The Syrian Tradition

of the Catholic Church and

Mar Matthew Gregory Nakkar (1795 - 1868)
It was the conversion of Edessa, in non-Hellenised Syria, that began the history of the of
Syrian Rite Their Mass is celebrated in the Aramean dialect of Edessa, oe Syriac, the language
spoken by Our Lord Jesus Christ.

From the Traditional Syrian Mass:

Lifting the Chalice veil which covers the Holy Offerings the priest agitates it over the stone alter,
before and behind the chalice, saying:
"Thou art the rock which opened to let spring forth twelve fountains to quench the thirst of the
twelve tribes of Israel. Thou art the stone drawn back from the sepulchre of our Saviour."

According to Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History (13, 5-32) and

the Syriac document called the Doctrine of Addai, Blessed King
Abgar V Ukkama of Edessa having heard that the High Priests
were plotting against Our Lord, invited him to his kingdom where
he would have peace and security. He also asked to be cured of
his leprosy. Our Lord dictated His reply to Hanan the king's
messenger and scribe: He declined the king's invitation to
Edessa but promised to send him one of His disciples to heal his
disease.(This dictated letter was venerated in Edessa as a
protecting relic.) Saint Thomas the Apostle appointed Saint
Addai, (feast 1 October) one of the 72 disciples, to convert
Edessa and accomplish Our Lord's promise to heal the king.

The Church in Edessa is of Apostolic antiquity, Saint Addia being

its first bishop. The entire kingdom of Edessa was soon
converted. King Abgar IX of Edessa (179-212 AD) renounced the
official religion of the Parthian empire, converted to the Faith,
was baptised in 206 AD and thus became the world's first
Christian sovereign of a state.

Saint Simeon Stylites, (left), shown at the moment when to test the authenticity of the
vocation he had already been living for many years, was called down from his pillar by
Church authorities. He immediately moved to come down, and thereby to manifest his
submission; upon which he was told to remain there because his willing obedience was proof
that his way of life was indeed from God.

From the 4th Century the Syrian Rite had hundreds of monasteries which were occupied by
thousands of monks and nuns training themselves in the virtues of piety, chastity, humility,
obedience, poverty, fasting and prayer. In the mountains of Edessa alone there were 300
monasteries occupied by 90,000 monks; in Saint Matthew's monastery east of Mosul (modern
Iraq) there were 12,000 monks. The most famous monk of the Syrian rite is Saint Ephrem,
Deacon and Doctor of the Universal Church (feast June 18th ) born about 306 in Nisibis (North-
West Mosul, Iraq). "From the time he began to lead a monastic life till his death, he ate nothing
but barley bread and dried herbs and sometimes green herbs. He drank nothing but water."
Another very famous Syrian monk is Saint Simeon Stylites who died in 549 (feast January 5th)
after standing or kneeling on a pillar for 47 years. He was visited by pilgrims from as far away as
Spain.
Today there are about 80,000 Syrian Catholics in the world. They are most numerous in Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon, but are also to be found in Egypt, the U.S.A. and Australia.
Despite persecutions at the hands of the Jacobite monophysites, who claim that Christ has only
one nature, the Syrian Catholics today outnumber the Jacobites, due to the missionary zeal of
such bishops as Mar (the title of a bishop amongst the Syrians) Matthew Gregory Nakkar
(1795-1868), the story of whose conversion we here relate.

Mar Matthew Gregory Nakkar (1795 - 1868) A Syrian Saul

Between 1825 and 1830 nearly all the Syrian Jacobites in Damascus and Southern Lebanon,
including the Bishop Jacob al-Haliani, returned to the communion of the Catholic Church: there
were, in fact, only fifteen Jacobite families left there. Alarmed, the Jacobite patriarch sent
Matthew Nakkar, Metropolitan of Mosul, to Damascus to deal with the situation, and to see, like a
new Saul persecuting the faithful of that city, that Bishop Jacob was imprisoned.
Nakkar, born in 1795 into a distinguished family which for 600 years had monopolised the Jacobite
See of Mosul, was ordained a priest at the age of 25, and succeeded his uncle as Metropolitan in
1826. He soon distinguished himself for his zeal against Catholics of the Syrian rite, denouncing
them to the Muslim Turkish authorities for disobeying the Sultan's order forbidding change of
religion. In his Memoirs we read: "My hatred for Catholics, inherited from my ancestors, increased
every day; I preached against them relentlessly and formally taught what they regarded as
heresy...I did all in my power to hamper their clergy in their ministry...To profess Catholicism
seemed to me scandalous and dishonourable."
It was his success in the imprisonment of two recently converted Catholic bishops in Mardin,
obtained from the Pasha at Baghdad for a suitable consideration, that caused his patriarch to send
him to Damascus. On his arrival, however, he found that Mar Jacob al-Haliani had sought refuge
amongst the Maronites in Lebanon, and all he could obtain was the imprisonment of 25 Catholics
for as many days. Seeing that his efforts to have Mar Jacob sent back to Syria were without avail,
Matthew decided to give up for the present, and he went to Jerusalem to celebrate Holy Week
there.

