The Syro-Malabar Church Explained

1. What the Syro-Malabar Church Is

The Syro-Malabar Church is one of the twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches sui iuris, self-governing churches in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, and its home is Kerala on the south-western coast of India. Its members are Saint Thomas Christians, an ancient community whose tradition holds that the apostle Thomas brought the Gospel to the Malabar coast. Its worship belongs to the East Syriac tradition, the liturgical family of Mesopotamia and Persia, and its principal service is called the Holy Qurbana, from the Syriac word for offering.

Government runs through a Major Archbishop and a Synod of Bishops. A Major Archbishop holds substantially the powers of a patriarch, with one difference at the point of election: he must be confirmed in office by the Pope before enthronement. The see is Ernakulam-Angamaly, in the city of Kochi. Pope John Paul II raised the church to major archiepiscopal rank in December 1992, and Cardinal Antony Padiyara became its first Major Archbishop. Mar Raphael Thattil was elected Major Archbishop on 9 January 2024.

By population the Syro-Malabar Church is the second largest Eastern Catholic church, after the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with a membership counted in the millions and a large and growing presence outside Kerala.

Membership rankings and totals for the Eastern Catholic churches are compiled annually in the Holy See's Annuario Pontificio and summarised by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. Figures published by different bodies vary, so this page states the order of magnitude rather than a precise count.

Catholic, and Not Roman

A Syro-Malabar Catholic is fully Catholic and is not a Roman Catholic in any accurate sense of that term. The Catholic Church is a communion of twenty-four churches, and only one of them, the Latin Church, is Roman in its law and its liturgy. Syro-Malabar Catholics are governed by the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches of 1990 rather than by the 1983 Code of Canon Law, keep their own liturgical calendar, and have their own marriage law and fasting discipline. The Second Vatican Council decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum 3 stated the principle plainly: the Eastern churches in communion with Rome are of equal dignity, and none is superior to another by reason of rite. Our guide to the Latin Church and what Roman Catholic really means works through that vocabulary in detail.

Three Names That Are Easily Confused

Three similar-sounding names belong to different churches. The Syro-Malabar Church is Eastern Catholic and East Syriac in rite. The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church is also Eastern Catholic and is West Syriac in rite, formed in 1930. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church is Oriental Orthodox, not in communion with Rome, and is covered in our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Malabar and Malankara are both old names for the Kerala coast, which is why the words look interchangeable and are not.

2. The Saint Thomas Christians and the Apostle

The Saint Thomas Christians hold that the apostle Thomas landed on the Malabar coast in the year 52, preached along the backwaters and among the Jewish trading settlements already there, founded a small number of churches, and was martyred at Mylapore near the modern city of Chennai. The community calls itself Nasrani, from the Syriac for Nazarene, and its self-understanding as an apostolic church stands behind everything else on this page. A reader who treats that claim as decoration will misread the disputes that follow, because for this community the apostolic origin is the thing that makes them who they are.

What the Tradition Says

The traditional account names a landing at Muziris, near modern Kodungallur, and the founding of what Malayalam tradition calls the seven and a half churches, the half being a smaller foundation. The places usually listed are Kodungallur, Palayoor, Kottakavu at North Paravur, Kokkamangalam, Niranam, Nilackal and Kollam, with Thiruvithamcode counted as the half. Thomas is then said to have travelled to the eastern coast and to have been killed there, and his tomb at Mylapore has been venerated for many centuries. The site is now the San Thome Basilica in Chennai. A portion of his relics was carried to Edessa in Mesopotamia in antiquity and later to Ortona in Italy, where they remain.

What the Evidence Outside the Tradition Shows

Historians distinguish between the apostolic claim itself and the evidence for an early Christian community, and they treat the two differently. The Acts of Thomas, a Syriac work of about the third century, sends Thomas to India and gives the tradition its earliest surviving literary form, and it is a romance rather than a chronicle, so scholars weigh it carefully. Fourth-century writers in the Syriac and Greek worlds, among them Ephrem the Syrian, speak of Thomas and India as an established association. Cosmas Indicopleustes, writing in the sixth century, reports Christians in Male, the pepper country of the Malabar coast, and a bishop ordained in Persia serving at Kalliana, which is direct testimony to an organised church there. Roman trade with the Malabar pepper ports in the first century is documented independently, so the route existed and the voyage was ordinary.

