What is the Chaldean Church - Part 2

Between Iraq and a Hard Place

Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Episode 52

Hannah teaches Colleen more on the history and beliefs of the Chaldean Church in this, part two, of a three part series. This episode covers the re-unification of the Chaldean Catholic Church with Roman Catholic Church along with some of the distinguishing features of the Chaldean Catholic Church liturgy and tradition. Keep an ear out for the best sourdough starter ever! Yeah… that will make sense later.

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Here's a video of a Chaldean Catholic Mass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSD5BM17f9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSD5BM17f9A Make sure you skip forward to catch some of the music!

Here's a rough transcript!

Hannah: Welcome to Between Iraq and a Hard Place. I'm Hannah.

Colleen: And I'm Colleen.

Hannah: And we're going to tell you about our life in Iraq.

Colleen: It's going to be fun.

Hannah: I hope so.

Colleen: And now it's time for part two.

Hannah: That's right. We're going to do a quick review, because while for you and me, it's been like five minutes since we were talking about church history, for everybody else has probably been at least a week.

Colleen: I mean, it's going to take us at least that long to edit and transcribe and post.

Hannah: It's a lot of work. We really got to get on our production team to start moving faster.

Colleen: Hannah, we are the production team!

Hannah: I know. We deserve a raise. OK, so we were talking about the Chaldean Church. Chaldean Church is the first… Well, the Church of the used to the first break off from the great church. And it is known in church history. The Church of the East breaks off.

Colleen: Yes.

Hannah: And then the Church of the East breaks again with the Eliya line.

Colleen: and the Shimun line?

Hannah: We're going to get there, OK? We're going to talk about the Eliya line first and the Shimun and then the Josephite. So the Eliya line is part of the church of the East. They maintain that through now. They have never aligned with the Roman Catholic Church. Up to this point, as we are talking about them in history, not like this point that we are present and in history because we got to 1670, the 1670s. OK, the Eliya line still Church of the East has never aligned with the Roman Catholic Church. Now we have the Shimun line, which is the Chaldean Catholic. They started the Chaldean Catholic Church, and then they broke away from the Chaldean Catholic Church in 1672, denounced Rome and formed the Assyrian Church of the East.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: OK, so now we have three church lines, the Church of the East, which is the Eliya line. The Assyrian Church of the East, which is the Shimun line. And then the Josephite line are the Chaldean Catholics who have never split from Rome. OK, so you got the Josephite line. They have always been Chaldean Catholics associated with Rome. The Shamoon line were Chaldean Catholics, then they renounced Rome and are now the Assyrian Church of the East. And then the Eliya line, which is the Church of the East.

Colleen: This helps explain some of the confusion that I had when people would ask me, like, is the church in northern Iraq Catholic? Because some of them are and some of them are not.

Hannah: Right.

Colleen: And even the ones that are aren't necessarily Catholic in the same way that like Roman Catholics are.

Hannah: Roman Catholic. Which we will get to and explain. There's also like Armenian, not Armenian, Aramaic Orthodox Church that are split off of I'm pretty sure the Assyrian I don't really know. Their history is harder to suss out.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: But since we're talking about Chaldeans, just remember those three. We got the Eliya line, the Shimun line and the Josephite line.

Colleen: Great.

Hannah: OK, we left them in 1672. We're going to come back to them in 1778.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: Which is when the patriarch of the Eliya line. So this is Eliya, the 11th. This is the Church of the East. They've never been associated with the Roman Catholic Church. He petition's the pope to not reunite, but to unite with Rome and reunite with the Chaldean Catholics, because the Eliya line, the Church of the East is starting to dwindle. There are not very many of them left, and they live in the same place. Eliya based in Alqosh, the Chaldean Catholic Church based in Mosul. So he says, can we get back together?

Colleen: Back together!

Hannah: Exactly.

Colleen: Does it work?

Hannah: He, Eliya the 11th, and his successor Eliya the 12th, both professed Catholic faith and both of them were accepted into communion with the Chaldean Catholic slash Roman Catholic Church. So they said, yes, come back. Welcome!

Colleen: Yay!

