurrection, without the Latin apparatus of temporal punishment, satisfaction and indulgences that developed in the West. Our guide to purgatory sets out the Catholic doctrine and the Eastern hesitations about it.

Mary

Assyrian liturgy honours the Virgin Mary highly, calls her blessed among women, keeps feasts in her honour, and traditionally names her the Mother of Christ rather than the Mother of God. The reason is historical: the Church never received the council at which Theotokos became the test word, and the Syriac phrase Yaldath Msheekha, Bearer of Christ, was already the settled usage. Assyrian theologians insist that the Christ she bore is God and man in one person, which is exactly what the Catholic title is defending. The 1994 declaration treated the two formulas as complementary, and section 9 below sets out how.

4. Two Qnome in One Parsopa

The Christological formula of the Assyrian Church of the East is two kyane and two qnome in one parsopa, and the whole difficulty of five hundred years of argument lives in the middle term. The formula asserts that Christ is fully divine and fully human, that neither the divinity nor the humanity is diminished or absorbed by the other, and that the one Christ is a single subject who acts, suffers and saves.

The Three Syriac Words

This table gives the sense the terms carry in East Syriac theological writing, above all in Babai the Great. Syriac qnoma and Greek hypostasis are cognate in dictionary terms and were used to do different jobs, which is precisely why the fifth-century argument was so hard to settle. Any short table of this kind simplifies; the standard treatment is Babai's Book of the Union.

Why the Formula Sounds Wrong to Latin Ears

Chalcedon in 451 taught one hypostasis in two natures. The Assyrian formula says two qnome in one parsopa. Read with Greek definitions, the Assyrian sentence appears to say two hypostases, which in Greek would mean two individuals and therefore two Christs. Read with East Syriac definitions, it says that the humanity of Christ is a real concrete humanity and the divinity is a real concrete divinity, and both belong to the single parsopa of the Son. Babai the Great, writing in the early seventh century, used the analogy of soul and body: two real things, each fully itself, in one living person who is neither of them alone.

Where the Difference Still Bites

The Catholic Church holds that the person of the Incarnate Word is the divine hypostasis of the Son, so the union is hypostatic: there is no human person in Christ alongside the divine person, and the human nature subsists in the Word. The East Syriac formula, taken strictly, resists saying that the human qnoma subsists in the divine one, and Catholic theologians have long asked what unites the two qnome if the parsopa is a common personhood rather than the divine hypostasis itself. That is a real theological question, and the 1994 declaration deliberately expressed the shared faith in language prior to the disputed technical terms rather than pretending the terms had merged.

Both Churches read that verse as the whole question in one sentence. The Word, who is God, is the one who became flesh, and the flesh is real flesh. For the Catholic doctrine of the divine persons that stands behind the argument, see our guide to the Trinity.

5. Ephesus 431 and the Parting of Ways

The separation of the Church of the East from the imperial Churches happened through the fifth century, and Ephesus in 431 is its hinge. The Church in Persia was not represented at that council. It lay outside the Roman Empire, under Sasanian rule, where Christians were periodically suspected of loyalty to the Roman enemy, and its bishops had declared their independence from bishops outside Persia at the Synod of Dadisho in 424, seven years before Ephesus met.

The School of Edessa and the School of Nisibis

The theological centre of Syriac Christianity was Edessa, where the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia were translated into Syriac and taught as the standard of orthodoxy. When the Antiochene tradition fell out of imperial favour, the Emperor Zeno closed the School of Edessa in 489, and its masters moved east across the frontier to Nisibis under Narsai. The School of Nisibis became the intellectual engine of the Church of the East for centuries, and it fixed Theodore's exegesis and Christology as the tradition's own.

Three Councils, Three Outcomes

The fifth and sixth centuries produced three separate Christian bodies out of one argument, and their positions are commonly confused with one another.

The Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox were the two extremes of the fifth-century argument, opposed to each other as sharply as either was to Constantinople. Treating them as one group, or calling either of them Eastern Orthodox, garbles the history entirely. Our guides to the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Church set out the other two families in their own terms.

Politics Doing the Work of Theology

The separation hardened for reasons that had little to do with the technical vocabulary. A Church under Persian rule that shared a hierarchy with Constantinople was a security problem for its own rulers, and the Sasanian state had every reason to encourage a Christianity distinct from the empire's. Distance, language and the collapse of routine contact did the rest. By the sixth century the Church of the East was a fully separate communion with its own patriarch, canons, liturgy and schools, and the theological quarrel had become an inherited boundary rather than a live conversation.

