Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
This sui juris Catholic Church of the E.-Syr.
liturgical tradition represents the continuity of the Catholic ecclesial
tradition in South India that came into being in the 16th cent. (see Thomas Christians). Under Portuguese and other European
missionary influence in the late 16th and early 17th cent. the local Church
became heavily Romanized, especially after the Synod of
Diamper (1599); Syriac, however, was retained as the liturgical
language by Archbishop Francisco Roz, SJ, even though the rite was adapted
to Roman norms. Following the revolt against the Padroado and the Jesuits in
1653, the Propaganda Fide sent the Carmelite Sebastiani to Malabar (1659) as
an Apostolic
In 1923 Ernakulam was made a metropolitan see, with seven suffragan eparchies, and in 1958 Changanacherry became a second metropolitan see. Since 1962 a number of eparchies outside Kerala have been created (including one for USA, in 2001). On 16 Dec. 1992 Ernakulam-Angamali was raised to the status of a Major Archbishopric, and in 1995 two further metropolitan sees were created (Tellichery and Trichur). There is a separate archbishopric in Kottayam for the Knanaya, or Southists (this goes back to the creation of an Apostolic Vicariate for them in 1911). There are sizable diasporas in North America, Europe, and the Gulf States. The total number of faithful is said to be between three and four million.
There are a large number of religious communities for both men and women, the most well known of them being the Carmelites of Mary the Immaculate (CMI), founded in 1831 by the Blessed Kuriakos Elias Chavara (who, among other things, set up a Syriac printing press in Mannanam in 1844).
Although very little Syriac literature has ever been produced in S. India,
numerous literary and, above all, liturgical mss. were copied there, and in
the 19th and earlier part of the 20th cent. a number of Syriac printing
presses were operative (St. Joseph’s Press at Mannanam was especially
productive). Syriac was regularly taught at seminaries, and still is at
some, though the shift to Malayam as the liturgical language after the
Second Vatican Council has led to a great decline in widespread knowledge of
the language. Among works of Syriac scholarship produced in Malabar, two
should be singled out: T. Arayathinal’s Aramaic (Syriac)
Grammar (1957; repr. 2007), and E. Thelly’s Syriac-English-Malayalam Lexicon (1999), based on Audo’s Simta.
Although the reforms of Vatican II have led to the decline of knowledge of
Syriac, at the same time they have encouraged the recovery of the indigenous
E.-Syr. liturgical tradition. In practice, however, liturgical renewal has
led to much controversy over the direction it should take: a return to the
Syriac sources, inculturation (including the adoption of some Hindu
customs), or retaining a more western perspective. A vocal advocate for the
indigenous tradition of the Thomas Christians and author of many books on
the subject was Fr. Placid Podipara