Who Are the Chaldean Catholic Saints?
The Living Saints of the Oldest Christian East
Who Are the Chaldean Catholic Saints?
From the apostolic missions of Addai and Mari in Mesopotamia to the martyrs of the Sayfo and the witness of modern Iraq — the saints of the Chaldean Catholic Church carry Christianity’s most ancient Eastern flame
The Chaldean Catholic Church is one of the oldest Christian communities in existence, tracing its lineage back to the very first centuries after Christ. Born in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, present-day Iraq — this Church has carried the flame of the Gospel through nearly two thousand years of trials, from Persian persecution to modern-day martyrdom. The Chaldean faithful are the living descendants of the early Assyrian Church that first brought Christianity eastward, speaking the same language Jesus Himself spoke: Aramaic.
The Chaldean Church embodies faith tested by fire — a faith that has endured through exile, war, and scattering. Yet from that suffering has emerged a lineage of saints whose courage and holiness have shaped Christian history. Their names span twenty centuries: apostolic founders who walked the same roads as the Twelve, bishops who refused to apostatize before Persian swords, monks who copied Scripture in monasteries while empires crumbled around them, and modern martyrs whose blood was shed in the same lands where Christianity first took root in the East.
To encounter the Chaldean Catholic saints is to encounter Christianity before it was divided into East and West, before councils defined the boundaries between communions, before the Church had spread to every nation. It is to stand in the living room of the faith itself — in the lands of Abraham, in the language of Jesus, in the liturgy that the apostolic missionaries of Mesopotamia first composed and that their spiritual descendants still pray today.
The Chaldean Catholic Church: Who They Are
The Chaldean Catholic Church is a sui iuris Eastern Catholic church in full communion with Rome. It uses the East Syriac Rite — one of the oldest liturgical traditions in Christianity — and celebrates its liturgy primarily in Classical Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic and one of the languages spoken across the ancient Near East during the time of Christ. Modern Arabic and Neo-Aramaic are also used in parishes today.
The church traces its foundation to the apostolic missions of the first century and entered formal union with Rome in a complex process beginning in 1553, when a portion of the ancient Church of the East entered Catholic communion under Patriarch Yohannan Sulaqa. The current Chaldean Catholic Church numbers approximately 400,000 to 600,000 faithful worldwide, with significant communities in Iraq, the United States, Australia, Europe, and Lebanon — many of them diaspora communities formed by the forced displacement of Christians from Iraq over the past three decades.
The Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church is currently based in Baghdad and Erbil. The church is governed by the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (CCEO) and is under the oversight of the Dicastery for the Oriental Churches in Rome. Its history goes back to the earliest centuries of the Church of the East, one of the most geographically expansive Christian missions in history — extending at its height from Syria to China.
Rite: East Syriac (Chaldean Rite)
Liturgical Languages: Classical Syriac; Modern Arabic; Neo-Aramaic (Sureth)
Primary Location: Iraq (Baghdad and Erbil); significant diaspora in USA, Australia, Europe
Union with Rome: Formalized 1553; current patriarchal line established 19th century
Patriarch: Cardinal Louis Raphaël I Sako (since 2013)
Faithful: Approximately 400,000–600,000 worldwide
Connection to Jesus: The Chaldean liturgical language, Syriac, is a direct dialect of the Aramaic Jesus spoke — making the Chaldean liturgy one of the closest living links to the language of the New Testament
Saints Addai and Mari: The Apostles of Mesopotamia
Among the earliest and most revered figures in the entire Chaldean tradition are Saints Addai and Mari — the apostolic missionaries who brought the Gospel to Mesopotamia in the first century. Their story is one of the most remarkable in all of Christian history, and their legacy is not merely ancient: it is alive in every Chaldean Catholic Liturgy celebrated today.
According to the ancient tradition of the Church of the East, Addai (also spelled Thaddeus) was one of the seventy-two disciples whom Jesus sent out during his earthly ministry (Luke 10:1). The Doctrine of Addai, an early Syriac document, records that King Abgar V of Edessa — the city in what is now southeastern Turkey — heard of Jesus’ healing miracles and wrote to him, asking for a cure. Jesus wrote back and promised to send a disciple after his resurrection. Addai was that disciple.
According to this tradition, Addai traveled to Edessa, healed King Abgar, proclaimed the Gospel, and converted the royal household and much of the city. From Edessa, he extended his mission into Mesopotamia, establishing Christian communities in the cities that would eventually become the heartland of the Chaldean Church. Before his death, he consecrated his disciple Mari to continue the work.