The Catholic position on the tradition is respectful and unforced. Popes have addressed the Saint Thomas Christians as an apostolic community and have honoured the Thomas tradition without turning a pious inheritance into a defined historical judgment. What is beyond dispute is that Christianity was established on the Malabar coast very early, that it was in living contact with the Syriac-speaking churches of Mesopotamia, and that it long predates any European presence in India by many centuries.

Later Migrations

Two later arrivals shaped the community. Tradition records the coming of Thomas of Cana, Knai Thoma, with a group of Christian families from Mesopotamia, an event usually placed in the fourth century, and their descendants form the Knanaya community, which practises strict endogamy and today has its own jurisdictions in two churches: the Archeparchy of Kottayam in the Syro-Malabar Church, and the Knanaya archdiocese seated at Chingavanam in the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church. Copper plate grants, including the Kollam plates of the ninth century, record privileges given to Christian merchants by local rulers and show a community with recognised standing in Kerala society. Saint Thomas Christians held a respected caste position, farmed and traded, carried arms in some periods, and were entirely Indian in dress, language and social custom while Syriac in worship.

3. The Church of Malabar Before the Portuguese

Before the sixteenth century the Saint Thomas Christians were one church with a distinctive double government: bishops sent from abroad, and an indigenous head who actually ran things. The bishops came from the Church of the East, the great Syriac church of Mesopotamia and Persia, which appointed a Metropolitan of India. Those metropolitans were usually Syriac-speaking foreigners who ordained, consecrated churches and presided at the liturgy.

The Archdeacon of All India

Day-to-day authority belonged to the Archdeacon, always a Saint Thomas Christian, who was the community's head in law, custom and negotiation with rulers. He governed the parishes, represented the community to Hindu kings, administered its properties and led its assemblies. Contemporary sources give him titles in the register of a prince of the community. This arrangement gave the Malabar church an unusually strong lay and local character, and it explains why later attempts to govern the community over the head of its own leadership met such fierce resistance.

The Link with the Church of the East

The hierarchical link ran to the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Church of the East, whose church had spread across Persia, Central Asia, and as far as China. The Malabar church therefore used the East Syriac liturgy, prayed in Syriac, and inherited the theological vocabulary of that tradition. Our guide to the Assyrian Church of the East sets out that church's own history and Christology, including the 1994 Common Christological Declaration signed with Rome, and one archdiocese in India, seated at Thrissur, still belongs to it today.

The Malabar Christians themselves were not participants in the Christological controversies of the Roman Empire, and they show no sign of having understood their faith as a party position in those disputes. They confessed the Trinity and the Incarnation, baptised, celebrated the Qurbana, honoured the Cross, kept the Syriac fasts, and had no images in their churches, which used the bare cross of the Syriac tradition. When the Portuguese arrived they found an intact apostolic Christianity that had never heard of the Pope's jurisdiction in the form the Portuguese meant to enforce.

4. The Synod of Diamper, 1599

The Synod of Diamper was an assembly held at Udayamperoor, near Kochi, in June 1599, convened by Aleixo de Menezes, the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa, which brought the Saint Thomas Christians under Latin jurisdiction and revised their liturgy, law and customs on Latin lines. Its decrees severed the community's link with the Church of the East, subjected it to a Latin bishop, and ordered the correction of Syriac books judged to contain error. A quantity of manuscript material was destroyed in consequence, a loss that historians of Syriac literature still count.

How It Happened

Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and Portuguese power on the coast grew quickly. The Portuguese crown held the padroado, a right of ecclesiastical patronage in its overseas territories granted by earlier popes, and the Portuguese clergy who came under it treated the Saint Thomas Christians as Christians in need of regularisation. Early relations were warm enough. They deteriorated as the Portuguese found Syriac books they could not read, married clergy, an unfamiliar liturgy, and a hierarchical link to a patriarch outside communion with Rome. When the last East Syriac metropolitan died, Menezes moved to prevent another arriving, toured the parishes, ordained priests himself, and summoned the synod.

