Syriac Orthodox Church Beliefs

1. Who the Syriac Orthodox Are

The Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch is one of the six Oriental Orthodox churches, headed by the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, and it worships in Syriac, the literary Aramaic that developed at Edessa in northern Mesopotamia. Its members call themselves Suryoye, and they trace their church to the community at Antioch where Acts 11:26 says the disciples were first called Christians, holding Saint Peter as the first bishop of that see. The church accepts the first three ecumenical councils, Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381 and Ephesus in 431, and it did not receive the Council of Chalcedon of 451.

Syriac Orthodox life is concentrated in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Israel and Palestine, Jordan, and in a very large diaspora built by successive waves of flight: Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Australia and Brazil. In India, the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church of Kerala belongs to this patriarchate and accounts for a large share of its faithful. The patriarchal see has been seated at Damascus since 1959.

Adherent totals for this church are contested and vary widely between church, government and academic sources, especially after two decades of war and emigration in Syria and Iraq. No figure is given here for that reason. Where a number matters to you, look for one that names its own publisher and its year.

Where It Sits Among the Orthodox

Three families of churches share the word Orthodox and are frequently run together. The Oriental Orthodox family, of which the Syriac Orthodox Church is a member, holds three councils and comprises the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara churches, treated together in our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The Eastern Orthodox Church holds seven councils, follows the Byzantine tradition, and is a separate communion. The Eastern Catholic Churches keep Eastern rites in full communion with Rome, and one of them, the Syriac Catholic Church, shares this exact liturgical tradition.

What Makes This Church Distinctive

Four things mark the Syriac Orthodox out even within the Oriental Orthodox family. The liturgical language is Aramaic, the language family of Jesus and the apostles, kept in continuous liturgical use for well over a millennium and a half. The theological tradition is poetic, formed by Ephrem the Syrian and Jacob of Serugh, who wrote doctrine in metrical hymns rather than in the syllogisms of the Greek and Latin schools. The church has survived as a minority under successive empires without ever holding political power. And its recent history is dominated by the Sayfo, the 1915 massacres of Syriac Christians in the Ottoman Empire, which its people treat as the central event of the modern era.

2. What Syriac Orthodox Christians Believe

Syriac Orthodox belief is the Nicene faith as the first three councils left it, confessed in Syriac and expounded through the Syriac fathers. A Syriac Orthodox Christian holds one God in three persons, the Son eternally begotten and consubstantial with the Father, the Incarnation of the Word from the Virgin Mary, his death and bodily resurrection, his ascension, his coming again to judge the living and the dead, the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. A Catholic reading that confession finds nothing to correct in it.

The Three Councils

The church receives Nicaea I of 325, which defined the Son as of one being with the Father against Arius; Constantinople I of 381, which completed the Creed and confessed the Holy Spirit as Lord and giver of life; and Ephesus of 431, which upheld Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius and defined Mary as Theotokos, God-bearer, rendered in Syriac as Yoldath Aloho. Everything the Syriac Orthodox teach about Christ is presented by them as the plain sense of Ephesus and of Cyril, which is the key to understanding their refusal of Chalcedon twenty years later.

The Creed Without the Filioque

The Creed is recited in the form settled in 381, with the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father, and without the Latin addition of the Filioque. The Syriac Orthodox share that position with the Eastern Orthodox and with every other Eastern church that separated before the addition spread in the West, and their objection has never been the centre of their argument with Rome, since their separation predates the dispute by centuries. Our guide to the Trinity sets out the Catholic doctrine of the divine persons, and the guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church treats the Filioque controversy itself.

Mary, the Saints and the Departed

Mary is honoured as Yoldath Aloho, ever-virgin, and she is invoked in every service; the Syriac hymnody addresses her with an intimacy and a density of imagery that surprises Western Christians meeting it for the first time. The saints are venerated and their intercession is asked, relics are honoured, and the martyrs of the Syriac tradition, ancient and modern, are named in the liturgy. The dead are prayed for at the Qurbono and commemorated on fixed days after burial and annually, in the conviction that the prayers of the living help the departed. The Syriac Orthodox do not teach the Latin doctrine of purgatory as a defined state with the vocabulary of temporal punishment and satisfaction, and our guide to purgatory explains where the Eastern churches diverge from the Latin framing while praying for the dead as insistently as Catholics do.

