The Archbishop of Bangalore, Bernard Moras, with Pope John Paul II
Posted on 07/11/2005 6:46:20 PM PDT by NYer
BANGALORE, India, JULY 11, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI has expressed his desire to visit India, says Archbishop Bernard Moras of Bangalore.
"The Pope expressed his desire to visit India when I had a brief exchange with him during my visit to Rome on June 29-30," the archbishop told a press conference here. His comments were reported by ICNS, the Indian bishops' news service.
Archbishop Moras was in Rome to receive the pallium, a woolen band that symbolizes the bond between archbishops and the Pope.
The archbishop said that he would invite the Holy Father to Karnataka and Bangalore in particular, when he visits India.
Archbishop Moras presented a memento to the Pope on behalf of the Bangalore Archdiocese.
For his part, Benedict XVI, in a message to the people of the state of Karnataka, said that they should work for unity and peace and love one another.
"Only by loving one another, we can love God," he stressed.
Soon after being elected in April, Benedict XVI hailed the Church in India, praised the country's unique culture and imparted his love and blessing to all Indians.
The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church
Rite: East Syrian
Membership: 3,752,434
The first Christians in India were evangelized by the apostle Thomas in what is now the state of Kerala. For most of their history, they were in communion with the Chaldean-Assyrian Church.
Indian Christians first encountered the Portuguese in 1498, when they warmly received the representatives of the Church of Rome, whose special status they continued to acknowledge despite long isolation.
Sadly, the Portuguese didn’t initially accept the legitimacy of the Malabar Church, and in 1599, Latinizations were imposed—appointments of Portuguese bishops, changes in the liturgy, Roman vestments, clerical celibacy, and the Inquisition. In 1653, after years of bitterness and tension, most Indian Christians severed their union with Rome. Alarmed, Pope Alexander VII sent Carmelites to India to repair the situation, and most of the Christians eventually returned to full communion with the Catholic Church.
In 1934, Pope Pius XI initiated a process of liturgical reform to restore the historic Syriac nature of the Latinized Syro-Malabar Church. Unfortunately, tension with the Latin Church remains over the establishment of Syro-Malabar jurisdictions in other parts of India where Latin dioceses already exist.
The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church
This Church was founded by the East Syrian Rite Syro-Malabar Christians that rejected the Portuguese Latinizations. As a group, they were not welcomed back into their former Chaldean-Assyrian Church. In 1665 the non-Chalcedonian Syrian Orthodox agreed to send them a bishop on the condition that they agree to accept non-Chalcedonian Christology and follow the West Syrian Rite instead of the East Syrian Rite. In the 18th century, there were four formal attempts to reconcile the Catholic and Malankara Orthodox Syrian Churches, all of which failed. In 1926, five bishops who were opposed to the jurisdiction of the Syrian Orthodox patriarch in India opened negotiations with Rome. They had asked only that their liturgy be preserved and that the bishops be allowed to retain their dioceses. In response, Rome only required that the bishops make a profession of faith. This instigated a movement of faithful into the new Syro-Malankara Catholic Church.
The Other Catholics: A Short Guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches
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