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Preservation of the canon law of the Church of the Eastedit
Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The canon law of the Church of the East frowns on hereditary succession to the patriarchate and the episcopate. Yet 10 of the 13 metropolitans of Shemsdin were chosen by this uncanonical process. See the articles Matran family of Shamizdin and my own, more recent, article Shemsdin (East Syrian Ecclesiastical Province). It is therefore absurd to claim that the Nochiyaye preserved intact this canon law. The European and American missionaries who praised the simple Christian virtues of the mountain Assyrians did not conceal their distaste for the principle of hereditary succession, which concentrated power and wealth (dues from the labour of the villages in each diocese) in the hands of the patriarch and his close relatives. The patriarch and his metropolitans and bishops were not quite as rapacious as the average Sicilian mafia clan, but they certainly made the most of their opportunities. The eighteenth-century Chaldean priest Khidr of Mosul tried to persuade the Nestorian patriarch Shemon XII Denha to convert to Catholicism by promising him the revenues from the Saint Thomas Christians of India if he went over to Rome.
