Kerala's Church: But Where Has The Message Gone?

While it is no mean achievement for a Church from an obscure corner of the world to find itself a seat on the Palatine, let us look at the ground realities in the state

- Paul Zacharia

Not everyone can win the occupancy of a 1,700 year-old basilica in the heart of Rome, situated upon the Palatine Hill, the first nucleus of the Roman Empire where once the palaces of the great Caesars stood. Kerala’s Syro-Malabar Church has just done it. Pope Francis has assigned to the Kerala Church the Santa Anastasia Minor basilica, one of the world’s oldest Christian places of worship, whose construction was started by Emperor Constantine in 325-326 CE and which is one of Palatine’s tourist attractions.

The Syro-Malabar Church and its over-a-dozen fellow Christian Churches are all too familiar to Keralites—they are never away from the news for reasons both right and wrong. For those not in the know: the Syro-Malabar Church (SMC)— along with the Malankara—represents that wing of the Catholic Church (61% of Kerala’s total Christian population) which upholds a Syrian tradition as different from the Latin (meaning European). The Syrian tradition is linked to the earliest Christian traders from the Persian region who sought out Kerala for its spices circa the 1st to 3rd centuries onwards. (Popular faith holds that it was St. Thomas the apostle who first brought Christianity to Kerala in the 1st century, though it is historically unverified.) The Latin connection came via the Portuguese, following Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Kozhikode in 1498 and the Portuguese colonisation of the western coast. Both Syrian and Latin rites owe allegiance to the Pope.