The Syriac Catholic Church, established in the second half of the 17th century as an Eastern Catholic offshoot of the Syriac Orthodox Church, had around a dozen dioceses in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Three of these dioceses were ruined during the First World War in the Assyrian and Armenian massacres, and the 20th century also saw the growth of an important Syriac Catholic diaspora in America, Europe and Australasia. As of 2012[update] the Syriac Catholic Church has fifteen dioceses, mostly in the Middle East, and four patriarchal vicariates for the diaspora communities.
During the 18th century the Syriac Catholic church established dioceses in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire with significant West Syriac Catholic communities, and also became the dominant West Syriac grouping in a number of villages in northern Iraq, gaining control of the monastery of Mar Behnam near Mosul.
At the beginning of the 19th century the Syriac Catholic Church had dioceses for Jerusalem, Aleppo, Damascus, Edessa, Amid, Mardin, Gazarta (from 1818), Mosul (from 1790) and the Monastery of Mar Behnam. In 1817 a diocese was created for Beirut, which persisted until 1898. In 1862 a separate diocese was created for Baghdad and Basra, hitherto under the jurisdiction of the bishops of Mosul.[1]
According to a population statistic of 1898, the Syriac Catholic church had just under 23,000 members, organised in nine dioceses.[2]
Like their Syriac Orthodox and Chaldean counterparts, the Syriac Catholic dioceses of Amid, Mardin and Gazarta were ruined in the First World War (Flavian Mikha’il Malke, Syriac Catholic bishop of Gazarta, was killed by the Turks in 1915), and were not afterwards revived. A new Syriac Catholic diocese was established for Hasakah in 1957, and the town has been the seat of a Syriac Catholic bishop since 1959. The diocese of Beirut has remained vacant since 1898, and the relatively small Syriac Catholic community of Beirut has been under the jurisdiction of a patriarchal vicar or apostolic administrator for most of the past eleven decades.
According to a Catholic statistic of 1962, the Syriac Catholic Church had just over 65,000 members in the Middle East at that time, plus a further 15,000 or so members in America and elsewhere.[3]
Table 1: Population of the Syriac Catholic Church, 1962
Region
No. of Parishes
No. of Churches
No. of Priests
No. of Believers
Region
No. of Parishes
No. of Churches
No. of Priests
No. of Believers
Lebanon
6
6
14
14,500
Damascus
4
4
5
3,807
Egypt
2
3
4
4,000
Hims
12
12
12
4,135
Jordan
1
1
2
1,200
Mosul
8
10
25
17,000
Turkey
4
4
2
800
Hassakeh
7
8
9
4,000
Aleppo
6
2
6
7,100
Baghdad
5
5
11
8,750
Total
55
55
90
65,292
According to a Catholic statistic of 1964, the Syriac Catholic Church consisted of a patriarchal archdiocese, four archdioceses (Aleppo, Damascus, Mosul, and Baghdad), two dioceses (Homs and Hama, and Jazira and Euphrates), and six patriarchal vicariates (Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan–Palestine, Mardin, Rome, and Paris).[4]
Table 2: Population of the Syriac Catholic Church, 1964
Iwanis Lewis Awad, Apostolic Exarch of Venezuela (since May 2003); and
Gregory Peter Melki, Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem (since February 2002).
Basile Georges Casmoussa, 72, who had been the archbishop of the Archeparchy of Mosul, was transferred to a position in the Syriac Catholic Patriarchal Curia. The Synod of Bishops of the Patriarchal Syriac Catholic Church elected the Protosyncellus (Vicar General) of the Archeparchy of Mosul, Father Boutros Moshe, 67, to be the new archbishop. Pope Benedict XVI, consented to his canonical election on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, sealing the appointment, with ordination and installation to follow at a later date. The Mosul Archeparchy has 35,000 Catholics, 36 priests, and 55 religious.
Also on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI consented to the canonical election by the Syriac Synod of Bishops of the Father Yousif Abba (Yousif Mansoor), 59, who was the Chancellor of the then Syriac Catholic Eparchy of the United States and Canada under Bishop Habash and served at the St. Joseph Syriac Catholic Church in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, as the new archbishop-elect of the Syriac Catholic Archeparchy of Baghdad, Iraq. Archbishop Yousif is a native Iraqi. Since 1997, he has been in charge of pastoral care for Syriac Rite Catholics in the United States and Canada. He speaks Syriac, French, Arabic, and English. He succeeds Athanase Mattai Shaba Matoka, who resigned from the position he had held since 1983 as archbishop emeritus, with ordination and installation as archbishop to follow at a later date. The Baghdad Archeparchy has 18,000 Syriac Catholics and seven priests.
Finally, also on March 1, 2011, the Pope approved the canonical election of the Father Jihad Battah, 54, until then the Protosyncellus (Vicar General) of the Syriac Catholic Archeparchy of Damascus, Syria, under Metropolitan Gregory Aliya Tabe, as a bishop-elect of the Syriac Catholic Patriarchal Curia, with ordination and installation as bishop to follow at a later date.