Sin, Grace and Salvation

Syriac theology speaks of the fall as a loss of the robe of glory, an image drawn from Ephrem: Adam and Eve were clothed in glory, they lost it, and Christ restores it in baptism, so that the baptised put on Christ as a garment. Human beings inherit mortality and a corrupted condition from Adam. Salvation is healing and restoration accomplished by the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection, appropriated through the mysteries and through a life of repentance, fasting, almsgiving and prayer. The medical image is everywhere in Syriac writing: Christ is the Physician, the Church is the hospital, the Eucharist is the Medicine of Life.

3. Miaphysite Christology in Syriac Terms

Miaphysite Christology is the confession that in Christ there is one incarnate nature of God the Word, out of two, divinity and humanity, united without mixture, without change, without confusion and without separation. The formula comes from Cyril of Alexandria, whose authority Ephesus had vindicated in 431, and the Syriac Orthodox hold it as the faith of that council rather than as a novelty. The one nature in this usage means one concrete, single, undivided reality of the incarnate Word, and the humanity within it stays complete, real and consubstantial with ours.

What Severus of Antioch Taught

Severus of Antioch, patriarch from 512 to 518 and the principal theologian of the non-Chalcedonian side, is the doctor of this church. Severus condemned Eutyches by name and repudiated any suggestion that Christ's humanity was absorbed, diminished or swallowed up in his divinity. He taught that after the union the two natures are distinguishable in contemplation, in the mind's analysis, and not as two separately subsisting things that could be counted. His objection to Chalcedon's phrase "in two natures" was grammatical and metaphysical: in his vocabulary a nature always exists concretely, so to count two natures after the union is to count two beings and to divide Christ. Chalcedonian theology answers that the words physis and hypostasis are being used in different senses on the two sides, and that what Severus asserts is what Chalcedon asserts.

Why "Monophysite" Is the Wrong Word

Calling the Syriac Orthodox monophysite attributes to them a doctrine they anathematise. Monophysitism in the condemned sense is Eutychianism, the teaching that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his divinity and is no longer consubstantial with ours. Severus condemned Eutyches, the Syriac Orthodox Church anathematises him, and every Oriental Orthodox church does the same. The accurate words are miaphysite, non-Chalcedonian, or simply Syriac Orthodox. Using the old label is a factual error about what this church teaches.

The Trisagion With the Addition

One liturgical detail carries the whole Christology and is worth knowing before visiting. The Syriac Orthodox sing the Trisagion as "Holy art thou, O God; holy art thou, O Almighty; holy art thou, O Immortal; thou who wast crucified for us, have mercy on us." The addition of the crucifixion clause, associated with Peter the Fuller in the fifth century, was fiercely disputed in the Byzantine world, where the Trisagion was read as addressed to the Trinity, so that the clause appeared to say that the Trinity was crucified. The Syriac Orthodox address the hymn to the incarnate Son, in whose single subject the crucifixion belongs to the one who is God, which is the same logic that lets a Catholic say truly that God died on the Cross and that Mary is the Mother of God. Read that way the addition states a doctrine Catholics hold.

How Close Rome and the Syriac Orthodox Actually Are on Christ

Unofficial consultations between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian theologians at Aarhus in 1964, Bristol in 1967, Geneva in 1970 and Addis Ababa in 1971 reported that once the terminology was clarified they found no substantive difference in the faith confessed on either side. That work fed directly into the official declarations, and the 1984 text signed by John Paul II and Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas states it at the highest level available to both churches. Section 11 gives the wording.

4. Why the Church Is Called Jacobite

The word Jacobite comes from Jacob Baradaeus, a monk consecrated bishop of Edessa around 542, who spent more than thirty years travelling in disguise through Syria, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor ordaining bishops, priests and deacons for the non-Chalcedonian communities while the imperial authorities were suppressing their hierarchy. His nickname, from a Syriac word for the coarse ragged cloth he wore, gave the church its outside name. Without his ordinations the non-Chalcedonian church of the Syriac tradition would very likely have died out with its last bishops, which is why he is venerated and why the label stuck.

What the Church Calls Itself

The church's own name is the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, and its head is the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East. In Middle Eastern and Western usage Jacobite was applied from outside, often polemically, and it implies that the church was founded by a sixth-century bishop rather than by the apostles, which is precisely the claim the church rejects. Anyone writing or speaking about the church should use Syriac Orthodox.