In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre it is the custom on Easter Eve for the Greek Orthodox
Patriarch and a Monophysite Armenian ecclesiastic to shut themselves up in the chapel of the
Angel before the sepulchre, kindle fire, and pass it out through small windows to the waiting
multitude outside. Now it was, and remains, a common belief amongst the schismatics that this
'holy fire' still came down miraculously from heaven (as it genuinely had done before the schism),
and that this miracle was a sign of God's approval of the separated churches. This belief was not
confined to the simple: Matthew Nakkar, for example, firmly believed in the miracle and all that he
had heard about the properties of the holy fire, e.g., that it did not burn. Accordingly, on this Holy
Saturday of 1832, he went with his deacon to the church, joined in the procession, united his
heart with the excited crowd, and jostled with them to light his candle at the holy fire. With
triumph he returned to his deacon, and, to demonstrate the miracle, applied the flame to the
deacon's long beard - it disappeared in a flash of light, sizzling and smelling. "I cannot express my
amazement," wrote Mar Matthew, "I was so certain that the fire would not burn that for a few
minutes I was stupefied: then I pulled myself together and bitterly reproached my deacon for his
lack of faith that had caused his beard to be burnt!" It was the beginning of the change in
Matthew Nakkar's life: if the "holy fire" was not miraculous, then it was not the sign of God's
approval of his church he had believed it to be; henceforward he began to have other doubts, and
he resolved to make a study of those points of religion about which there is disagreement
between the Jacobites and the Catholic Church.

The syrian Patriarch of Antioch

Mar Ignatius Rahmani (late 1800's)

He was soon to have this opportunity in an unexpected way. Having travelled to Aleppo to
have the Catholics there expelled, he was obliged to wait there until the end of the Muslim fast of
Ramadan before the orders could be executed by the authorities. Divine Providence so disposed it
that, in the mistaken belief that he had come to the so-called "Venetian Inn", Mar Matthew
obtained lodging at the monastery of the French Lazarist Fathers! After the persecutor's initial
surprise and fear, the Father Superior won his confidence through his charity and respectful
welcome, and soon conversations and discussions followed which turned principally on
Monophysitism: was Jesus Christ a real, whole and complete man as well as God, or was He not?
Matthew found his views less easy to defend than he had supposed - he was particularly
impressed by the testimonies that Father Godès adduced from the writings of the Syrian doctor St
Ephrem, and he asked permission to read himself in the Lazarists' library. He read there and he
prayed; as an honest man, he was really worried. Grace was at
work, and on 27 November 1832, in the church at Aleppo that
he had come to recover, he made a public abjuration of heresy
and was reconciled by the patriarch of the Catholic Syrians, Mar
Gregory Jarwah.
Then the persecutor became the persecuted. He went straight
to Mardin, the chief Jacobite stronghold, and within two months
fifty-four Jacobites had formally abandoned their errors. The
Jacobite patriarch cited him before the governor, accusing him
of receiving a "chest of gold" from the Pope as the price of his
apostasy, and of enticing good Jacobites from their allegiance to
the Sultan to that of the "Franks". The governor, in spite of the
evident injustice of the accusations, took the course of Pilate,
and soon Mar Matthew was imprisoned in the patriarch's own
jail.
The Syrian Patriarch of Antioch and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church Mar Ignatius Gabriel
Tappuni (early 1900's)
 The latter tried everything he could to make him apostasise: he was confined in an empty
underground cistern for two weeks, and every evening brought out for a cruel beating. Then,
dressed in a caricature of episcopal vestments, he was brought before the patriarch and ordered
to curse the Council of Chalcedon. Thereupon he was struck in the mouth, the blow breaking his
teeth, and literally kicked from the top of a flight of stairs to the bottom. Unable to move, he was
picked up and flung into a hut outside the monastery. "If he dies, throw his body to the dogs" was
the order.
The next morning, as Mar Matthew lay in the hut praying to God for strength, a Kurdish princess
happened to pass by, and hearing his groans, told her servants to break the door down. Hearing
Matthew's story, she sent for her husband, who had him taken to his palace and nursed back to
health. Giving thanks to God and the prince for this unlikely turn of events, Mar Matthew was soon
back at his preaching and teaching with more zeal than ever; at the end of a year he had won
over his own successor in the see of Mosul and a thousand lay-people. Thus he continued for
some thirty-five years, bringing tens of thousands of Jacobites to the Catholic Faith in his new
diocese of Nabk and Kariatim until, rich in merits and exhausted by his labours, he went to his
eternal reward on 22 March 1868 at the Syrian ecclesiastical college at Sharfeh.

"I am a monk to become a saint and to live life as it was meant to be, before the Fall. I would like to magnify the Glories of Mary." Br.
Ephrem Marie, C.SS.R of the Syrian Rite.

Traditional Syrian Fast and Abstinence

(in vigour until at least the 1920's)
(Cf. Fr. R.. Janin, A.A. Les Eglise orientales et Les Rites orientaux, Paris
1922)
Fast: eating and drinking nothing until midday
Abstinence: abstaining from eating all meat, oil, wine and animal
products (eggs, milk, cheese etc.)
1. Nineveh fast three days, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of
the third week before Lent, (After the example of
the Ninevites who fasted and repented when
Jonah preached the imminence of Divine

2. Great Lent
3. Apostles Lent
4. Assumption Lent
5. Christmas Lent
6 Abstinence
7 Forbidden food
The Dormition (or Falling Asleep in Death) of Saint Ephrem the Syrian
He is depicted surrounded by his disciples. The Stylites and cave dwellers of the Syrian monastic life are also represented. Saint Ephrem's
chastisements).
50 days of fasting all days except Sunday and
Saturday (but Holy Saturday is a fast day;
abstinence during the whole of Lent Sundays and
Saturdays included)
aabstinence only, three days 25th - 28th June
abstinence only, eight days 8th - 14th August
abstinence only, ten days 16th - 24th December
All Wednesdays and Fridays are days of
abstinence; except: from Christmas to Epiphany,
from Easter to Pentecost, during the week
preceding Great Lent, on June 29th and August
15th
Like most oriental Christians, the Syrians kept the
Mosaic ban on eating blood, suffocated animals
and certain animals considered impure; and
which Oriental Church Councils have many times
renewed.
influence helped populate the deserts with monks.