6. The Church That Reached China

The Church of the East carried Christianity across Asia during the first millennium, and almost nothing of that work survives. From Mesopotamia its monks and merchants followed the trade routes east into Persia, Central Asia, the Turkic steppe, India and China, and by the seventh century its patriarchs were appointing metropolitans at distances no Western Church attempted until the age of sail.

The Xi'an Stele

The best-known physical evidence is the stele erected at Chang'an, modern Xi'an, in 781, inscribed in Chinese and Syriac. It records the arrival of the monk Alopen at the Tang capital in 635 and the imperial permission granted to what the Chinese text calls the Luminous Religion. The monument was rediscovered in the seventeenth century and stands today in the Beilin Museum in Xi'an. It is the sort of documentary anchor most claims about early Asian Christianity lack.

India

The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, who trace their origin to the Apostle Thomas, were in hierarchical relationship with the Church of the East for centuries and received bishops from its patriarchs. Portuguese pressure from the sixteenth century, and the Synod of Diamper in 1599, broke that connection and drew most of the community into the Latin orbit, after which further divisions produced the several Kerala Churches that exist now. One archdiocese in India, based at Thrissur, remains part of the Assyrian Church of the East today. The Syro-Malabar Church, one of the bodies descended from the Saint Thomas Christians, is an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with Rome that keeps the same East Syriac liturgical inheritance, a case our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches treats in detail.

The Collapse

The Central Asian and Chinese missions withered under a combination of dynastic change, the conversion of the Mongol successor states to Islam, plague and the campaigns of Timur at the end of the fourteenth century, which devastated the surviving Christian communities of Mesopotamia and Iran. A Church that had once held sees from the Mediterranean to the Pacific was reduced to the mountains of Hakkari and the plain of Nineveh. The scale of that loss is the reason the Assyrian Church of the East is a small communion today with a very large history.

The list at Pentecost begins in the East. The Christians of Mesopotamia have read that verse as their own charter for a very long time.

7. Worship, Sacraments and the Church Year

Assyrian worship is the East Syriac rite, celebrated in classical Syriac, chanted throughout, and built around the Holy Qurbana, the Eucharistic offering. The rite is one of the two great Syriac liturgical families, the other being the West Syriac rite used by the Syriac Orthodox and by the Maronite and Syriac Catholic Churches in modified forms. A visitor notices the antiquity first: long chanted psalmody, a raised platform in the nave called the bema from which much of the service is sung, deep bows, and a bare cross rather than a crucifix or a screen of icons.

The Three Anaphoras

Three Eucharistic prayers are in use. The Anaphora of the Holy Apostles Addai and Mari is the ordinary one and the subject of section 8. The Anaphora of Mar Theodore the Interpreter is used from Advent through Palm Sunday, and the Anaphora of Mar Nestorius is used on five occasions in the year, including the Epiphany and the commemoration of the Greek doctors. The attribution of the latter two is traditional rather than a claim of literal authorship.

The Sacraments

East Syriac writers speak of seven mysteries, and their lists are drawn up differently from the Latin list of seven sacraments. The classic enumeration set out by Abdisho bar Brikha in the fourteenth century runs: priesthood, baptism, the oil of anointing, the oblation of the Body and Blood of Christ, absolution, the Holy Leaven and the sign of the Cross. Other East Syriac authors count marriage or monastic profession among the seven and drop items from that list, so the number is stable in the tradition while the contents are not. Baptism, the Eucharist, priesthood and absolution are held in common with Rome under any of these enumerations. Marriage is honoured and blessed by the Church. Priests may be married if they married before ordination, and bishops are chosen from among the celibate clergy, a discipline shared with the other Eastern traditions.

The Holy Leaven

The Holy Leaven is one of the most distinctive elements in Assyrian sacramental practice. A portion of consecrated leaven, which the tradition holds was handed down from the bread of the Last Supper and preserved by the apostles, is renewed each year in a rite on Holy Thursday and mixed into the dough for the Eucharistic bread in every parish. Whatever a historian makes of the origin story, the practice does real theological work in the tradition: it expresses the continuity of every altar with the upper room, materially and visibly. The Catholic Church has never made a judgement on the historical claim, and it does not affect the recognition of the Assyrian priesthood or Eucharist.