What the Decrees Did

The acts of Diamper are extensive and cover doctrine, liturgy, clerical life and social custom. In substance they required the community to accept the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa and, through him, of Rome as the Portuguese presented it; they revised the East Syriac Qurbana, adding Latin elements and removing others; they imposed clerical celibacy; they introduced the Latin form of certain sacraments and the use of images; they condemned the names of East Syriac fathers in the liturgical books; and they legislated on caste practices, inheritance and local custom. A Latin diocese at Angamaly, later moved to Cranganore, replaced the old metropolitanate.

How Catholics Should Assess It

Catholic scholarship today is candid about Diamper. The synod's canonical standing has been questioned by canonists, since a synod convened and dominated by an outside archbishop, without the community's own metropolitan, sits uneasily with the ordinary rules for such assemblies. Its treatment of an Eastern patrimony as a defect to be corrected has been repudiated in principle by the Church's own teaching. Orientalium Ecclesiarum 6 instructs the Eastern churches in communion with Rome to keep and where necessary to restore their ancestral traditions, and it directs that any change should follow organic development rather than external pressure. Popes since Leo XIII have said in various forms that the Eastern patrimony belongs to the whole Church and must be preserved.

Saying that does not require treating the Saint Thomas Christians of that generation as passive. They negotiated, resisted, complied in part, and preserved a great deal in practice that the decrees on paper suppressed. The half century after Diamper is a record of a community managing an imposed settlement while waiting for an opening.

5. The Coonan Cross Oath and the Great Division

The Coonan Cross Oath of 3 January 1653 is the moment the Saint Thomas Christians split into two bodies that have never reunited. A large crowd gathered at the church at Mattancherry in Kochi, took hold of ropes tied to a stone cross outside because they could not all touch it, and swore that they would no longer obey the Portuguese Jesuit archbishop or the Latin hierarchy. The cross is said to have bent under the pressure, giving the event its name, from the Malayalam word for bent.

Why the Community Rose

The immediate trigger was the affair of Mar Ahatallah, a Syrian bishop who arrived in the region claiming authority over the Malabar church and was detained by the Portuguese at Kochi. He was taken away by ship, and the community, having been prevented from meeting him, believed he had been killed. Behind that lay half a century of accumulated resentment at Latin jurisdiction, at the treatment of their books and liturgy, and at government by men who did not know their language. The Archdeacon, Thomas Parambil, was subsequently declared metropolitan by the community and took the name Mar Thoma I, in a consecration performed by priests rather than by bishops, which is where the canonical difficulty began.

The Two Parties

Rome responded by sending Carmelite missionaries rather than Portuguese authorities. The Carmelite Joseph Sebastiani worked through the parishes, and in 1663 Parambil Chandy, known in Portuguese sources as Alexander de Campo, a cousin of the Archdeacon, was ordained a bishop in communion with Rome and became the first Saint Thomas Christian to hold that office under the new arrangement. A majority of parishes returned to communion with Rome. That body is the Pazhayakoor, the Old Party, and it is the ancestor of today's Syro-Malabar Church. The remainder, the Puthenkoor or New Party, stayed with Mar Thoma I.

The New Party sought valid orders and found them from the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, whose bishops arrived from 1665 onward. Over the following century that side adopted the West Syriac liturgy of Antioch in place of the East Syriac rite it had inherited, which is why the Kerala churches descended from it pray a different rite from their own cousins. From that line come the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, and, through the reunion led by Mar Ivanios in 1930, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church.

6. How the Syro-Malabar Hierarchy Was Restored

The Syro-Malabar Church spent nearly three centuries under Latin bishops before it recovered a hierarchy of its own, and the recovery came in stages between 1887 and 1992. Understanding those stages explains why the church guards its self-government so jealously now.

