In the span of a few weeks, Pope Francis has promoted from ordinary priest to bishop, to cardinal, and finally to prefect of the dicastery for interreligious dialogue the Indian George Jacob Koovakad, 51, for four years – and also in the future – the organizer of his trips around the world.
Fortunately, however, the newly elect will only have to deal with dialogue “ad extra,” with other religions, because with regard to dialogue “ad intra” he comes from a Church that could not be more divided, in frontal opposition even to the pope.
Koovakad belongs to the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, with four and a half million faithful mostly residing in southern India, in the State of Kerala, where he was ordained bishop last November 24. It is a Church whose origins date back to the first centuries, with its founder the apostle Thomas whose tomb is venerated in Chennai, of Syro-Oriental lineage, with self-government on the synodal model and with its own Eucharistic liturgy, including the very ancient anaphora of Addai and Mari, which is the only one not to include the words of Jesus over the bread and wine offered as his body and blood.
Starting in the sixteenth century, after the arrival of the Portuguese in India, the Syro-Malabar Church was strongly Latinized, except for the recovery in the last century, before and after Vatican Council II, of some of its ancestral traits. One of these concerns the position of the celebrants during the “Qurbana,” the Mass. In 2021, the synod of the whole Syro-Malabar Church definitively and unanimously established that the celebrants must face the people during the liturgy of the word and the final blessing, but have their backs to the people and face the altar during the liturgy of the Eucharist.
And from there the scuffle broke out. Because almost all the priests of the populous primatial see, the archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamalay, disobeyed the order and persisted in celebrating the whole Mass facing the people. Left to defend what the synod had established, almost on their own, were the major archbishop of the archeparchy, Cardinal George Alencherry, already disliked by the people and facing stiff opposition on entirely different matters financial in nature, and his papally appointed apostolic administrator, Archbishop Andrews Thazhath, who was also president of the bishops’ conference of India.
The climate was so heated that Thazhath had to get police protection to celebrate Mass, rival factions clashed physically even inside churches, and in Ernakulam St. Mary’s Cathedral itself had to stay closed for months.
But meanwhile, in Rome, Francis had set in motion the synod on synodality, with the declared intention of conforming the whole Church to this collegial model of governance. And so the pope was foremost in wanting the norm of the Syro-Malabar synod of 2021 to be respected.
In the summer of 2023, to resolve the dispute, the pope sent as his delegate to that rebellious land an expert on the matter, the Jesuit Cyril Vasil, archbishop of the Greek-Catholic eparchy of Kosice in Slovakia and previously the secretary of the dicastery for the Eastern Churches.
Vasil arrived in Ernakulam on August 4 holding a message from the pope that asked for obedience from the faithful. But he neither managed to have this message read in all the churches, nor did he himself manage to enter the cathedral without police protection. The alternative he was proposing did not admit of any sort of mediation, which indeed had been attempted by a handful of bishops and priests in the region. According to him one obeyed either the pope, and therefore the decisions of the synod, or the “troublemakers who lead to perdition.” In the end they let fly at him with insults and eggs.
But even after the failure of Vasil’s expedition, Francis did not bend. In early December 2023 he accepted the resignation of the contested cardinal Alencherry and of his right-hand man, Thazhath, but addressed a video message to the Syro-Malabar faithful, also translated into Malayalam, the local language, which again asked for absolute obedience, the only alternative to which was schism:
“You are churches, do not become a sect. Do not force the competent ecclesiastic Authority to acknowledge you as having left the Church because you are no longer in communion with your Pastors and with the Successor of the Apostle Peter.”
But not even after this video message did the pope obtain obedience. In January he appointed the new major archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church in the person of Raphael Thattil, with Bosco Puthur as apostolic administrator.
And on May 13, 2024, receiving in audience in Rome the Syro-Malabar bishops with a large representation of the faithful, Francis once again tried to convince the rebels to obey.
To ingratiate himself with them he offered the Syro-Malabar Church, in a surprise move, a new role of international importance: that of taking care of all the migrants, hundreds of thousands, who have left Kerala to work in the Arab states of the Gulf, “so that your great liturgical, theological, spiritual and cultural heritage may shine ever more brightly.” And he urged them to take action “as of today,” even before such jurisdiction was canonically confirmed “in writing,” which nonetheless had to be requested and obtained from the Vatican.
But then Francis again insisted on what was weighing on him: “Showing a grave lack of respect for the Blessed Sacrament – the Sacrament of charity and unity – by arguing about the details of how to celebrate the Eucharist, the pinnacle of his presence among us, is incompatible with the Christian faith. […] It is here that the devil, the divider, who truly exists, creeps in and thwarts the most heartfelt desire that the Lord expressed before dying for us: that we, his disciples, be ‘one’ (Jn 17:21), without division and without breaking communion.”
In June, the new major archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Church addressed a circular to the clergy and faithful with the ultimative request that they obey the resolutions of the 2021 synod.
The circular was supposed to be read in all the churches, but only in a very few was this done. From July 3, the deadline of the ultimatum, priests who did not obey would be excommunicated. But in fact the circular was openly burned or thrown in the trash, with resounding protests. And five bishops from neighboring dioceses, in a letter to the major archbishop, also took a stand against the excommunication threatened for the disobedient, when instead – they wrote – “Pope Francis should have been heeded,” when at the audience of May 13 “he told us that the problem should be solved by ourselves in the synod” and not with a solitary injunction from above.
In effect, on July 1 the synod of the Syro-Malabar Church managed to issue a proposal of agreement valid for all of its 36 dioceses, according to which, starting from July 3, which is also the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, every Sunday Mass would be celebrated according to the rules of the 2021 synod, while on all other days it could be celebrated facing the people.
But not even this compromise was able to quell the rebellion, to which was added a strike by the archeparchy’s curia officials over the unresolved aftermath of the administrative misdeeds of the past years.
This strike, complete with the occupation of the offices in the curia, got a response from the archbishop in October with a change of directors of the various offices. But this fueled further protests, especially over the promotion to chancellor of Joshy Puthuva, former administrative arm of Cardinal Alencherry, considered the main culprit of those scams.
The fact is that about 300 priests of the archeparchy gathered in the cathedral to condemn the new appointments, all assigned, they said, to people hostile to the celebration of Mass facing to the people.
The one who was contested, more than the archbishop, was the apostolic administrator Bosco Puthur. “He is a dictator,” said a leader of the rebels, the priest Kuriakose Mundadan, secretary of the presbyteral council of the archeparchy. A circular letter from Puthur issued in early November, which ordered new priests to obey the 2021 norms and the others to at least adhere to the compromise solution of July 1, 2024, was torn up and set on fire in front of the doors of many churches (see photo).
In the following weeks, priests thought to be affiliated with the archbishop and the apostolic administrator were prevented from entering their respective churches, with the consequent counterattack by their followers, who stormed the very churches to take possession of them.
In early January this year, 21 priests even occupied the archeparchy building for a few hours. And the priest Joyce Kaithakottil went on a three-day hunger strike near St. George’s Cathedral in Angamalay, in support of the Mass being celebrated entirely facing the people.
The synod of the Syro-Malabar Church condemned both of these actions. But this time too without being heeded, as already happened for the liturgical resolutions of 2021 and 2024.
In short, that synodality so much urged by Pope Francis as the cure-all of the Church, when put to the test of facts can also fail disastrously.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
