View from Rome

Sometime in the 1620s, a group of workmen from the Chinese city of Xi’an uncovered a tall, thin stele, engraved with writing in Chinese and Syriac, which had been buried for the best part of 1,000 years. The column, which dated to the year 781, expounded the basic doctrines of Christianity, and gave details of various Christian communities extant in China at the time. It had been erected by monks belonging to the Church of the East (sometimes known as the “Persian”  or “Nestorian” Church), a branch of Christianity which had separated from the rest over its refusal to accept the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD. 

If you had looked at a map of the Christian world in the eighth century, at the time the Xi’an stele was erected, it is the Church of the  East, rather than the communities which would later come to be known as the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, that would have seemed to predominate. The “Persian” Church had its roots in Parthia, modern-day Iraq and Iran, but had spread as far afield as India and China. 

Today, tragically, this ancient Church is a shadow of its former self, divided into three branches (one in communion with Rome, two independent) and worn down by centuries of persecution, as well as by the instability caused by Western meddling in the Middle East. Over the weekend, Pope Francis welcomed the Iraq-based Mar Awa III, head of the Assyrian Church of the East – one of the non-Catholic branches – to the Vatican. The Pope stressed that both the Catholic Church and the Church of the East share “the same faith, handed down by the Apostles”, one that is merely “expressed and accepted in different forms”. And the pontiff added St Isaac of Nineveh – a seventh-century desert-dwelling hermit and saint of the Church of the East – to the Roman Martyrology, opening the door for him to be officially venerated by Catholics. 

The occasion for the meeting was the 30th   anniversary of the Common Christological Declaration signed by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Dinkha IV in 1994. In that brief, historic document, each leader recognised the “legitimacy and rightness” of the other’s view of Christ, and affirmed that past divisions “were due in large part to misunderstandings”. Various other moves towards reconciliation have been made since then, some meeting with more success than others. 

Undoubtedly the boldest effort was that made in 2015 by Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako, the outspoken head of the Chaldean Catholic Church – the branch of the Church of the East in communion with Rome – who volunteered to resign as Patriarch in order for the three branches of the Church of the East to unify under a new leader. His non-Catholic counterparts respectfully declined, citing ongoing “ecclesial divergences”. Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, if Christian unity is ever to be achieved, it will take the sort of daring, self-sacrificial mentality exhibited by Patriarch Sako. 

Last Friday, the Italian navy delivered eight migrants, recently rescued from the Mediterranean Sea, to the Albanian port of Shëngjin. It was the second such transfer in the past month, part of right-wing Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s ongoing attempt to process some asylum claims offshore. The first such effort, which saw 16 newly rescued migrants sent to Albania in mid-October, ran into difficulties after a court in Rome ruled that neither Egypt nor Bangladesh – the migrants’ countries of origin – could be classified as “safe”. The Italian government’s new processing centres in Albania are only supposed to accommodate healthy, adult men from countries deemed safe for repatriation, and the judge thus ordered the immediate return of the migrants to Italy. The ruling infuriated Meloni, who claims that it is the role of the government, not the judiciary, to decide which countries are safe. She sent a second group of migrants across the Adriatic in a fresh bid to test the law. On Monday this effort, too, was shot down by judges in Rome. Meloni must now find a way to prove that her expensive pet project will not go the way of Rishi Sunak’s ill-fated Rwanda experiment.

At the tail end of an otherwise unremarkable end-of-October conference in the Holy See Press Office, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelisation announced the launch of Luce, the official cartoon mascot for the upcoming 2025 Holy Year. Dressed in a raincoat of papal yellow and muddy pilgrim’s boots, with oversized eyes and blue hair apparently inspired by anime (a Japanese style of animation that is highly popular online) she became an overnight viral sensation. 

The explosion of interest in Luce, to judge by some of the thousands of comments, videos and articles she has spawned, is due both to her objective charm (the design is extremely well done), and to a fascination with witnessing one of the world’s most ancient institutions experimenting with a form of art so deeply tied to internet culture. Or, as an atheist friend put it: “This has got to be the best religious marketing tactic I’ve ever seen.” 

Joseph Tulloch is a writer and journalist based in Rome.