Holy Smoke: Inside the world's most vicious liturgy wars

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🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

In the ancient Syro-Malabar Church of south India, clergy who try to change the liturgy do so at their peril. At St Mary’s Cathedral Basilica in Ernakulam last December, a long-standing dispute over whether the priest should face the people led to scenes in which protestors attacked clergy in the middle of the service, sending the sacred vessels crashing to the ground. As a result, the cathedral was closed – and remains so, six months later.

This liturgy war is a hideous embarrassment for the Vatican, because the Syro-Malabar Church is the second largest Eastern Church in Communion with Rome. Traditionally dated back to St Thomas the Apostle's mission to India, it has four millions members worldwide. Members are known for their missionary zeal – the Syro-Malabars are one of the few thriving Catholic communities in Britain – but also passions that in the last few years have spilled over into violence, allegations of corruption and hunger strikes. At the root of the dispute is an attempt by Rome to impose a uniform liturgy on congregations that bitterly disagree about whether the priest should face East or West during the Holy Qurbana, the Syro-Malabar name for the Mass. Bishops have been burned in effigy.

My guest in this episode of Holy Smoke is Luke Coppen, senior correspondent of the Pillar and one the few journalists outside India who has been following the escalation of the Christian world's most spectacular liturgy war. If you thought the Vatican's attempt to crush the Latin Mass was a nasty business, just wait until you hear what Luke has to say about the situation in India, which the Pope seems powerless to control.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:28.1	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson. And I guess you could call this a new series of Holy Smoke,
0:40.9	which is my sort of get-out clause when I haven't done an episode for a bit.
0:45.0	But I've had COVID for the first time ever.
0:46.1	It's horrible.
0:53.6	And I've just relapsed, I think, as a result of the stress of trying to understand the subject of this week's podcast, which is the world's nastiest liturgical
0:57.3	dispute, the most vicious liturgy wars in living memory, and they involve not Arthur
1:04.7	Roach's thuggish attempt to suppress the Latin Mass, but the Sero-Malabar Church, that's a community of some 4 million Indian Christians
1:13.9	in full communion with the Holy See, whose right is extremely ancient, it is Syriac, it is
1:21.9	connected historically to Nestorianism, and I suppose you could say that in some ways it's as
1:27.3	far removed from the mainstream
1:29.2	Roman right mass as you can imagine. I mean, mass is called the Holy Corbana. The Eucharic prayer is known as
1:36.7	the anaphora. The services themselves have been influenced down the centuries by Hinduism.
1:44.1	So it's exotic, unfamiliar and rather beautiful way of worshipping and thriving, I think.
1:49.0	But there is almost literally blood on the streets in India.
1:54.0	And the Kazas Belai, originally anyway, was the Vatican's attempt to regularise the worship of the Cyril Malabar Church.
2:04.9	My guest today is the senior correspondent of the pillar, Luke Coppin,
2:09.8	the genius and only begetta of the much-missed weekly Catholic herald,
2:14.7	and a friend of mine for many, many years,
2:17.1	who has been covering in great detail for the pillar
2:19.2	this bloody but little publicised outside India liturgical warfare.
2:25.2	And so I really need two things, Luke.
	...

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