Fasting and the Church Year

The East Syriac calendar is arranged in periods of roughly seven weeks each, running from Advent through Epiphany, Lent, Resurrection, the Apostles, Summer, Elijah and the Cross, and the Dedication of the Church. The Rogation of the Ninevites, Ba'utha d-Ninwaye, is a strict three-day fast kept some weeks before Lent in memory of the repentance of Nineveh under the preaching of Jonah, and it is among the most characteristic observances of the tradition. The Great Fast before Resurrection is long and severe by modern Western standards, with abstention from meat and animal products.

Communion Practice

The Eucharist is received under both kinds, and infants and young children commune, as in the Eastern Churches generally. Communion is normally given to the baptised members of the Church, and the 2001 guidelines discussed in section 10 created a defined exception for Chaldean Catholics in need. On what the Catholic Church teaches happens at the altar, including transubstantiation and the Real Presence, see our guide to the Eucharist, which covers the doctrine this page assumes.

8. The Anaphora of Addai and Mari

The Anaphora of the Holy Apostles Addai and Mari is the ordinary Eucharistic prayer of the East Syriac tradition and one of the oldest Christian Eucharistic prayers in continuous use. Scholars of the East Syriac liturgy generally place its core in the third century, and some argue for an earlier date; the Holy See's own 2001 guidelines call it one of the most ancient Eucharistic prayers, going back to the very early Church. It is named for Addai and Mari, the missionaries whom the tradition credits with evangelising Mesopotamia. The prayer's structure is unlike a Roman canon: a series of addresses to God, thanksgivings, commemorations and intercessions, with a strong doxological rhythm and a memorial of the passion, death and resurrection woven through it.

The Feature That Made It a Question

The anaphora in its traditional form carries no continuous Institution Narrative, meaning that the words "This is my body ... this is my blood", recited as a single quoted block from the Last Supper, do not appear as such. Almost every other historic Eucharistic prayer in East and West contains that narrative, and Latin sacramental theology from the medieval period onward has treated those words as the form of the sacrament, the words by which the consecration is effected. An ancient prayer that lacks them, used continuously by a Church with valid orders, poses a genuine question about how the Church understands its own sacramental theology.

What the Prayer Does Contain

The anaphora explicitly commemorates the passion of Christ, offers the sacrifice in his name, asks the Holy Spirit to come upon the offering, and speaks of the body and blood of Christ in petition and thanksgiving. The intent to do what Christ did at the Last Supper is unmistakable in the text. The scholarly description that the Holy See eventually adopted is that the substance of the institution is present in the prayer in a dispersed way, distributed through successive prayers of praise, thanksgiving and intercession, rather than gathered into one narrative sentence.

Modern Assyrian Practice

Some printed editions and some current Assyrian usage include the words of institution within the anaphora, and the Holy Synod of the Assyrian Church of the East has permitted their insertion. The 2001 guidelines specifically invited Assyrian ministers to insert them when Chaldean Catholic faithful are present at the celebration. The Holy See's ruling did not depend on that insertion, which is what makes the ruling theologically significant.

9. The 1994 Common Christological Declaration

The Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East was signed in the Vatican on 11 November 1994 by Pope John Paul II and Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV. It is the document that closed, at the level of official teaching, a division that had stood since the fifth century. The two Churches declared that they profess the same faith in the mystery of the Incarnation, and they said so in language chosen to sit before the disputed technical vocabulary rather than to adjudicate it.

What the Declaration Says

The text confesses Jesus Christ as true God and true man, perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity, consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and consubstantial with us in his humanity. It states that his divinity and his humanity are united in one person, without confusion or change, without division or separation, and that in him the distinction of the natures is preserved. It rejects the idea that Christ is an ordinary man whom God adopted. On the disputed titles, the declaration records that the Assyrian Church of the East prays to the Virgin Mary as the Mother of Christ our God and Saviour, that the Catholic tradition addresses her as the Mother of God and also as the Mother of Christ, and that both Churches recognise these expressions as legitimate and complementary formulations of the same faith.

What It Does Not Do

The declaration did not establish communion between the two Churches, and both parties said so plainly in the text itself, which describes the agreement as a step toward full communion and sets out further work on sacramental theology, ecclesiology and the apostolic succession. It did not require the Assyrian Church to accept the Council of Ephesus or to anathematise Nestorius, and it did not require the Catholic Church to withdraw the definition of Ephesus. What it did was establish that neither Church holds the doctrine the other has been condemning, so the anathemas of the fifth century do not fall on the Churches that exist now.