Where Jacobite Is a Normal Self-Description

Kerala is the exception, and it is a large one. The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church is the official, self-chosen name of the Indian church that recognises the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch as its supreme head, and its members describe themselves as Jacobites without any sense of insult. In Kerala the word functions as a marker of jurisdictional allegiance, distinguishing this body from the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, which holds an identical faith and an autocephalous position. Section 14 sets out that situation.

5. Worship in Aramaic: Qurbono, Shehimo and the Fasts

Syriac Orthodox worship follows the West Syriac rite, sung throughout, heavy with incense, and conducted in Classical Syriac mixed with the local language of the congregation. The eucharistic liturgy is called the Qurbono, the Offering, and its normal form is the Anaphora of Saint James, the ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, which this tradition has kept as its principal eucharistic prayer. The West Syriac books preserve a very large number of alternative anaphoras, used on particular feasts and at the celebrant's discretion.

Inside the Qurbono

The service begins with the preparation of the bread and wine, moves through psalms, the Trisagion with its crucifixion clause, readings from the Old Testament, the Acts and Epistles, and the Gospel, then the creed, the kiss of peace, and the anaphora itself with its epiclesis calling the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. The bread is leavened. The altar stands behind a curtain that is drawn at the solemn moments, an ancient practice of veiling the sanctuary. Communion is given to the baptised of the church, infants included, and this is the practice of the whole Eastern world. A visitor will notice how much of the service is sung by the congregation and how much of the theology arrives as poetry.

The Shehimo, the Sevenfold Office

The Shehimo is the weekday breviary of the Syriac Orthodox Church, arranged in seven daily hours across a weekly cycle with a distinct theme for each day. Praying seven times a day is grounded in Psalm 119:164, and the practice is expected of clergy, monastics and devout laity alike, with families keeping at least the evening and morning hours at home. The texts are largely poetic, drawn from the classical Syriac hymn-writers, and they carry doctrine in the form of images: the robe of glory, the pearl, the bridal chamber, the Medicine of Life.

Fasting

Fasting in this tradition is frequent and strict by Western standards, and it is understood as physical training rather than as a penalty. The Great Fast before Easter runs fifty days. The Fast of Nineveh, a three-day fast recalling the repentance of Nineveh under Jonah's preaching, falls some weeks before Lent and is a signature of the Syriac churches. There are also fasts before Christmas, before the feast of the Apostles, and before the Dormition of the Mother of God, and Wednesdays and Fridays are kept through the year. The classical discipline abstains from all animal products for the fasting periods and delays eating until a set hour of the day.

Signs, Gestures and Church Buildings

The sign of the cross is made with one finger in some usages and with the whole hand in others, and prayer is offered facing east. Shoes are removed on entering many churches in the Middle East and in Kerala. Men and women often stand on separate sides of the nave. Church buildings in Tur Abdin, the historic heartland in south-eastern Turkey, are built of pale stone with deep barrel vaults and a strong horizontal emphasis, and their architectural line runs back to late antiquity without interruption.

6. The Seven Mysteries

The Syriac Orthodox Church celebrates the sacraments, which it calls mysteries, and its usage lines up with the Catholic seven in substance while differing in administration. Baptism, chrismation with the holy myron, the Eucharist, penance, anointing of the sick, matrimony and holy orders are all celebrated, and the church has not defined the number seven with the precision of Latin scholasticism, since it inherited its sacramental practice before that habit of counting arose in the West.

Baptism and Myron

Infants are baptised by triple immersion in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, anointed at once with the holy myron, the consecrated oil that corresponds to Latin confirmation, and given Holy Communion at the same service. The three mysteries of initiation stay together as they did in the ancient Church. The myron itself is consecrated by the Patriarch, an act performed rarely and with great solemnity, and its distribution to the dioceses is a visible sign of communion with the patriarchal see. The Catholic Church recognises the validity of this baptism, and our guide to baptism covers the Catholic doctrine and the recognition of baptism celebrated in other churches.

