Read an excerpt from “Chaldean Catholics: Christians With a Distinct Spirituality” below, then read the full story.
Of all the Eastern Rites within the Catholic Church, the Chaldean Rite is perhaps the oldest, both chronologically and in the form of its liturgy.
The term “Chaldean,” however, is a much later label given to those Christians who form a single tradition and live, for the most part, in Iraq and Iran.
The term is also dear to the history of Iraq: Abraham came from Ur, land of the Chaldees, and the Chaldean Empire of Mesopotamia (Iraq) received more than a slight mention in the Old Testament.
Saints Thaddeus and Mari are traditionally believed to have been the first evangelizers of Greater Syria and Mesopotamia (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq). These disciples journeyed from Jewish community to Jewish community telling of the life and message of Christ, the Messiah.
Those who accepted the good news added the “breaking of bread,” or Eucharist, to the regular synagogue service. This was true of all the early “Christian Jews,” but the Chaldean Community has maintained its Jewish flavor more markedly than any other community, right to the present day.
This was mainly due to the fact that the Chaldean Church never enjoyed the status of being a “state religion,” as the Byzantine, Armenian, Coptic and Ethiopic churches did. As such, there was never any need to elaborate the service for the entrance of a king, or to furnish the church interiors in a way befitting high society.
In fact, this community was so harassed that it never even developed a church architecture. Interior furnishings were always fashioned so that they could be quickly dismantled and carried to a new location.
None of this is to say that the Chaldean Church did not play a tremendous role in the annals of the early Church. Missionaries from the Chaldean Church during the first centuries of Christianity evangelized many communities within the Persian Empire. Some even went beyond the Empire – into Mongolia and China.