1887 and 1896

In 1887 Pope Leo XIII separated the Saint Thomas Christians in communion with Rome from Latin jurisdiction, creating vicariates apostolic for them, though under European bishops at first. In 1896 the arrangement was revised into three vicariates, Trichur, Ernakulam and Changanacherry, each given a bishop drawn from the Syro-Malabar community itself. That was the first native episcopate the community had held since the seventeenth century. A fourth vicariate at Kottayam was erected in 1911 for the Knanaya community.

1923 and 1992

Pope Pius XI established the Syro-Malabar hierarchy proper in 1923, with Ernakulam as the metropolitan see and Mar Augustine Kandathil as its first metropolitan. The church grew rapidly through the twentieth century, in Kerala and through migration into other Indian states. Pope John Paul II raised it to the rank of a major archiepiscopal church in December 1992, giving it a Major Archbishop and a Synod with the authority to govern its own affairs, including liturgy, within the limits set by the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. Cardinal Antony Padiyara was the first Major Archbishop, followed by Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil, Cardinal George Alencherry, and Mar Raphael Thattil, elected on 9 January 2024.

The Territory Question

One long-running friction concerned territory. Eastern Catholic churches are assigned a proper territory in which their bishops have ordinary jurisdiction, and for most of the twentieth century the Syro-Malabar proper territory was confined to part of Kerala, while Syro-Malabar Catholics who migrated elsewhere in India fell under Latin bishops. The church argued that this cut migrants off from their own liturgy and pastoral care. Rome addressed it gradually, erecting Syro-Malabar eparchies in other parts of India, among them Chanda, Satna, Ujjain, Kalyan and Faridabad, and in 2017 the Eparchy of Shamshabad was erected with responsibility for Syro-Malabar faithful across India outside the existing jurisdictions.

The same question arose again for the diaspora outside India, and section 12 covers how it was answered there. For the wider pattern of which this is one case, see our guide to the twenty-three Eastern Catholic churches, which sets out the ranks of patriarch, major archbishop and metropolitan and the government each carries.

7. The Holy Qurbana and the East Syriac Rite

The Holy Qurbana is the Syro-Malabar celebration of the Eucharist, and it belongs to the East Syriac liturgical family, the tradition of the Church of the East in Mesopotamia and Persia. Qurbana is Syriac for offering or sacrifice. The rite is chanted throughout, uses a rich body of hymns and responses, and has a structure and vocabulary noticeably different from the Roman Rite while carrying the same faith about what is happening on the altar. Our guide to the Eucharist covers the doctrine that Syro-Malabar and Latin Catholics hold in common.

The Anaphora of Addai and Mari

The central eucharistic prayer of the rite is the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, named for two figures whom the East Syriac tradition remembers as evangelists of Mesopotamia. It is among the oldest eucharistic prayers still in use anywhere in Christianity, and its most discussed feature is that its ancient form does not contain a separate institution narrative of the kind familiar from the Roman Canon. The words of Christ over the bread and cup are woven through the prayer rather than recited as a distinct block.

That feature raised a real theological question, and the Holy See answered it. In 2001 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, published guidelines on admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, which recognised the Anaphora of Addai and Mari as a valid eucharistic prayer. The judgment rested on the antiquity and continuous use of the prayer, on its being a coherent whole in which the intention and the words of institution are present in a euchological form, and on the faith of the church that prays it. Syro-Malabar practice includes the institution narrative in its own current books, and the 2001 judgment matters here because it settled the standing of the tradition to which the Syro-Malabar liturgy belongs.

What a Visitor Notices

The Qurbana looks and sounds distinctly Eastern. It is sung rather than said, with the congregation answering in Malayalam. Incense is used generously. A veil or curtain across the sanctuary is drawn at points in the older practice. Communion is given by intinction, the consecrated bread dipped in the chalice and placed on the tongue, so a Latin visitor should not put out a hand. The liturgical calendar runs in seasons of its own, beginning with Annunciation and running through Nativity, Epiphany or Denha, the Great Fast, Resurrection, Apostles, Summer, Elijah and Cross, Moses, and the Dedication of the Church. A solemn chanted form called the Rasa is used on great feasts, with multiple deacons and elaborate processions.