Penance and Anointing

Confession is made to a priest, with an emphasis on healing and on the restoration of the penitent to the assembly rather than on the reckoning of penalties. Anointing of the sick is given for bodily and spiritual healing, and is not restricted to the point of death. Both are named specifically in the 1984 provision with Rome, along with the Eucharist, which is why that provision matters so much in practice: these are the three sacraments a Christian may urgently need where no priest of his own church can be reached. The Catholic understanding of the sacrament of penance is set out in our guide to confession.

Marriage and Orders

Marriage is celebrated with a crowning rite and is understood as a mystery of union in Christ. Men who are already married may be ordained to the diaconate and the priesthood, and a priest may not marry after ordination; bishops are chosen from among monastics and are celibate. The rank of chorepiscopus, a senior married priest with limited oversight, survives in this church as it does in the other Syriac traditions. Ordination is by the laying on of hands in a succession the church traces to the apostles, and the Catholic Church regards these orders as valid.

7. Saints, Fathers and the Syriac Poets

The Syriac Orthodox tradition produced a body of theological poetry that stands beside the Greek and Latin fathers and is far less known in the West. Its authors wrote in metre, in dialogue poems, in verse homilies and in hymns for congregational singing, and they carried doctrine in image rather than in definition. Any Catholic who wants to understand this church should start with its poets, because the poems are what the people actually sing.

Ephrem the Syrian

Ephrem the Syrian, who died in 373 at Edessa, is the towering figure of Syriac Christianity and belongs to every church of the tradition, since he lived long before any of the divisions. He wrote hymn cycles on the Nativity, on Faith, on Paradise, on Virginity and against heresies, teaching through paired images: the robe of glory lost by Adam and restored in Christ, the Pearl as a figure of faith, the eye of the heart made luminous by grace. Pope Benedict XV declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1920, so a saint of the Syriac tradition is formally a teacher of the whole Catholic Church. Our guide to the saints and their veneration explains what that recognition involves.

Jacob of Serugh and the Verse Homily

Jacob of Serugh, who died in 521, is known as the Flute of the Holy Spirit for the enormous body of metrical homilies he composed on Scripture, the feasts and the saints. His homilies are read liturgically to this day. Alongside him stand Balai, Isaac of Antioch and a long line of anonymous poets whose dialogue poems set biblical characters arguing with one another, a form the Syriac churches used to teach doctrine to congregations who could not read. Narsai, the other great Syriac verse homilist of the period, belongs to the East Syriac side and is honoured in the Church of the East rather than here.

Severus, Philoxenus and the Later Doctors

Severus of Antioch and Philoxenus of Mabbug are the doctrinal authorities of the miaphysite position, and both are venerated as saints in this church while being condemned in the Byzantine and Latin traditions. Later figures include Jacob of Edessa, who died in 708, a polymath who standardised Syriac grammar and canon law, and Bar Hebraeus, the thirteenth-century maphrian, historian, physician and encyclopedist whose works are a summary of the whole medieval Syriac inheritance. The mutual condemnation of saints between the traditions is one of the genuinely hard obstacles to reunion, since these names are sung in the liturgy and cannot simply be edited out.

The Modern Martyrs

The Syriac Orthodox commemorate the victims of the Sayfo of 1915 as martyrs, and the church has canonised or commemorated bishops and priests killed in that period and in the wars of the last two decades. Two Aleppo hierarchs, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Mor Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim and the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Boulos Yazigi, were abducted in April 2013 and their fate has not been established, and their names are raised in prayer across the Syriac and Greek churches. Suffering has a settled place in this church's self-understanding, and our guide to the problem of suffering treats the Catholic response to it.

8. The Peshitta and the Syriac Bible

The Peshitta is the standard Syriac Bible of this church, its name meaning the simple or straightforward version, and it has been the received text of the Syriac churches since roughly the fifth century. The Old Testament was translated directly from Hebrew, which makes it an independent witness of real value to textual scholars, and the New Testament replaced the earlier Diatessaron harmony of Tatian and the Old Syriac gospel versions. Syriac Orthodox readings at the Qurbono are taken from it.

The Shape of the Peshitta New Testament

The classical Peshitta New Testament contains twenty-two books, omitting 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude and Revelation. Those five circulated in Syriac in later versions and are printed in modern Syriac Bibles, and the church reads and receives them. The omission reflects the state of the canon in the Syriac-speaking world at the time the Peshitta was fixed rather than a rejection of the books. The Book of Revelation therefore entered Syriac liturgical and devotional life later and less deeply than it did in the Greek and Latin churches, and its interpretation in this tradition is correspondingly less developed. For the book itself and how Catholics read it, see our guide to the Book of Revelation.