A Joint Committee for Theological Dialogue was established by the same act and has worked since on the sacraments and on the nature of the Church. Its agreed statements have no force beyond what the two Churches receive from them, and the working relationship has been steady for three decades.

10. The 2001 Ruling on Addai and Mari

On 20 July 2001 the Holy See approved a document titled Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, prepared by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity with the agreement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for the Oriental Churches. Its practical purpose was pastoral: Assyrian and Chaldean faithful, scattered by war and emigration, frequently found themselves in places where only one of the two Churches had a priest. Its doctrinal content went considerably further than the pastoral problem required.

The Three Reasons Given

The guidelines set out why the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, celebrated without a continuous Institution Narrative, can be regarded as a valid Eucharistic prayer. Three grounds were stated.

What the Guidelines Permit

The provisions are narrow and reciprocal. An Assyrian faithful who has no access to a priest of his own Church may ask for the Eucharist from a Chaldean Catholic minister. A Chaldean Catholic in the same situation may receive from an Assyrian minister, in a celebration using the Anaphora of Addai and Mari without the Institution Narrative. Where Chaldean faithful are present at an Assyrian celebration, the Assyrian minister is warmly invited to insert the words of institution, which the Assyrian Holy Synod permits. The arrangement applies to these two Churches, and it does not open Catholic Communion generally to members of Churches not in full communion beyond what canon law already allows.

The three grounds above are the reasons stated in the 2001 Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, approved by the Holy See on 20 July 2001. Read the document itself before relying on this summary for any pastoral decision, and ask a priest of the Church concerned about what applies in a particular place.

What Latin Theologians Argued About Afterwards

The ruling provoked a serious debate among Catholic sacramental theologians, and the debate is worth knowing about. Some argued that it changed nothing doctrinally, since the Church has always held that the form of a sacrament is determined by the Church's own liturgical tradition and that the Roman insistence on the narrative words is a Latin specification rather than a universal necessity. Others argued that it amounted to a real development, since the words of institution had been treated for centuries in Latin manuals as the necessary and sufficient form of consecration. The Holy See did not authorise any Latin or Eastern Catholic Church to omit the Institution Narrative from its own anaphoras, and the Roman Missal and every Eastern Catholic anaphora retain it.

11. Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, Oriental Orthodox

Four groups of Christians in the Middle East carry overlapping names, and confusing them is a common error in writing about this subject. The names mix ethnicity, liturgical rite and communion status, and none of the three lines up with the others.

The Chaldean Catholic Church

The Chaldean Catholic Church is the Eastern Catholic Church of the East Syriac tradition, in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, with its patriarchate in Baghdad. It came into being through unions with Rome beginning in 1552, when a party of bishops of the Church of the East elected Yohannan Sulaqa and sent him to Rome for confirmation in protest against hereditary succession in the patriarchate. Rival lines existed for centuries and the modern Chaldean patriarchate was consolidated in the nineteenth century. Chaldeans and Assyrians share a liturgical inheritance, a language and in most cases an ethnic identity, and they are two Churches because of the communion question alone.

The Ancient Church of the East

The Ancient Church of the East separated from the Assyrian patriarchate in the 1960s, chiefly over the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and over the hereditary succession then in force in the patriarchal line, and it has its seat in Baghdad. The Assyrian Church of the East abolished hereditary succession in 1976, removing one of the original causes, and the two Churches have pursued reunion through a joint commission since. Both bodies hold the same East Syriac faith and rite.

Assyrian as an Ethnic Term

"Assyrian" also functions as an ethnic and national identifier for a people indigenous to northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria and northwestern Iran, who speak modern dialects of Aramaic. Members of that people belong to the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and other bodies. Church membership and ethnic identity are separate facts here, and naming conventions among the communities themselves are contested.

12. A Century of Loss and Displacement

The modern history of the Assyrian Church of the East is dominated by violence and by exile, and no account of what the Church is today makes sense without it. The community entered the twentieth century concentrated in the Hakkari mountains of Ottoman Anatolia and the Urmia plain of Persia, with an established village Christianity and a patriarchal line held within one family.

