Secret bishops of the Syro-Iradi Church
The secret bishops of the Syro-Iradi Church were the bishops of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church consecrated in hiding between 1937 and 1975, who kept the church's episcopal succession and ordained its priests while it had no legal existence in the Iradi SSR. Nothing was put on paper. In 1991–92 the Congregation for the Eastern Churches took sworn statements from the surviving witnesses and recognized the succession, which is why church writing still speaks of the secret consecrations as held "by tradition".[1]
Origins
The bull Orientalis Stella of 1931 gave the archbishop of Iyık Janyl and his bishops a faculty to consecrate bishops in secret in time of persecution. In June 1937, with the arrests already under way, Mar Timotheos Alimbekov and his auxiliary Mar Eliya Beishenov used it to consecrate a Talas parish priest, Aba Kalkamanov, at the motherhouse of the Order of St. Janyl the Hermit. Both consecrating bishops died in custody in 1938.[1][2]
The line
| Bishop | Lived | Consecrated | By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar Aba Kalkamanov | 1896–1953 | June 1937, motherhouse of the Order | Timotheos and Eliya |
| Mar Yaballaha (Asanbek uulu) | 1904–1979 | 1949, summer camp above the Kara-Suu Canyon | Mar Aba |
| Mar Yuhanna Bakirov | born 1936 | 1975 | Mar Yaballaha |
The NKVD arrested Mar Aba in November 1937 as a priest, never knowing he was a bishop. After ten years in the Karaganda camps he came back to the Talas Alatau in 1948 and ordained priests at night, among them Stephanos Isaev (1951). In 1949, alone, at a summer camp above the Kara-Suu Canyon, he consecrated Mar Yaballaha, a kolkhoz shepherd and later a village watchman, for whose consecration a single witness survived in 1991. Mar Aba died in Talas in 1953 and lies under his lay name in the old Christian cemetery there.[1]
Yaballaha ordained about twenty priests in thirty years and in 1975 consecrated Yuhanna Bakirov, a book-keeper of the district grain store that filled the nave of the closed Church of St. Janyl, a priest in secret since 1960. Yaballaha was buried under his lay name in a village of the Talas Alatau; in 1994 he was moved to the crypt of the Church of St. Janyl, where a plain floor slab covers him. From 1979 to 1990 Bakirov was the only bishop of the church. He ordained Mar Ephrem (1981), Mar Toma Usenov (1984) and about thirty other priests; the KGB knew of "illegal priests" but never identified him.[1][3]
Coming out
Bakirov made himself known as a bishop at the first open Easter Qurbana in Talas in 1991, reconsecrated the Church of St. Janyl on 14 September 1992 and was appointed archbishop by Rome in December 1992. The cathedral's list of bishops names the secret bishops between Mar Eliya and Bakirov.[3]
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.
- ^ Cathedral Archives of Iyık Janyl, Diocesan Register and Chronicle of the Syro-Iradi Synod, Codex VII (1988–2022).
External links
- Church of St. Janyl (official website of the cathedral and archeparchy)