The Old Testament Canon

Syriac Orthodox biblical manuscripts include the books Catholics call deuterocanonical, and the Syriac tradition also transmits texts such as 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra that stand outside the Catholic canon, along with the Psalms of Solomon in some manuscripts. The church has not issued a canon list with the formal precision of the Council of Trent, and it uses the books its liturgy and lectionary have always used. Our guide to the deuterocanonical books explains the Catholic canon and the differences between the Christian canons.

Why the Language Matters

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, the language family that Jesus and the apostles spoke in first-century Palestine, and it belongs to the same Semitic world as the Hebrew Old Testament. That kinship shows in the vocabulary: Syriac theology reaches for the same roots and images the Bible uses, without the Greek philosophical apparatus that shaped Western doctrinal language. Classical Syriac and the Galilean Aramaic Jesus spoke are related dialects rather than the same tongue, so the common claim that the Syriac Orthodox worship in the exact language of Christ overstates a real closeness by a small but important margin. Turoyo, the modern spoken Aramaic of Tur Abdin, is a living vernacular within the community and is distinct again from the classical written language.

9. The Patriarch of Antioch and All the East

The Syriac Orthodox Church is governed by the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East together with the Holy Synod of its bishops. The patriarch is elected by the synod, takes the name Ignatius as part of his title in a custom running back to the late thirteenth century in honour of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, and is addressed as Moran Mor. Ignatius Aphrem II was elected to the see in 2014. There is no office in this church with jurisdiction over the other Oriental Orthodox churches, and the six churches of that family relate to one another as equals.

The Antiochene Title

Several churches carry the title Patriarch of Antioch, because the ancient see divided repeatedly through the Christological and later disputes. The Syriac Orthodox patriarch, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, the Melkite Greek Catholic patriarch, the Syriac Catholic patriarch and the Maronite patriarch all hold Antiochene titles today, and the Latin Church suppressed its own titular Antiochene patriarchate in 1964. The city of Antioch, modern Antakya in Turkey, has not been the residence of any of them for centuries. Nothing about the plurality of titles is a claim that the others are frauds; it is the residue of a long history of division within one ancient see.

The Maphrian and the Catholicos of India

The historic office of maphrian was the second rank of the church, a kind of catholicos governing the eastern regions beyond the Euphrates, and Bar Hebraeus held it in the thirteenth century. The office lapsed in the nineteenth century in its original form, and the corresponding rank now belongs to the Catholicos of India, who heads the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church in Kerala under the Patriarch of Antioch. Archdioceses in Europe, the Americas and Australia are governed by metropolitans appointed by the patriarch and synod.

Monasteries

Monastic life anchors the hierarchy, since bishops are drawn from monastics. The monastery of Mor Gabriel in Tur Abdin, whose foundation the tradition places at the end of the fourth century, and the monastery of Mor Hananyo near Mardin, known as Deyrulzafaran, the Saffron Monastery, which served as the patriarchal residence for centuries before the twentieth-century displacements, are the two great houses of the historic heartland. Mor Mattai near Mosul in Iraq is another ancient foundation. These places have survived war, expropriation and depopulation, and their continued life is the clearest sign that this church has not given up on its homeland.

10. From Antioch to Damascus: A History of Displacement

The history of the Syriac Orthodox Church is a sequence of relocations forced by empires that were rarely friendly and never their own. The church began in the Syriac-speaking hinterland of Antioch, was pushed out of the imperial establishment after 451, survived Byzantine coercion, spent thirteen centuries under Muslim rule, lost most of its people and its heartland in 1915, and has spent the last century rebuilding in Damascus and in diaspora.

Before Chalcedon

Christianity in the Syriac world is very old. Edessa was a centre of Syriac Christian learning by the second century, the Peshitta and the school of Ephrem belong to the fourth, and Syriac missionaries carried the faith east along the trade routes into Persia, central Asia and eventually China. The theological culture was Semitic and biblical before it was philosophical, and the Christological arguments of the fifth century arrived in it as an imposition from the Greek-speaking imperial church.