The church also has four patriarchal vicariates (Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, Sweden and France), and a patriarchal procurate in Rome. In 2010 there were an estimated 159,000 Syriac Catholics, under the care of 11 bishops and over a hundred priests.
The Syriac Catholic Church is an Eastern Catholic Christian jurisdiction originating in the Levant that uses the West Syriac Rite liturgy and has many practices and rites in common with the Syriac Orthodox Church. Being one of the twenty-three Eastern Catholic Churches, the Syriac Catholic Church is a self-governed sui iuris particular church, while it is in full communion with the Holy See and with the entirety of the Catholic Church.
An exarch was the holder of any of various historical offices, some of them being political or military and others being ecclesiastical.
The Chaldean Catholic Church is an Eastern Catholic particular church in full communion with the Holy See and the rest of the Catholic Church, and is headed by the Chaldean Patriarchate. Employing in its liturgy the East Syriac Rite in the Syriac dialect of the Aramaic language, it is part of Syriac Christianity. Headquartered in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Sorrows, Baghdad, Iraq, since 1950, it is headed by the Catholicos-Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako. In 2010, it had a membership of 490,371, of whom 310,235 (63.27%) lived in the Middle East.
The Catholic Church in Syria is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome.
Catholics in Iraq follow several different rites, but in 2022, most (82%) are members of the Chaldean Catholic Church; about 17% belong to the Syrian Catholic Church, and the remainder are primarily Armenian, Greek and Latin-rite Catholics.
Ignatius Aphrem I Barsoum was the 120th Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and head of the Syriac Orthodox Church from 1933 until his death in 1957. He was consecrated as a Metropolitan and as a Patriarch at a very hard time for the Syriac Orthodox church and its people and parishes and he worked very hard to re-establish the church initiations to where his people moved. He researched, wrote, translated, scriped, and published many scholarly works that included books on the saints, tradition, liturgy, music, and history of Syriac Orthodox Church.
Ignatius Isaac II was the Patriarch of Antioch and head of the Syriac Orthodox Church from 1709 until his resignation in 1723.
Dioceses of the Church of the East, 1318–1552 were metropolitan provinces and dioceses of the Church of the East, during the period from 1318 to 1552. They were far fewer in number than during the period of the Church's greatest expansion in the tenth century. Between 1318 and 1552, the geographical horizons of the Church of the East, which had once stretched from Egypt to China, narrowed drastically. By 1552, with the exception of a number of East Syriac communities in India, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Church of the East was confined to its original heartland in northern Mesopotamia.
In the period of its greatest expansion, in the tenth century, the Syriac Orthodox Church had around 20 metropolitan dioceses and a little over a hundred suffragan dioceses. By the seventeenth century, only 20 dioceses remained, reduced in the twentieth century to 10. The seat of Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch was at Mardin before the First World War, and thereafter in Deir Zaʿfaran, from 1932 in Homs, and finally from 1959 in Damascus.
Dioceses of the Church of the East after 1552 were dioceses of the Church of the East and its subsequent branches, both traditionalist and pro-Catholic.
Aqra, properly ʿAqra, was a diocese of the Chaldean Catholic Church founded in the mid-19th century. It was united with the Archeparchy of Mossul to create the Archeparchy of Mossul-Aqra on December 22, 2018.
Chaldean Catholic Eparchy of Seert was a diocese of the Chaldean Catholic Church, centered in Seert. It existed during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The diocese was ruined during the First World War.
The Chaldean Catholic Archeparchy of Kirkuk is an archeparchy of the Chaldean Catholic Church in communion with the Pope in Rome. The archeparchy was created in the early years of the nineteenth century. Its present ordinary, Archbishop Yousif Thomas Mirkis, was consecrated in 2014.
Yousif Behnam Habash is an Iraqi-born bishop of the Syriac Catholic Church. Since 2010, he has been the Eparch of Our Lady of Deliverance of Newark.
Ignatius George II was the Patriarch of Antioch and head of the Syriac Orthodox Church from 1687 until his death in 1708.
The Syriac Catholic Archeparchy of Mosul is a Syriac Catholic Church ecclesiastical territory or archeparchy in northern Iraq. It is not a metropolitan see and is immediately exempt to the Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and the Roman Congregation for the Oriental Churches, and not part of any ecclesiastical province. Its cathedral is the Syriac Catholic Cathedral in the episcopal see of Mosul.
The Armenian Catholic Eparchy of Qamishli is a suffragan eparchy of the Armenian Catholic Church sui iuris in the Patriarch's own ecclesiastical province 'of Cilicia', serving part of Syria.
The Syriac Catholic Patriarchal Eparchy of Beirut is a Syriac Catholic Church ecclesiastical territory or eparchy of the Catholic Church in Lebanon. The Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch's cathedra is found in the eparchy in the episcopal see of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.
The Syriac Catholic Archeparchy of Baghdad is a Syriac Catholic Church ecclesiastical territory or archeparchy of the Catholic Church in Iraq. It is not a metropolitan see and is directly exempt to the Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, though not part of his or any other ecclesiastical province, and in Rome depends on the Congregation for the Oriental Churches.
References
Fiey, J. M. (1962). Assyrie chrétienne (3 vols). Beirut.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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