Hannah: And then Eliya the 11th dies. And Eliya the 12th says, "Psyche! Just kidding. I don't want to be Catholic. I want out."

Colleen: Like I got a taste of this and I don't want it. Or maybe I don't want to lose the power. Like I'm just going to become a nobody?

Hannah: Right. He's not a nobody! He takes his people with him. Well, or tries to.

Colleen: He's afraid of becoming a nobody. It was like subsumed into the Roman Catholic world.

Hannah: Right. So he says, forget about it. I'm out of here. He is opposed by this guy named Yohana Hormizd. It's really hard for me to say his name.

Colleen: Is that the same name as the guy at the Alqosh? Alqosh monastery? The Hormuzd thing?

Hannah: Yeah! Do you want to explain that?

Colleen: Uh… No.

Hannah: OK.

Colleen: Like I just recognize the name and it's like all over like the monastery. And it's like the Hormuzd monastery and like the church that's there has like his name on stuff. That's all I really know.

Hannah: OK. He was a monk at the Alqosh Monastery. And he said, no, no, no Eliya, You said you were going to be Catholic. You brought all of us into this. We were in agreement. We're staying with the Catholic Chaldean Church.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: So he took a lot of those Eliya line followers and kept them in communion with the Roman Catholic/Chaldean Catholic Church.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: He becomes kind of their default leader because of this. But he's not recognized as the patriarch of Alqosh. For a lot of reasons, most of them political. They don't want to offend the Chaldean patriarch of Mosul by then lessening his power by giving someone else the patriarchy of Alqosh.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: So the pope recognized him, recognizes him as the administrator of the Catholic patriarchate. This is a lot of Catholic things that I don't understand. My understanding is that, like, he's not the spiritual leader, but he's kind of the like administrative, deals with the details of the running of the church.

Colleen: The organizer.

Hannah: Yeah.

Colleen: I mean, that's valuable.

Hannah: It is valuable.

Colleen: We need both of those roles.

Hannah: It is still a pretty powerful role. This upsets the Josephite line. Remember that line that has always been staying with the Roman Catholics when the Chaldean Catholic Church split Chaldean Assyrian.

Colleen: So when the Eliya line like was joining them again, they don't really want to give up their power to the Eliya line.

Hannah: Right. And they looked at Yohanna Hormizd and said, we don't believe that he's really Catholic. We don't believe he genuinely wants to do this. We think it's a power grab. We think he's going to pull the Chaldean Catholics out of the Catholic, the Chaldean Catholic Church, and make them Assyrian.

Colleen: OK.

Hannah: In spite of the fact that he did the exact opposite of that previous to this. So they're they're a little upset with Rome. So Rome withdraws the administrator role from Yohanna.

Colleen: Does that make all the people underneath him kind of angry and upset?

Hannah: No.

Colleen: Oh, OK.

Hannah: I mean, probably, but not in a way that really matters.

Colleen: I don't know way that impacts split's and joins of churches?

Hannah: Right. Because Yohanna Hormizd did want his people to continue to be in the Roman Catholic Church. And so he's not going to kick up a fuss about it necessarily. He was genuine, which is why he gets everything named after him, because he's a bit of a hero to them. So they take the admin role from Yohanna and then give it to Joseph, the fifth, of that Josephite line. Neither of them are appointed as patriarch. So there is no patriarch of Mosul, Alqosh at this time. There's just the administrator of the Patriarchate. So they're kind of the leader like they're they're running the show, but they're not like in charge of everything.

Colleen: Gotcha. Is there anybody in charge?

Hannah: No.

Colleen: Oh!

Hannah: This doesn't last long. So that happens. And this is happening in like the early eighteen… 1818… 1820, kind of around there. In 1828, Joseph, the 5th, the administrator of the Catholic Patriarchate, dies.

Colleen: Uhuh.

Hannah: And in 1830, Yohana Hormizd, who is still alive, is appointed Patriarch.

Colleen: OH!

Hannah: So because he bided his time and let things be, he gets appointed patriarch because he outlives the Josephite line, essentially. His patriarchy, which is non-hereditary. An appointed patriarch every year, not someone related to him, has continued to lead the Chaldean Church, unbroken since 1830. This is yet another reason why so many things are named after him. He really is seen as kind of the leader who brought all the Chaldean Catholics back together.