451 and the Break

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 defined that Christ is acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, change, division or separation, in one person and one hypostasis. Syriac and Egyptian opponents read the phrase "in two natures" as a concession to Nestorius and as a betrayal of Cyril, and they refused it. Imperial policy then swung between coercion and compromise for a century, with the Henotikon of Zeno in 482 trying to paper over the definition and the reign of Justinian returning to enforcement. By the middle of the sixth century, once Jacob Baradaeus had ordained a full parallel hierarchy, there were two churches on the ground and the question stopped being negotiable. The full story of Chalcedon and its aftermath is in our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches.

Under Islamic Rule

The Arab conquests of the seventh century removed Syria and Mesopotamia from Byzantine control, and for the Syriac Orthodox this ended imperial persecution and began a long minority existence under the legal category of dhimmi, protected non-Muslims paying the jizya tax, with restricted public rights and steady attrition through conversion and disadvantage. Syriac gradually gave way to Arabic as the spoken language while surviving in the liturgy. Syriac scholars translated Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic and made themselves indispensable in Baghdad, and the church produced its medieval renaissance under the Abbasids. Our guide to Islam and Christianity covers the wider relationship.

The Sayfo

The Syriac word Sayfo means the sword, and it names the massacres and deportations of Syriac Christians in the Ottoman Empire during and around 1915, carried out in the same period and by the same mechanisms as the Armenian genocide. The Tur Abdin region, the historic core of the church, lost the greater part of its Christian population through killing and flight. Villages that had been continuously Christian since antiquity were emptied. Several countries and parliaments have formally recognised the Sayfo as genocide and others have not, and the Turkish state rejects the characterisation. For this church the event is the hinge of its modern history: it explains the patriarchal move away from Mardin, the depopulation of the homeland, and the existence of the European diaspora.

Recognition of the Sayfo as genocide is a matter of individual state and parliamentary acts, and the list of recognising bodies changes over time. Check the current position of any particular country against that country's own official record rather than against a secondary summary.

Damascus and the Diaspora

The patriarchate moved from Deyrulzafaran near Mardin to Homs in the 1930s and to Damascus in 1959, following the community. Emigration to Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and North America accelerated through the later twentieth century, and the wars in Iraq after 2003 and in Syria after 2011 drove another wave out, with the loss of ancient communities in Mosul, the Nineveh Plain, Homs and Aleppo. Whole dioceses now exist outside the Middle East, and the church faces the ordinary diaspora questions of language, intermarriage and the retention of the young in acute form.

11. The 1984 Declaration With Rome

On 23 June 1984 Pope John Paul II and Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, signed a common declaration in Rome that did two distinct things: it settled the Christological charge between the two churches, and it made a concrete pastoral provision for the sacraments. Among the agreements Rome has reached with Oriental Orthodox churches, it is the one that carries a sacramental provision alongside a Christological statement, and it remains the practical basis of the relationship.

What It Says About Christ

The declaration states that the confusions and schisms that occurred between the two churches in later centuries do not affect the substance of their faith, since they arose only because of differences in terminology and culture and in the various formulae adopted by different theological schools to express the same matter. It records that the two heads of churches find today no real basis for the sad divisions and schisms that subsequently arose between them over the doctrinal formulation of the mystery of the Word of God made man, and it confesses together the perfect divinity and perfect humanity of Christ. Fifteen centuries of mutual accusation of heresy were set aside in a paragraph.

What It Says About the Sacraments

The pastoral provision is the part that touches ordinary life. The declaration acknowledges that it is not rare for the faithful of one church to find access to a priest of their own impossible, materially or morally, and it provides that in such cases they may ask for the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist and the anointing of the sick from lawful priests of the other church. It asks that the faithful of each church be aware of this and that priests receive such requests generously. It also permits cooperation in the preparation of candidates for these sacraments and in the pastoral care of families formed by marriages between the two churches.

Where the 1984 Text Sits in a Longer Series

The 1984 declaration followed a meeting between Pope Paul VI and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Jacob III in 1971, which produced the first common declaration in the series and opened the way. Rome signed a parallel Christological declaration with Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church in 1973 and with the Armenian Catholicos Karekin I in 1996, and in 2017 Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria signed a declaration on the mutual recognition of baptism between the Catholic and Coptic churches. The 1984 text is the one with the sacramental provision, and no other Oriental Orthodox church has an agreement with Rome that goes as far in practice. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism sets out the framework these agreements belong to.