1915 and After

During the First World War the Assyrian and other Syriac Christian communities of the Ottoman southeast were subjected to mass killing and deportation, remembered as the Sayfo, the sword, alongside the Armenian and Greek deportations of the same period. The survivors fled south into what became Iraq, and the Hakkari homeland was permanently lost. In August 1933 the Simele massacre in northern Iraq killed a large number of Assyrian villagers and drove further flight into Syria. Patriarch Mar Shimun XXIII Eshai was deprived of Iraqi citizenship and exiled, and the patriarchal seat moved eventually to the United States, where he was assassinated in 1975.

Reform and Return

Mar Dinkha IV was elected in 1976 and the Holy Synod abolished hereditary patriarchal succession, ending a practice that had caused repeated divisions since the sixteenth century. He led the Church through the 1994 declaration with Rome and the negotiations behind the 2001 guidelines, and died in 2015. Mar Gewargis III was elected the same year, and the Synod moved the patriarchal seat back to Erbil in Iraq. Mar Awa III Royel was elected in 2021 after his predecessor's resignation.

Iraq and Syria Since 2003

The Christian population of Iraq has fallen sharply since 2003 through emigration, and again after 2014, when the Islamic State group seized Mosul and the towns of the Nineveh Plain and drove out the Christian and Yazidi populations. Churches and manuscripts were destroyed, and many families who left have not returned. The war in Syria displaced Assyrian communities on the Khabur river from 2015. The result is a Church whose institutional centre is in Iraq and whose people are largely in Europe, North America and Australia. Pope Francis visited Iraq in March 2021 and met Christian communities in Mosul, Qaraqosh and Erbil, a visit that carried real weight for the region's Christians.

13. Where Things Stand Between Rome and the Assyrians

The Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East are not in full communion, and the distance between them is now smaller than the fifth-century record suggests. The Christological quarrel has been addressed at the level of official teaching. The Eucharist and the priesthood of the Assyrian Church are recognised by Rome. A limited sacramental sharing exists between the Assyrian Church and its Chaldean sister Church. A standing dialogue commission continues to work.

What Remains Open

Three things remain, and they are substantial. The first is the reception of the councils: the Assyrian Church has not received Ephesus in 431 or Chalcedon in 451, or any later council, and the Catholic Church holds all of them as binding expressions of the faith. The second is the place of Nestorius and of Theodore of Mopsuestia, both condemned by councils the Catholic Church receives and both honoured in the Assyrian tradition. The third is the papacy, since full communion means communion with the Bishop of Rome in the terms Catholic teaching gives that office, a question set out in our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office.

The Chaldean Question

Any move toward communion runs through the existence of the Chaldean Catholic Church, and both sides know it. A single East Syriac people is divided between a Church in communion with Rome and a Church that is not, with parallel hierarchies in the same cities. Serious proposals for eventual unity of the two patriarchates have been discussed by their leaders for decades. The obstacles are partly theological and heavily practical, involving jurisdiction, property, patriarchal precedence and the memory of how the division arose. The Catholic principle for such cases, that receiving groups piecemeal is not the method for seeking unity, was stated in the Balamand statement of 1993 in the context of relations with the Eastern Orthodox, and it shapes how Rome approaches this situation as well.

How Rome Describes the Assyrian Church

Catholic documents call the Assyrian Church of the East a true particular Church with apostolic succession and a valid priesthood and Eucharist, which is the same category of recognition applied to the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 states the general principle: the Church knows herself joined in many ways to the baptised who do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or preserve unity of communion under the successor of Peter, and with the Eastern Churches that have valid sacraments that communion is very deep.

14. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Speak accurately about the Assyrian Church of the East, which begins with dropping the word "Nestorian" as a name for it. Learn the position from the Church's own confession and from the 1994 declaration before answering it. Distinguish the Assyrian Church from the Chaldean Catholic Church, from the Syriac Orthodox, and from the Oriental Orthodox family, since each of those errors is common and each one misleads.

Pray for the Christians of Iraq, Syria and Iran, whose situation is precarious and whose churches are ancient. Support the Eastern Christian communities in your own country if there are any near you; many Assyrian and Chaldean parishes now exist in Western cities, and they welcome visitors who come to learn. Respect Assyrian communion discipline by not presenting yourself where you have not been invited, and understand that a Catholic's own discipline is governed by canon law and by his bishop rather than by hospitality.

Hold the Catholic faith without caricaturing the other side. The Council of Ephesus taught the truth, and the Catholic Church has not withdrawn a word of it. The Church that did not receive that council nevertheless confesses the one Christ, and Rome has said so in a signed act. Both of those things belong in a Catholic's account of this history.

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