Colleen: The unifier.

Hannah: The unifier of the patriarchal line.

Colleen: OK!

Hannah: So important guy. Yeah.

Colleen: No wonder his name is all over.

Hannah: Right. So we got the Shimun and Josephite line. What happens to them? They split and kind of come back together. We don't really know at this point in our podcast what happens to the Eliya line.

Colleen: The part that started to join and then.

Hannah: Right and then left.

Colleen: And the left again.

Hannah: Right. And they die out in 1804 when Eliay the 12th dies. And he didn't have enough people following him and they felt like they could organize a successor. So we kind of like the Assyrians Church of the East still exists, and is pretty small. But everyone else who split off from the Chaldean Catholic Church has come back to the Chaldean Catholic Church.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: Or the line has died out and we don't know what happened to them. They got absorbed into something else. So this continues. There aren't really any church splits from 1830 when Yohanna Hormizd kind of conglomerate's everybody back together. So for the last. What is that? Two hundred and ninety years of. Chaldean history, they've all kind of stayed together.

Colleen: Unified, awesome!

Hannah: As part of the Roman Catholic Church. This is where it gets interesting.

Colleen: But I thought it was all like tidy now.

Hannah: It's all tidy. I've learned some things about the Roman Catholic Church, which I still don't understand. OK?

Colleen: Yeah, we're Protestants.

Hannah: We're Protestants. I don't think I've ever even set foot in a Catholic church.

Colleen: Oh! I have. Lots of them. You haven't even gone on like a tour of one? Somewhere in Europe?

Hannah: No, like when I spent time in Europe, I spent most of my time outside because I was tired of being inside. Oh, no, I've been no. That's an Anglican church. No, I don't think I've ever been in a Roman Catholic Church. Weird.

Colleen: We may have to make a trip out just so that you can have an experience.

Hannah: I mean, there's one really close to here. We probably should just go. So we're going to wade into what the difference is between Roman Catholic Church and Chaldean Catholic Church.

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Hannah: So the Roman Catholic Church and the Chaldean Church, Chaldean Catholic Church, which is under the Roman Catholic Church.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: Again, I don't understand the liturgy or traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. I'm probably going to get some things wrong, because I don't have any experience with that.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: And my brain was exploding from all of this church history, so I didn't really take the time to research it. I did look at the Chaldean Church rites and liturgy. So I kind of understand that. I don't really understand how it's different. So it's not so much going to be a comparison as this is what the Chaldean Church does, that probably the Roman Catholic Church doesn't do.

Colleen: There are a few things, though, that you do know are major differences.

Hannah: Oh, sure.

Colleen: Like the language, right?

Hannah: Yes. So the Catholic Church, the language of the church was Latin at the time when the Chaldean Church came back into the Catholic Church. Part of the the deal was that since the Romans recognized the Chaldeans as maintaining most church traditions, they were like, oh, you don't have to you don't have to do your liturgy in Latin. You can keep doing it in the language that you've been doing it in for centuries, which is Eastern Syriac.

Colleen: OK.

Hannah: OK, so I watched a Chaldean Catholic Church service, an Easter service, I think. And definitely not in Latin. Didn't understand anything that was happening.

Colleen: Do you have a link to that video that we can post in the show notes?

Hannah: Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes for sure. So Eastern Syriac, is their a liturgical language? It's not necessarily the language that everyone speaks, just like not everyone in the Catholic Church spoke Latin. But it's like the language that they used to read the Bible and pray and

Colleen: …do church things…

Hannah: … do church things in. So this liturgy, this Eastern Syriac liturgy is not just linguistically different. The liturgy is actually written from a different church than the Roman Catholic liturgy. So they're similar. But they have different writers.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: And there are some things that are different about them. The church in Edessa is the tradition that the Chaldean Catholics follow. And it was written by the two disciples of St. Thomas. St. Thomas establishes the church, makes two disciples who kind of lead the church in the Middle East. They are considered saints in the Chaldean Church.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: The Catholic Church recognizes one of them, probably? It was hard for me to like figure that out, because in the Chaldean Church, he's known as St. Addai. Which the Catholic Church has a saint that probably had that same name originally, but then was westernised into Thaddeus. So St. Thaddeus is recognized by the Roman Catholic Church and might be the same guy as St. Addai in the Chaldean Catholic Church.

