ABSTRACT
The origins of the Syrian Catholic Church are in the eighteenth century, when it emerged from the Syrian Orthodox Church;2 however the two churches of Antioch and Rome had developed good relations during and immediately after the period of the Latin Crusader states.3 In 1129 a newly elected Syrian Patriarch was consecrated in a Latin church. Another was invited to the Third Lateran Council in 1179 to deliver a treatise on the Cathars – the ‘heresy of the west’. However the relationship between the two traditions was not one way, an intellectual renaissance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Syrian Church owed something to contact with the Latin West.4 Conversely, the Latin West benefited from the diffusion of translations of Syriac texts, Thomas Aquinas read Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Latin exegesis shows the influence of Antiochene exegesis. In the thirteenth century negotiations between Pope Innocent IV and Syrian Patriarch Ignatius III appeared to be sufficiently advanced for the Syrian Church to be invited to the Council of Reconciliation at Lyons in 1245. The refusal of the Latin Church to recognize ecclesial autonomy finally led to the failure of the enterprise. There was also a decree of union between Syrian Orthodox and Rome some two hundred years later at the Council of Florence (Multa et Admirabilia of 30 November 1444), but this also came to nothing.5