Mari is the figure most directly linked to the establishment of Christianity in Mesopotamia proper. He traveled south from Edessa through what is now northern Iraq, preaching the Gospel in the cities and villages of the Tigris and Euphrates basin. Tradition credits him with founding the see of Seleucia-Ctesiphon — the twin capital city of the Parthian and later Sasanian empires, and the site that became the patriarchal headquarters of the entire Church of the East. In a very real sense, Mari planted the tree whose branches became the Chaldean Catholic Church.
Apostolic missionaries to Mesopotamia and founders of the East Syriac Christian tradition. Addai was a disciple of Jesus sent to the region of Edessa; Mari was his disciple who brought the Gospel into the heart of Mesopotamia. Together they are regarded as the apostolic founders of the Chaldean Church — its own Saints Peter and Paul.
Their liturgical legacy — the Anaphora of Addai and Mari — is one of the oldest Eucharistic prayers still in liturgical use anywhere in the world. Every Chaldean Catholic priest who celebrates the Divine Liturgy stands in direct spiritual succession to the missionary work these two saints began.
The Anaphora of Addai and Mari: A Living Link to the Apostolic Age
The most tangible legacy of Saints Addai and Mari is not a relic or a shrine. It is a prayer — the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, one of the oldest Eucharistic prayers still used in regular liturgical worship anywhere in the world. This prayer, used in every celebration of the Chaldean Divine Liturgy, is believed to derive from the earliest apostolic practice of Mesopotamian Christianity, predating many of the Eucharistic prayers used by other traditions.
The Anaphora is remarkable for several reasons. Most significantly, it contains no explicit citation of the words of institution — the “This is my body” and “This is my blood” formulas — as a direct quotation. These words are present in the prayer, but scattered throughout rather than gathered into a single consecratory formula. This ancient structure has been the subject of significant theological discussion, particularly between the Catholic Church and the Church of the East. In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity issued a significant declaration affirming the validity of the Anaphora and permitting Chaldean Catholics, in certain pastoral circumstances, to receive communion at celebrations using it in the Assyrian Church of the East.
The prayer itself is a window into the theological world of the earliest Eastern Christianity — a world that understood the Eucharist as a participation in the living presence of Christ, expressed in the Aramaic idiom and imagery of the ancient Near East. To pray it is to be connected to a tradition older than the Council of Nicaea, older than the New Testament canon as we know it, reaching back to the very first generations of those who broke bread in the name of Jesus in the land between the two great rivers.
Saint Thomas and the Eastern Mission
Alongside the tradition of Addai and Mari, the Chaldean and broader East Syriac tradition holds a deep devotion to Saint Thomas the Apostle. According to the ancient traditions of the Eastern churches, Thomas was the apostle who carried the Gospel farthest eastward — through Mesopotamia, Persia, and ultimately to India, where the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala claim him as their founder and where tradition says he was martyred near Madras (modern Chennai) in 72 AD.
The Acts of Thomas — a Syriac text of the early 3rd century — records the missionary journeys of Thomas and has been a beloved narrative in the East Syriac tradition for nearly two thousand years. Whether or not every detail of these accounts is historical, what is certain is that by the second and third centuries, there were Christian communities across Mesopotamia and Persia, all tracing their apostolic foundation to the missionary activity that Thomas and the disciples of Addai represented.
Thomas is invoked throughout the Chaldean tradition as the patron of those who doubted and came to faith — his encounter with the risen Christ (“My Lord and my God!”) is one of the most theologically significant moments in the Gospels, and his willingness to travel to the ends of the known earth for Christ has made him a model for the Chaldean Church’s own centuries of missionary endurance under persecution.
The Persian Martyrs: Faith Under the Sasanian Empire
The most dramatic and extensive period of martyrdom in the Chaldean tradition came in the 4th century, under the Sasanian Persian Empire. When the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD, the political situation of Christians in the Persian Empire became acutely dangerous. The Persians, already suspicious of their large Christian minority’s sympathies, now saw those Christians as potential fifth-column supporters of Rome — the empire’s great rival. The result was a wave of persecution under Emperor Shapur II (309–379 AD) that historians consider one of the most severe anti-Christian persecutions in history.
The persecution was triggered by Shapur’s demand that the Christian community pay a double tax to fund his wars against Rome. When the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Simeon Bar Sabba’e, refused to collect the tax from his impoverished flock, the emperor moved against the church directly. What followed was forty years of sustained violence against the Christian communities of Mesopotamia and Persia — a persecution that produced thousands of martyrs whose names fill the liturgical calendar of the East Syriac tradition.
The Synaxarion of the Church of the East — the traditional calendar of saints — records hundreds of martyrs from this period, ranging from bishops and priests to laypeople, deaconesses, and consecrated virgins. The Church of the East came to venerate April 17 as a special commemoration of all the martyrs of Shapur’s persecution, a feast that remains in the Chaldean liturgical calendar to this day.