Colleen: OK, OK. The Western linguistic changes to names and places is…

Hannah: Confusing.

Colleen: Widespread.

Hannah: Indeed. So that's one of the Saints that helped write this liturgy. The other one is Saint Mari. Also known as Mares or Palut. And he is not recognized by the Roman tradition. But definitely a saint in Chaldean Catholic Church. So these two guys wrote a liturgy. And it is the liturgy that has been used by the Church of the East and then the Chaldean Church since it was written in 432 or whatever.

Colleen: OK. So one of the differences is maybe these two groups have different saints. In addition to their different liturgies.

Hannah: Right. Because they had those centuries of separate traditions being built between the Roman and the Chaldean Catholic. So there are different saints for sure. Again, I didn't get into all of that because it's very complicated.

Colleen: Fair.

Hannah: And we're try and keep it simple. So those are the two saints that St. Thomas appointed to lead the church after he left. They wrote the liturgy. As far as I can tell. The only real differences when both are translated into English, both the Latin and the Syriac, East Syriac, is that there are some differences in wording in the Eucharist service. Which I suspect kind of harkens back to that conflict with Nestorias.

Colleen: Mm hmm.

Hannah: And the hypostatic union and what that means and what that looks like. I think he maybe wanted the words of the Eucharist service to look different, which maybe led to the misunderstanding, which led to the split. The Catholic Church looked at that. The Roman Catholic Church looked at that and said, it's fine. It's not a big deal. Keep it. The prayers that are given, the liturgical prayers are much longer, much more elaborate and focused differently than the Roman Catholic ones.

Colleen: What are some of the things they focus on?

Hannah: I don't really know. They're all in Syrian. But like. Didn't you read some translations? No. They're not translate like I couldn't find any of this translated in any way. And even if I had, I wouldn't really know how they were different from Roman Catholic prayers.

Colleen: True.

Hannah: So there's like a different focus mood of the prayers than from the Roman Catholic one. There's also difference in the vestments of the priests and what they wear, which is no surprise. The music that is used is very different.

Colleen: I mean, that makes sense to as far as like clothing and music and language all being very culturally defined rather than morally defined.

Hannah: Yeah. So the Chaldean Catholic Church music is very Middle Eastern. It's like it's very beautiful. But it is definitely not like if a Roman Catholic person went to a Chaldean Catholic Church, they probably would not recognize it as being the same.

Colleen: OK.

Hannah: Aside from that, you know, they do Holy Communion and the the rites generally are the same. There's a priest, all those things. Other than that, they would be like, nope, not the same. I don't understand. One of the things that makes it different is that there are additional feast days or variations on Saints days,

Colleen: More holidays! Win!

Hannah: Definitely a win…. Sort of.

Colleen: Uh oh, there's always a catch, isn't there?

Hannah: The big the big main difference is that the Chaldean Catholic Church follows what they call the fast of the Ninevites or the fast of Jonah.

Colleen: OK, I mean, that makes sense. They're right next to or in Mosul, which is modern day Nineveh. Jonah's tomb is there like this seems like it would be something that they would connect to.

Hannah: And the point of the fast is that they're remembering or commemorating the repentance of Ninevah. So I had several Chaldean Christian friends in Iraq who would do, they called it the Jonah fast. Who would do the Jonah fast, and it's three days with no food and no water. And not in the Ramadan sense of during the day. It was like none.

Colleen: All through the day and the night, through all those days. OK.

Hannah: And it usually happened around Easter-ish time. I remember it. I'm going to misremember this now. I remember it being a spring fast. And I also had one of my Muslim friends, one of my first years living in Iraq, who came up to me when this fast was happening for her Christian friends and was like, how are you doing? How is your fast? And I was like, what are you talking about? I'm not fasting. And she was like, But you're a Christian. I was like, yes, but I've never even heard of the fast of Jonah.