Liturgical Language and the Twentieth-Century Restoration

The rite was celebrated in Syriac until the middle of the twentieth century. Pope Pius XII approved a restored Syro-Malabar Qurbana in 1957 that stripped away a number of the Latin accretions of the Diamper period, and it came into use in 1962. Malayalam then replaced Syriac as the ordinary liturgical language, following the wider permission for vernacular worship. Those two changes arrived at the same moment as the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which set up the tension that section 8 describes: one current in the church wanted to keep restoring the ancient East Syriac shape, another wanted to reform in the direction the Latin Church had just taken, and the two currents wanted opposite things from the same liturgy.

8. The Qurbana Dispute: What Is Actually at Stake

The Syro-Malabar liturgical dispute is about the direction the priest faces during the Holy Qurbana, and it has divided the church for decades. In 1999 the Synod of Bishops approved a uniform mode of celebration: the priest faces the congregation for the liturgy of the word, turns toward the altar from the beginning of the anaphora, and faces the people again after Communion. Implementation was postponed repeatedly. In 2021 the Synod set the uniform mode as binding for the whole church, and most eparchies adopted it while the Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly largely did not.

The Case for the Uniform Mode

Those who support the 1999 decision make three arguments. The first is liturgical: the priest turning east with the people at the anaphora is the ancient East Syriac practice, and restoring it is exactly what Orientalium Ecclesiarum asked the Eastern Catholic churches to do with their own traditions. The second is canonical: a Synod of Bishops of a major archiepiscopal church has authority over its own liturgy, the decision was taken by that Synod, confirmed and repeatedly urged by Rome, and a church that ignores its own Synod has no working government. The third is practical: a single church celebrating its principal liturgy in two visibly different ways teaches division every Sunday.

The Case Made in Ernakulam-Angamaly

Those who resist make arguments that deserve to be stated in their own terms rather than dismissed. Ernakulam-Angamaly has celebrated the Qurbana with the priest facing the people throughout since the 1970s, so for two generations of parishioners it is the only form they have known, and they experience the change as an imposition rather than a restoration. They argue that facing the people expresses the assembly gathered around the table and that this was itself the fruit of legitimate reform. They argue that the 1999 decision was a compromise nobody actually wanted, producing a hybrid found nowhere in the tradition. Many of them point to the pastoral reality that the archeparchy contains a large share of the church's clergy and institutions, and that a liturgical settlement imposed against them will not hold. Trust had also been damaged by a controversy over land transactions in the archeparchy that ran through the courts and church tribunals for years, which is why the dispute has been about authority as much as about liturgy.

What Has Happened

The conflict became public and painful. Churches in the archeparchy were closed or contested, liturgies were disrupted, and confrontations at St Mary's Cathedral Basilica in Ernakulam drew national coverage, including at Christmas in 2023. Rome intervened repeatedly. Pope Francis wrote to the Syro-Malabar Church and in July 2023 sent a video message appealing to the priests and faithful of the archeparchy to accept the Synod's decision, warning that refusal would harm communion. Archbishop Andrews Thazhath was appointed apostolic administrator of Ernakulam-Angamaly in 2022. Archbishop Cyril Vasil was sent as a papal delegate in 2023. Cardinal George Alencherry resigned as Major Archbishop in December 2023, and Mar Raphael Thattil was elected in January 2024, after which further administrators were appointed for the archeparchy. Efforts at a settlement have continued, and the situation remains unresolved at the time of writing.

Why This Matters Beyond Kerala

The dispute is a live test of a principle the whole Catholic Church has committed itself to. If Eastern Catholic churches are genuinely self-governing, their synods must be able to legislate for their own worship and be obeyed. If restoration of Eastern tradition is a real duty rather than a slogan, it will sometimes cost communities the form of worship they have grown up with. Both halves of that are hard, and the Syro-Malabar Church is living them out in front of everyone.

9. Belief, Sacraments and Church Discipline

Syro-Malabar Catholics hold the whole Catholic faith without qualification: the Nicene Creed, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the seven sacraments, the ecumenical councils the Catholic Church receives, the communion of saints, and the authority of the Pope. Nothing in the East Syriac patrimony amounts to a different doctrine. The differences are in law, liturgy, calendar and custom, and Catholic teaching treats those differences as a legitimate variety within one faith.

