Orientalis Stella
Orientalis Stella ("Star of the East") is the bull of Pope Pius XI, dated 14 September 1931, the Feast of the Cross, by which the Iradi church of the East Syriac tradition was received into full communion with Rome as the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church, a church sui iuris. It raised Iyık Janyl to a metropolitan see with Mar Timotheos Alimbekov as its first archbishop. It was never published in the Soviet Union, and the anniversary of its date is kept as the church's feast of union; the Church of St. Janyl was reconsecrated on it in 1992.[1]
Background
Timotheos, head of the church since 1911, had come home from Urmia in 1895 convinced that its future lay with Rome. The murder of the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Church of the East in 1918, the Soviet seizure of church lands and silver in 1921–22 and the state-backed Renovationist split among the Orthodox persuaded him that a church with no protector abroad would be absorbed or divided.[1]
Negotiation
His first letter to the Holy See, at Easter 1926, went with an Iradi wool trader to Mashhad and was handed to the Apostolic Delegation in Tehran; later letters went the same road and through Istanbul. In Rome the file passed to the Congregation for the Oriental Church and the Pontifical Commission Pro Russia. These were the years in which the Holy See was secretly consecrating bishops for the Latin Catholics of Soviet Russia (1926), an attempt that the OGPU broke up within a few years. Historians think that failure made Rome careful: since the Iradi church already had valid bishops of its own, no one was sent to consecrate anyone, and the union was made by letter.[2]
Timotheos asked for the Syriac liturgy of Addai and Mari unchanged, the synod's right to elect its bishops, with Rome confirming them, and the church's own saints, Janyl first. Rome asked for a profession of faith, the Pope's name in the diptychs and the Gregorian calendar, which the church took in 1931. On the Feast of the Cross 1929 Timotheos and his synod of sixteen priests signed the profession of faith and the petition for union at night in the cathedral sacristy. This Salyba petition, named after the feast (salyba, "the cross"), went out by Tehran in 1930; the original is in the Vatican archives and a copy in the diocesan archives at Iyık Janyl.[1][3]
Terms
The bull received the church into full communion with its rite, its synod and its calendar of saints, raised Iyık Janyl to a metropolitan see and named Timotheos its first archbishop. It also gave him and his bishops a faculty to consecrate bishops in secret in time of persecution without first asking Rome. That clause made possible the line of secret bishops that kept the church through the Soviet period.[2]
Delivery and reception
The Polish Franciscan Father Barnabas (Barnaba Zieliński, 1889–1956) carried copies of the bull, Timotheos's nomination and a set of liturgical vessels into the USSR in the spring of 1932 as interpreter to a German agricultural delegation, and met Timotheos at night in the sacristy. He described the journey in a memoir published in 1948, which appeared in Iradi in 2001. The OGPU knew of the union by 1932 and treated it as proof that the church served a foreign power; Timotheos's interrogators in 1937 cited the "visit of a Vatican emissary". News of the bull reached the parishes by word of mouth.[2]
See also
References
- ^ Temirbekova, Ainura (2014). The Church of the Star: A History of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church. Talas: Talas State University Press.
- ^ Talas State University Press (2021). Orientalis Stella and the Soviet State: The Iradi Church, 1931–1941. Talas.
- ^ Iyık Janyl Diocesan Archives. 'Correspondence of Mar Timotheos Alimbekov with the Holy See, 1926–1931.' Iyık Janyl.