Malankara Church - Archdeacons

Archdeacons

The position of Archdeacon – the highest clergyman not of the rank of bishop – had great importance in the church of India in the centuries leading up to the formation of an independent Malankara Church. Though technically subordinate to the Metropolitan, the Archdeacon wielded great ecclesiastical and secular power, to the extent that he was considered the secular leader of the community and served as effective head of the Indian Church in times when the province was absent a bishop. Unlike the Metropolitan, who was evidently always an East Syrian sent by the Patriarch, the Archdeacon was a native Saint Thomas Christian. In the documented period the position was evidently hereditary, belonging to the Pakalomattam family, who claimed a privileged connection to Thomas the Apostle.

Details on the archidiaconate prior to the arrival of the Portuguese are elusive, but Patriarch Timothy I (780 – 823) called the Archdeacon of India the "head of the faithful in India", implying an elevated status by at least that time. In the recorded period of its history, the office of archdeacon was substantially different in India than in the rest of the Church of the East or other Christian churches. In the broader Church of the East, each bishop was attended by an archdeacon, but in India, there was only ever one archdeacon, even when the province had multiple bishops serving it.

Following the collapse of the Church of the East's hierarchy in most of Asia in the 14th century, India was effectively cut off from the Church's heartland in Mesopotamia and formal contact was severed. By the late 15th century India had had no metropolitan for several generations, and the authority traditionally associated with him had been vested in the archdeacon. In 1491 the archdeacon sent envoys to the Patriarch of the Church of the East, as well as to the Coptic Pope of Alexandria and to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, requesting a new bishop for India. The Patriarch of the Church of the East Shemʿon IV Basidi responded by consecrating two bishops, Thoma and Yuhanon, and dispatching them to India. These bishops helped rebuild the ecclesiastical infrastructure and reestablish fraternal ties with the patriarchate, but the years of separation had greatly affected the structure of the Indian church. Though receiving utmost respect, the metropolitan was treated as a guest in his own diocese; the Archdeacon was firmly established as the real power in the Malankara community.