The story of the conflict between the Jacobite and Orthodox factions of what was originally called the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church and now is referred to as the Malankara Church goes back about a century.
As the district administration took control of St. Mary’s Church at Piravom in Kerala’s Ernakulam as ordered by the High Court after the rivalling groups took aggressive moves to control its premises, the saga of the rivalry needs to be told.
Christians on the Malabar coast, especially the St. Thomas Christians, lived as one single entity. The St. Thomas Christians still believe that their ancestors were baptized by St. Thomas, the apostle of Jesus in the first century common era. However, the equations changed when the Portuguese arrived in India.
The Portuguese wanted to bring all Christians under Rome. The synod or conference of church leaders at Udayamperoor (Diamper), near Kochi, in 1599 virtually forced all Malabar Christians to adhere to Rome. However, the St. Thomas Christians rebelled and the fire of divisiveness burnt till 1653 when the oath of the bent cross (Koonankurisu swearing) was organised at Mattancherry, near Kochi. The resolution was that a large group of the St. Thomas Christians would not walk into the Roman church leadership.
Thus an indigenous archdeacon was ordained for the local church by the St. Thomas Christians on the same day of the oath while the other group adhered to Rome under the Pope.
The archdeacon was ordained as a bishop assuming the title of Mar Thoma. The succession of bishops, through proper rituals continued until the time of the sixth Mar Thoma, when a group of church members rebelled against the leadership and sought the intervention of the Patriarch of Antioch in Turkey to rid the church of what the group called as hegemony by the bishop in the 1870s.
On the intervention of the rebel group, Patriarch of Antioch came to India in 1876 and divided the Malankara church into six dioceses at the historic church synod at Mulanthuruthy, near Kochi. Until that time the church was a single unit. It was decided at the synod that a democratic system of election would be introduced to ensure proper administration of the church and to prevent misrule.
However, equations changed again in 1912 when a Catholicos was ordained by an expelled patriarch and given charge of the entire Syrian Orthodox Church, but under the spiritual leadership of the Patriarch.
The feat was achieved by the group which had formerly favoured the rule by a single bishop before the diocesan divisions. The rebels again raised the banner of revolt but the church continued to exist as one entity.
A constitution for the Malankara church was framed in 1934 approving the spiritual leadership of the Patriarch of Antioch. However, a Supreme Court of India verdict in 1958 derecognised the spiritual leadership of the Patriarch. The question of accepting the Patriarch as spiritual head divided the groups and for about 10 years after the SC verdict the church continued to be one.
The simmering differences came to fore with the consecration of two new bishops by the patriarch in the early 1970. The group which had already opposed the patriarch went to court seeking to ban the two new bishops from entering the churches. The case continued and a Supreme Court verdict in 1995 declared the Patriarch as the spiritual head of the Malankara church and a court supervised conciliatory meeting was ordered under the supervision of a judge.
The direction was that the Malankara church members should meet to decide on the differences. However, the Jacobite group did not attend the meet under the supervision of the judge in 2002 while the orthodox group organised the meet at Parumala. As a result, the judge supervising the church meet reported to the court about the events and those who were elected at the Parumala meet were declared as leaders of the entire Malankara church.
On the basis of this the report, the orthodox group approached the local court seeking access to the St. Peter and Paul church at Kolencherry and the present Supreme Court verdict of July 2017 has given control of all the churches in the Malankara church to the Orthodox group, while the Jacobite group has said that the court verdict was unjust to them.