What Rome Has Not Claimed

Nothing in the 1984 declaration makes the Syriac Orthodox Church a Catholic church, subject to the pope, or in full communion with Rome. The Syriac Orthodox Church remains a self-governing church of the Oriental Orthodox communion with its own patriarch and synod. The declaration removes the charge of heresy and it opens three sacraments in cases of necessity, and it leaves the questions of primacy, of the later councils and of the mutually condemned saints exactly where it found them.

12. What Remains Open Between Rome and the Syriac Orthodox

Four questions stand between the Catholic Church and the Syriac Orthodox Church after the Christological agreement of 1984, and they are questions of authority, history and liturgical memory rather than of the doctrine of Christ. Naming them precisely is more useful than treating the 1984 declaration as though it had settled everything.

The Status of Chalcedon and the Later Councils

The Catholic Church holds Chalcedon of 451 as the fourth ecumenical council and counts twenty-one ecumenical councils in all. The Syriac Orthodox Church holds three and regards Chalcedon as an error of formulation that was rightly refused. The 1984 declaration agreed that the two churches confess the same faith in Christ, and it did not ask the Syriac Orthodox to receive Chalcedon or Rome to unsay it. A restoration of communion would have to resolve how a council that one church treats as binding and the other treats as mistaken can be held together, and no formula for that yet exists. The same problem applies with greater force to the councils the Catholic Church counts after 451, and to the condemnation of Severus by the synod of Constantinople in 536, which the emperor Justinian confirmed and this church has never accepted.

Saints Condemned on the Other Side

Severus of Antioch and Philoxenus of Mabbug are saints in the Syriac Orthodox calendar and condemned figures in the Catholic and Byzantine traditions. Leo the Great, whose Tome Chalcedon endorsed, is a saint and a Doctor of the Catholic Church and was long anathematised in Syriac liturgical texts. These names are sung, and they are embedded in books that are printed and used. A settlement of the diptychs is a real pastoral problem, because it touches what people say aloud in church.

Papal Primacy

The Syriac Orthodox Church has never held the Roman jurisdiction defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870, and it separated long before those definitions were formulated, so its position developed independently rather than as a reaction to them. It grants the Bishop of Rome a place of honour in the ancient order of sees and denies him ordinary, immediate and universal jurisdiction over its bishops and faithful. The Catholic case for the papal office rests on Matthew 16:18-19 and John 21:15-17 and on the practice of the early Church, and our guide to the papacy sets it out.

The Eastern Catholic Question

The Syriac Catholic Church, formed when a portion of the Syriac Orthodox community entered communion with Rome in the eighteenth century, keeps the same West Syriac liturgy and the same patrimony and is in full communion with the pope. Its existence is experienced on the Orthodox side as a division of one people, and the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue faced the same problem in the Byzantine context at Balamand in 1993, where uniatism was agreed to be an unacceptable method for seeking unity while the existing Eastern Catholic churches were affirmed in their right to exist and to care for their faithful. Both halves of that statement hold here. The Eastern Catholic Churches guide covers the Syriac Catholic Church and its Syro-Malankara counterpart in India.

Practical Relations Today

The Catholic column follows Unitatis Redintegratio 13 to 18, the common declaration of Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas of 23 June 1984, and the 1983 Code of Canon Law canon 844. Syriac Orthodox discipline is set by that church's own synod and is not described here. Ask the local parish rather than assuming.

13. The Syriac Churches Not to Confuse With This One

Several distinct churches use Syriac in worship, and the names overlap enough to defeat most casual searching. The distinctions below are matters of communion and doctrine rather than of style, and getting them right is the difference between describing a church accurately and describing a church that does not exist.

The Syriac Catholic Church

The Syriac Catholic Church is an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with Rome, keeping the identical West Syriac liturgy, headed by its own Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, with its patriarchal seat in Beirut. Its continuous line dates from the late eighteenth century. A Catholic looking for this liturgical tradition inside his own communion will find it here.

