ASIA/INDIA - More than 50,000 gather to celebrate the raising of the head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church Archbishop Cyril Mar Baselios to the dignity of Major Archbishop

New Delhi (Fides Service) - More than 50,000 people including cardinals, bishops, priests, men and women religious and civil authorities attended a ceremony to celebrate the raising of the head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church Archbishop Cyril Mar Baselios to the dignity of Major Archbishop. The ceremony on May 14 at St. Mary’s Cathedral Trivandrum, Kerala was presided by Cardinal Ignace Moussa Daoud, prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches and the papal bull in Latin announcing the appointment was read out by Archbishop Lopez Quintana papal nuncio to India.
Mar Baselios was born in Kerala in 1935, ordained a priest in 1960, and appointed Bishop in 1978. In 1995 he was made Archbishop of Trivandrum becoming head of the Syro-Malankara Church. In full communion with Rome this local Church follows the Code of Canon Law for Oriental Churches and this new major Archepiscopal state will allow it to have its own Synod and the necessary autonomy in pastoral activity to care for its faithful.
This Church began in 1930 when Bishop Mar Ivanios, another bishop, a priest, a deacon and a layman of the Malankara Orthodox Church were received into full communion with Rome. In India the Syro-Malankara Church has five dioceses and about 350,000 Catholics. In the United States there is a Syro-Malankara community of another 250,000. In India there are Catholics of three rites, Latin, Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara, each with its own college of bishops, but all the bishops form one Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.
(PA) (Agenzia Fides 21/5/2005 righe 28 parole 280)