Saint Simeon Bar Sabba’e: The Bishop Who Would Not Tax the Poor
Simeon Bar Sabba’e (died 344 AD) is the most venerated of all the Persian martyrs and one of the most important saints in the entire Chaldean tradition. As Catholicos — the supreme bishop of the Church of the East, based in Seleucia-Ctesiphon — he was the shepherd of the entire Christian community of the Persian Empire when Shapur II began his persecution.
Simeon was arrested in 340 AD after refusing to collect Shapur’s double tax from his Christian flock. For four years he was imprisoned and subjected to pressure to apostatize and comply. He refused. On Good Friday of 344 AD, Simeon was brought before the Emperor one final time. He was offered his freedom if he would worship the sun — the sacred symbol of Zoroastrian Persia — just once. He refused. He is reported to have said simply: “I will not adore the sun. I adore and will adore the Creator of the sun and of all things.”
On that same day, Simeon was executed along with five bishops, a hundred priests, and many other clergy and laity who had been imprisoned with him. His faithful deacon Ananias, who was offered his freedom if he would renounce his bishop, refused and was executed at Simeon’s side. The faithful deacon who died alongside his bishop became a model of Christian loyalty that the Chaldean tradition has never forgotten.
Catholicos of the Church of the East, martyred by the Persian Emperor Shapur II on Good Friday, 344 AD, along with five bishops, a hundred priests, and countless faithful. His refusal to apostatize — even when offered his freedom — set the pattern for Chaldean martyrdom across the next twenty centuries.
Venerated in both the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East as the greatest of the Persian martyrs. The Roman Martyrology also commemorates him. His feast is celebrated in conjunction with all the martyrs of the Shaporian persecution on April 17 in the East Syriac calendar.
The Great Persecution (340–401): Thousands of Martyrs
The persecution that began with Simeon’s execution in 344 AD did not end with his death. It continued, with varying intensity, for decades. The Synaxarion of the Church of the East records a staggering number of martyrs from this period. Among the most notable groups and individuals are:
The Forty Martyrs of Beth Zabdai (347 AD)
Forty Christians — including their bishop, Heliodorus — were martyred in the region of Beth Zabdai (along the upper Tigris) in a single episode of mass execution. Their feast is celebrated together as a group, echoing the famous Forty Martyrs of Sebaste who were being martyred in the Roman Empire at almost the same time. The simultaneity of Eastern and Western martyrdom in the mid-4th century reminds us that the early Church paid for its faith on both sides of the great imperial divide.
Saint Martha, Daughter of Posi (341 AD)
Martha, daughter of Posi (also spelled Pousha), was a consecrated virgin and the sister of Simeon Bar Sabba’e himself. She was arrested and martyred in 341 AD, before her brother’s execution. Her story adds a dimension of profound personal sacrifice to Simeon’s own: the bishop who would not compromise had already seen his sister die for the faith before he himself was brought before the emperor. Martha is venerated as one of the great female martyrs of the Chaldean tradition.
Saint Shahdost (342 AD)
Shahdost was the successor of Simeon as Catholicos — and he too was martyred, just two years after his predecessor, in 342 AD. He had served as Catholicos for less than a year before being arrested and killed. His brief tenure and quick martyrdom illustrate the ferocity of the persecution: the Persian Empire was not targeting random Christians but specifically the leadership of the church, decapitating its hierarchy in the hopes of destroying the institution.
Saint Barba’shemin (346 AD)
Barba’shemin succeeded Shahdost and was himself martyred in 346 AD, along with nine bishops and hundreds of clergy. He was the third Catholicos in a row to die for the faith — a succession of martyred primates that has no parallel in Western Christian history. The Church of the East was, in effect, undergoing a martyrdom of its entire episcopal leadership in a single generation.
Modern historians and hagiographers of the Church of the East estimate that the Shaporian persecution produced between 16,000 and 190,000 martyrs, depending on the source and methodology used. Even at the most conservative estimates, the Persian persecution of the 4th century was one of the most deadly anti-Christian persecutions in history — comparable in scope to the Roman persecutions of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and far less well-known in the Western world.
The Chaldean Catholic liturgical calendar commemorates these martyrs collectively on the Friday after Easter — a feast uniquely tied to the Paschal mystery, emphasizing that the martyrs’ deaths were not defeats but participations in the Resurrection that Easter proclaims.
Medieval Saints of the Chaldean East
After the great persecution of the 4th century, the Church of the East entered a long period of relative stability under the Sasanian Empire and then, after 637 AD, under Arab Muslim rule. The Islamic conquest of Persia and Mesopotamia did not immediately end Christian life; for several centuries, the Caliphate tolerated Christian communities as dhimmi (protected peoples), and the Church of the East actually expanded dramatically during this period — sending missionaries as far east as China, India, and Central Asia.