The Sacraments as the East Syriac Tradition Celebrates Them

Baptism and chrismation are administered together in the Syro-Malabar tradition, following the ancient Eastern pattern in which initiation is given as one action, and the practice of first Communion in this church has varied with time and place. Confession is celebrated with the same doctrine a Latin Catholic knows and a different set of prayers and gestures; our guide to confession and the sacrament of penance covers what the sacrament is and does in both traditions. Marriage in the Syro-Malabar rite includes the tying of the minnu, a pendant marked with a cross, on a thread, along with the giving of the manthrakodi, a wedding garment, customs that are Indian in form and Christian in meaning.

Clergy

Syro-Malabar priests are celibate. Several Eastern Catholic churches ordain married men to the priesthood. The Syro-Malabar Church lost that practice through the Latin discipline imposed at Diamper and has kept celibacy since. The church has a strong record of vocations, and Syro-Malabar priests and sisters serve across India and around the world, which is one of the most visible things about the community.

Law and Calendar

The church is governed by the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated in 1990, together with its own particular law approved by its Synod. Its liturgical year runs in the East Syriac seasons named in section 7 rather than in the Latin cycle of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and Ordinary Time. Its fasting discipline is its own. A Syro-Malabar Catholic and a Latin Catholic in the same Indian city are subject to two different codes of law, and canon lawyers determine which applies in a mixed case, particularly in marriage.

10. Saints, Customs and Popular Devotion

The Syro-Malabar Church has given the Catholic Church four canonised saints in recent decades, all of them from Kerala. Saint Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, a Franciscan Clarist sister who died in 1946 after a life of illness, was canonised by Pope Benedict XVI on 12 October 2008 and is the first woman of Indian origin to be canonised. Saint Kuriakose Elias Chavara, a nineteenth-century priest who founded the first indigenous religious congregations of the Syro-Malabar Church and pioneered schools and printing in Kerala, and Saint Euphrasia Eluvathingal, a contemplative sister known locally as the praying mother, were both canonised by Pope Francis on 23 November 2014. Saint Mariam Thresia Chiramel, founder of the Congregation of the Holy Family, was canonised on 13 October 2019.

Our guide to the saints and what canonisation means explains the process behind those decisions. Blessed Augustine Thevarparampil, known as Kunjachan, who spent his priesthood among Dalit Christians in Kerala, was beatified in 2006.

The Cross Without a Corpus

The characteristic sign of the Saint Thomas Christians is the Mar Thoma Sliva, the Saint Thomas cross, an equal-armed cross rising from a lotus or from steps, with buds at the arm ends and often a descending dove above it. Ancient examples carved in granite survive in Kerala and at Mylapore. The cross carries no corpus, following the Syriac tradition, and it reads the Cross as the sign of the risen Lord. Open-air granite crosses on tall pillars stand outside old Kerala churches, and the church buildings themselves, particularly the older ones, borrow freely from Kerala temple architecture in their gables, lamps and flag staffs.

Household and Parish Customs

Several customs are distinctive and much loved. On the Thursday of Holy Week, families make Pesaha appam, an unleavened rice bread, blessed and broken by the head of the household with a sweetened coconut milk called pal, a domestic rite that carries the Passover reference in its name. Margam Kali is a traditional round dance whose songs narrate the mission of Thomas in India. Parish feasts, called perunnal, run for days with processions, drums, fireworks and a shared meal, and the offering called nercha is distributed to all who come. These are Indian forms, held by Christians, with no borrowed content that the church regards as incompatible with the faith.

Marian Devotion

Marian devotion is strong in the Syro-Malabar Church, carried in parish feasts, novenas and pilgrimage to old Marian churches across Kerala, several of which draw visitors from beyond the Christian community. The church also keeps the Rosary widely, which arrived through the Latin missions and was received rather than imposed. For the Catholic framework for judging alleged apparitions, which has changed considerably in recent years, see our guide to Marian apparition sites and their actual church status.