Colleen: Right. Yeah. I mean, I hadn't heard of it until you mentioned it just now, because there just aren't that many Christians in the city in Iraq that I lived in.

Hannah: And so I ended up like talking to one of my Chaldean Christian friends and being like, are you fasting? And they were like, yes, of course we're fasting. Aren't you fasting? And I was like, no, no. What? What, what is this? And they're like, well, we've asked for three days because Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days. And so then he came and brought our people back to God. I was like, so this is like an Old Testament fast.

Colleen: It's kind of beautiful.

Hannah: It is. It is. And the Catholic Church was definitely like, keep that. That is uniquely yours. Keep it. So that's the big one. The big difference. There are some variations in Saint's days as well. More having to do with when those saint days fall. And like when Easter falls.

Colleen: Which makes a lot of sense to if you haven't had synchronized calendars and all of that is super, super common in communication across history of different areas.

Hannah: Yeah. They have the faster than Innervates is the big one. On the other, big difference, which was happening when the Chaldean Church rejoined the Catholic Church, is that they were using leavened bread for communion.

Colleen: Oh.

Hannah: Where traditionally the Catholic Church uses unleavened bread.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: The Chaldean Church is not doing this so much anymore. They've switched over to the unleavened way. The Assyrian church was doing it for a while, and it is unclear to me if they continue to use leavened bread. But I wanted to talk about this because I think this story is kind of cool.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: About how this started. So the tradition for leavened bread in the Chaldean Church is that when St. Thomas came and established the church, the Church of the East, at the time. He brought with him some of the dough from the bread that was used when Jesus… it was either like from the Last Supper, which didn't make sense to me because that wouldn't have been leavened bread. Or from when they eat bread and fish with Jesus after his resurrection.

Colleen: Oh, OK.

Hannah: So he brought some of some of that bread yeast dough,

Colleen: like the sourdough starter.

Hannah: Kind of like a sour dough starter. Yes. His his bread dough. And so when he made bread for their first communion, he took a piece of that dough and made bread with that yeast from that original starter.

Colleen: Huh?

Hannah: So, yes, it's a little bit like holy sourdough bread.

Colleen: It's like the friendship bread of forever.

Hannah: Right. Mm hmm. And so then when that dough was made from the starter. Hmm. They took a piece of that dough and saved it for the next week's communion bread. And then they would take a piece of that dough and save it for the next week's communion bread. So there's kind of this tradition of the yeast, of this bread is holy because it came from Jesus.

Colleen: Fascinating.

Hannah: They're not saying that we've been using the same yeast that Jesus used for thousands of years, but they're saying a little bit of that yeast is mixed in with each bread that we make because it has grown the new starter for the next week's bread.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: And so to them, the leavened bread was holy because it came from the yeast of the bread that Jesus used.

Colleen: A tradition that ties them back to Christ himself. Like. Yeah, that's cool.

Hannah: Which I was like, this is fascinating. And I a little bit can't believe they gave it up.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: I mean, maybe maybe the starter died at some point and they were just like, well, I'm going to go back to the Catholic way. I don't know.

Colleen: Or like how far had it spread out among all those different churches? And was it almost a practical like we can't keep doing this?

Hannah: We can't continue doing this. Yeah. But yeah…

Colleen: It's a cool story!

Hannah: It is a really cool story. And it's one of those things that I'm like. do Chaldean Catholics remember that story now?

Colleen: Oh, yeah.

Hannah: Since they haven't been using the leavened bread. And I don't think it was a like the church patriarch was like, look, we're going to switch to unleavened bread. I think it just kind of fell out of fashion, as it were.

Colleen: And, you know, maybe as that story was lost, it was like, well, I mean, they use unleavened bread in Scripture…

Hannah: Right.

Colleen: Let's do that.

Hannah: Let's let's do that instead.

Colleen: We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Servant Group International on Facebook or Instagram. And you should check out our blog and complete transcripts over at servantgroup.org.

Hannah: And it's really helpful for us if you share our podcast or leave a review on whatever platform you listen to this podcast on. It helps us know that people are listening and you can let us know what you want to hear next.

Both!: Thanks for listening.

Hannah: Whoo! All right. I need a drink because I'm losing my voice.