List of Chaldean Catholic Patriarchs of Babylon

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This is a list of The Chaldean Catholicos-Patriarchs of Babylon, the leaders of the Chaldean Catholic Church and one of the Patriarchs of the east of the Catholic Church was originally established by Saint Thomas in the first century AD.

This list continues from the List of Patriarchs of the Church of the East that traces itself back from the Church founded in Mesopotamia first mentioned in the 1st century under Simon Peter in 1 Peter 5:13 out of which grew the Church of the East. It was Catholicos Timothy I Al-Baghdadi incorporated the numerically dominant St. Thomas Christians under the Apostolic See of the Catholicos-Patriarch of Babylon, which is often wrongly attributed to St. Thomas as a result.

Catholicoi and Patriarchs of Babylon for the Chaldeans

The Shimun line

In 1553, Mar Yohannan Sulaqa, willing to separate from the Church of the East's Patriarchal See of Alqosh, a Chaldean town in northern Iraq, went to Rome asking for his appointment as Patriarch. He was consecrated in St. Peter's Basilica on 9 April 1553.

The Josephite line of Amid

The Catholic Patriarchs based in Amid, now Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey, began with Joseph I who in 1681 separated from the Patriarchal See of Alqosh entering into full communion with Rome.

At the death of Augustine Hindi, this See remained vacant until 1830 upon the merging of the Alqosh line in the person of Mar Yohannan Hormizd thus forming the modern Chaldean Catholic Church.

The Alqosh/Mosul line

The patriarchal See of Alqosh, also known during the 17th and 18th centuries as Eliya line, was the oldest and largest patriarchal See of the Church of the East, the only one existing patriarchal line before the 1553 split, and traces itself back from St. Thomas in the 1st century. In 1610, Mar Eliyya VIII (1591–1617), Patriarch of the See of Alqosh, entered communion with the Catholic Church. Eliyya VIII, however died in 1617, and his successor quickly repudiated the union, returning to the Church of the East.

In 1778, with the death of Eliya XII (or XI) Denkha, the See of Alqosh divided between Mar Eliyya XIII Isho-Yab, who was not in communion with Rome, and his cousin Mar Yohannan VIII Eliyya Hormizd, who professed to be Catholic. In 1804, with the death of Eliyya Isho-Yab, Yohannan Hormizd remained the only incumbent of this ancient See. He was recognized patriarch by Rome only in 1830, after the merging of the see of Amid, thus forming the modern Chaldean Catholic Church.

See also

External links