The Assyrian Church of the East

The Assyrian Church of the East keeps the East Syriac tradition, a different liturgical family with its own eucharistic prayers including the ancient Anaphora of Addai and Mari, and is headed by a Catholicos-Patriarch. Its Christology is dyophysite in the Antiochene line associated with Theodore of Mopsuestia, and it separated from the imperial church earlier, over the Council of Ephesus of 431, so it stands on the opposite side of the Christological argument from the Syriac Orthodox. Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration in 1994 recognising a shared confession of faith in Christ. The Ancient Church of the East is a body that separated from it in the twentieth century over calendar and administration.

The Chaldean Catholic Church

The Chaldean Catholic Church is the Eastern Catholic church of the East Syriac tradition, in full communion with Rome, headed by a Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans and centred in Iraq. It is the East Syriac counterpart to the Syriac Catholic Church of the West Syriac tradition.

The Maronite Church

The Maronite Church of Lebanon uses a distinct Syriac-Antiochene liturgy, retains Syriac in parts of its worship, and has been in full communion with Rome without a parallel Orthodox counterpart of its own. It is not a branch of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

The Mar Thoma Syrian Church

The Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Kerala keeps the West Syriac rite in a form revised in the nineteenth century under Anglican influence, holds Reformed doctrine, and is in communion with the Anglican Communion. It describes itself as Reformed in doctrine, Oriental in worship and episcopal in government, and it is not part of the Oriental Orthodox communion.

14. The Jacobite Church in Kerala

Kerala, in south India, holds a large body of Syriac Orthodox faithful under the Patriarch of Antioch, gathered in the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, which belongs to the Saint Thomas Christian community that traces its origin to the apostle Thomas. Kerala's Syrian Christians received West Syriac liturgy and the Antiochene connection through a series of encounters and realignments from the seventeenth century onwards, and the community is now divided among several churches that share one heritage.

The Two Orthodox Bodies

The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church recognises the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch as its supreme head and has a local Catholicos of India under him. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church holds an identical faith and an identical liturgy and takes the opposite view of jurisdiction, holding that the Catholicate re-established in Malankara in 1912 gives the Indian church its own head, so that it governs itself in full communion with, and not under, the patriarchate of Antioch. The dispute is about authority and property, and it has run through Indian courts for the better part of a century, with the two sides in and out of temporary settlements. Nothing doctrinal divides them.

Why This Matters for Search

A reader searching for Jacobite beliefs in India and a reader searching for Syriac Orthodox beliefs in Syria are asking about the same faith held by the same communion in two very different settings. The Kerala churches worship in Malayalam and Syriac, keep Indian customs of dress and food, and observe the fasts of the Syriac tradition. Our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches maps the whole Kerala situation, including the Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara Catholic churches and the Mar Thoma Church, in more detail than this page needs.

15. Where a Catholic Reader Stands

A Catholic can hold everything on this page without qualifying his own faith. The Syriac Orthodox Church has valid orders and a valid Eucharist, confesses the same faith in Christ by signed declaration, and stands outside full communion over questions of council, primacy and memory that remain genuinely unresolved. Both statements are true at once, and holding them together is the whole discipline of reading another church honestly.

What Accuracy Requires

Say Syriac Orthodox, never monophysite. Do not describe this church as Eastern Orthodox, since the two communions are separate and are not in communion with each other. Do not say Rome and the Syriac Orthodox are reunited, because the 1984 declaration explicitly stops short of that. Do not say the Syriac Orthodox worship in the language Jesus spoke without the qualification that Classical Syriac and Galilean Aramaic are related dialects. Small precisions of this kind are what distinguish a Catholic who has read the church from one who has read about it.

What Charity Requires

This is a church whose people have been killed for the faith within living memory and are being displaced from their homeland now. Before a Catholic advances an argument about Chalcedon, he should know what Sayfo means and what has happened in Mosul and Aleppo in the last twenty years. Prayer for the Christians of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey is the first obligation, and the practical support of the churches that serve them is the second.

If You Want to Attend a Qurbono

Visitors are welcome at Syriac Orthodox worship, and the ordinary courtesies apply: arrive early, stand when the congregation stands, dress modestly, remove shoes where that is the local custom, and do not present yourself for Communion. The 1984 provision covers cases of real necessity where a priest of your own church cannot be reached, and ordinary visiting falls outside it. Speak to the priest before or after the service; you will usually be shown considerable hospitality.

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