A proposal for two dwindling historic Middle Eastern Churches to enter full communion is “a sound idea” but its application would be “fraught with difficulties”, a leading scholar has warned.
Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, Patriarch of the Baghdad-based Chaldean Church, said in a speech last month: "I have studied our Eastern heritage and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and I see nothing to prevent the union of the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East under the name Church of the East."
He said he was voicing his "personal opinion".
Both Churches have shrunk in the last 40 years as a result of economic emigration accelerated by persecution and political turbulence. According to the Agenzia Fides website, Patriarch Sako said there was an urgent need to reflect on a "project of unity" because so many Middle Eastern Christian communities were “characterised by … emigration”. Since 2003 some 70 per cent of Iraq’s Chaldeans are believed to have left Iraq.
Dr Erica Hunter, a longtime scholar of Eastern Christianity based at Cambridge University, told The Tablet: “It’s the whole question of the survival of the Church in the Middle East.”
Sako’s proposal was, she said, theoretically “a sound idea … but its whole application is fraught with practical difficulties,” primarily “the question of [papal] authority”.
Dr Anthony O’Mahony, a tutor in World Religions at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, said Sako has proposed greater unity before, but Assyrian Patriarch Awa III has expressed concerns about the Church of the East having “to rescind its autonomy”, in Dr O’Mahony’s words.
Professor Dietmar Winkler, a consultant on the Vatican's dialogue with Eastern Churches, said he was “sure that there were no talks between [Patriarch Sako] and Rome” about a possible union of the two Churches, but he noted that Sako has developed doctrinal and theological arguments for full communion between some Eastern Catholic Churches and the ancient Churches of the East.
Given that the Assyrian Church “(rightly) cannot accept” papal authority, Winkler concluded: "A new ecumenical model must be developed, but it does not yet exist."
Under St John Paul II the two Churches signed an accord in 2001 permitting mutual admission to the Eucharist. The Chaldean Church emerged in the eighteenth century from the older Assyrian Church of the East, following exposure to Europeans and European education.
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