11. The Kerala Churches Side by Side

Kerala's ecclesiastical map is unusually complicated, and almost all of it descends from one apostolic community. The table below places the churches that came out of the Saint Thomas tradition, with the rite each uses and the communion each belongs to. Everything in it follows from the split described in section 5, and the Orthodox side of the map is treated in its own right in our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches.

The rite and communion columns state each church's own self-description and its recognised standing. The Jacobite and Malankara Orthodox churches hold an identical faith and identical liturgy and differ over the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch, a jurisdictional dispute that has run through Indian courts for decades.

Why the Distinctions Are Worth Getting Right

Running these churches together is a common error in English-language writing, and it causes real offence in Kerala. The Oriental Orthodox churches are a separate communion from the Eastern Orthodox and are not in communion with them, a point our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches makes at length and our guide to Eastern Orthodox Church beliefs covers from the other side. Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara are two different Catholic churches with different rites. The Mar Thoma Church is Reformed in doctrine, Oriental in worship and episcopal in government, in its own careful self-description, and it is not Orthodox. The Syriac Orthodox Church is the Antiochene body whose patriarch stands behind the Jacobite side.

12. The Syro-Malabar Diaspora

The Syro-Malabar Church now has eparchies on four continents, built to serve Kerala Catholics who emigrated for work in large numbers from the later twentieth century onward. Nurses, engineers, teachers and their families settled in the Gulf, in North America, in Britain, in Australia and across Europe, and they asked for their own liturgy and their own bishops rather than absorption into Latin parishes.

The Eparchies Outside India

Rome erected the Eparchy of Saint Thomas the Apostle of Chicago for the United States in 2001, the Eparchy of Saint Thomas the Apostle of Melbourne for Australia in 2013, the Eparchy of Mississauga for Canada in 2015, and the Eparchy of Great Britain, seated at Preston, in 2016. Elsewhere, Syro-Malabar communities are served by chaplaincies and by priests working with the local Latin bishop, which is the ordinary arrangement where no eparchy exists.

The Problem of the Second Generation

The hardest pastoral question in the diaspora is whether children born abroad will keep the rite. They grow up speaking English, attending Latin schools, and often preferring a Latin parish that is closer and shorter. Syro-Malabar bishops abroad have responded with catechesis in English, youth movements, Qurbana in English, and a great deal of effort explaining to parents that keeping the rite is the ordinary continuation of an apostolic tradition rather than nostalgia for Kerala. The same question faces every Eastern Catholic church in the West, and it is being answered better in some places than others.

What It Means for a Latin Parish Nearby

A Latin parish that hosts a Syro-Malabar community should know two things. The Syro-Malabar faithful are Catholics in full communion, so nothing about their status is provisional or irregular. And their liturgy is not a translation of the Roman Rite, so scheduling it into a slot between Masses with an expectation that it will run to Roman length misunderstands what it is. Latin Catholics who attend one are welcome, fulfil their Sunday obligation, and may receive Communion. Our guide to the Mass and what happens in it covers the shared theology, and the shape of the service will still surprise a first-time visitor.

13. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

The Syro-Malabar Church asks four concrete things of a Catholic who has just learned it exists. Speak about it accurately, which begins with never calling its members Roman Catholics and never confusing them with the Malankara or Orthodox churches of Kerala. Attend a Holy Qurbana if one is celebrated anywhere near you, and stand through it without treating it as a curiosity. Pray for the resolution of the Qurbana dispute, which is a wound in a church of millions and is not a spectator sport. And learn enough of the history to understand why a community that lost its liturgy once in 1599 reacts strongly whenever its liturgy is legislated for again.

For Anyone Considering the Rite Seriously

If the East Syriac tradition draws you, the honest advice is to attend for a long time before doing anything canonical. Learn the seasons, follow the Qurbana with a book in hand, meet the community, and let the tradition teach you at its own pace. Transfer between churches sui iuris is a real canonical act with real consequences for you and your children, and it is not the ordinary way to love an Eastern rite. Most Latin Catholics who fall in love with the Qurbana should simply keep going to it.

14. Related Topics