Saint Ishoyahb III (580–659 AD)
Ishoyahb III was Catholicos of the Church of the East from 649 to 659 AD — one of the most significant leaders in the history of the entire tradition. His tenure coincided with the early centuries of Islamic rule, and he navigated the new political reality with extraordinary skill. His surviving letters — one of the richest epistolary collections in early Syriac Christian literature — reveal a pastor of uncommon wisdom and pastoral depth.
Most significantly, Ishoyahb III was a great liturgical reformer who standardized the Church of the East’s liturgical texts, including the Divine Office, creating the foundation on which Chaldean Catholic liturgical practice still rests. He also wrote to the Christian communities of the Malabar Coast in India, confirming their connection to the Mesopotamian patriarchal see — a correspondence that has been cited by Indian Thomas Christians as evidence of their ancient connection to the East Syriac tradition.
The Monasteries: Centers of Learning and Holiness
The Chaldean tradition produced a remarkable monastic culture in the medieval period. The monasteries of the Tur Abdin region (in what is now southeastern Turkey) and the plains of Mesopotamia were not only centers of prayer and ascetic discipline but also the greatest centers of learning in the medieval world outside of Constantinople. Chaldean and Syriac Christian scholars preserved and transmitted the works of Greek philosophy, medicine, and science — translating Aristotle and Hippocrates into Arabic and thereby preserving knowledge that would otherwise have been lost to the Western world entirely. The monks who did this work were saints in the fullest sense: their intellectual labor was a form of prayer, offered in service to a Church that had kept the faith through four centuries of martyrdom.
Saint Abdisho Bar Berika (died 1318)
Abdisho Bar Berika (also spelled Ebedjesu) was a Metropolitan of Nisibis and Armenia and one of the greatest scholars the East Syriac tradition ever produced. His Catalogue of Syriac Authors is an indispensable reference work for the history of Syriac Christianity, and his Marganitha (“The Pearl”) is a systematic theological treatise that summarizes the doctrine of the Church of the East. He also composed liturgical poetry and wrote on canon law. He is one of the great doctor-saints of the East Syriac tradition — a man whose holiness expressed itself through scholarly labor in service of the truth.
Union with Rome and the Birth of the Chaldean Catholic Church
The formal origin of the Chaldean Catholic Church as a distinct institution begins in 1553, when a portion of the ancient Church of the East entered Catholic communion. The circumstances were complex — a disputed patriarchal election led one group to seek recognition from Rome — and the next three centuries saw the union weaken, reassert itself, and finally stabilize in the 19th century under a series of patriarchs who committed their communities definitively to Catholic communion while retaining the East Syriac Rite in its entirety.
The first patriarch to enter union with Rome was Yohannan Sulaqa, who was ordained in Rome in 1553 by Pope Julius III. He returned to Mesopotamia as a Catholic patriarch, but was captured by the Ottoman governor and martyred in 1555 — one of the first martyrs specifically of the Chaldean Catholic tradition. His blood sealed the union he had come to Rome to establish.
The union was fully consolidated in the 19th century, and from that point forward the Chaldean Catholic Church developed its own tradition of saints, blesseds, and holy people — figures formed by both the ancient East Syriac heritage and the full communion with the universal Catholic Church that gave them access to Roman canonization processes. The most significant of these modern saints and blesseds belongs to the tragedy of the early 20th century.
The Sayfo and Blessed Flavien Michel Melki
The Sayfo — the word means “sword” in Syriac — is the name given to the genocide of Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians carried out by the Ottoman Empire and Kurdish irregular forces between 1914 and 1918. Coming during the same period as the better-known Armenian Genocide, the Sayfo is estimated to have killed between 250,000 and 750,000 Eastern Christians — including a devastating proportion of the Chaldean Catholic faithful of the Hakkari mountains and the plains of Mesopotamia.
From this catastrophe emerged the most recognized modern saint of the Chaldean Catholic tradition: Blessed Flavien Michel Melki.
Flavien Michel Melki was born in 1858 in the village of Baz in what is now southeastern Turkey, in the Hakkari region that was home to one of the oldest concentrated Chaldean Christian populations in the world. He entered religious life, was ordained a priest, and eventually was consecrated bishop — serving as the Chaldean Catholic bishop of a diocese in the region when the Sayfo began.
In 1915, as Ottoman and Kurdish forces moved against the Christian populations of the Hakkari and surrounding regions, Bishop Melki refused to abandon his flock. He was captured and offered his freedom in exchange for apostasy. He refused. He was killed in 1915 — one of thousands of Chaldean Catholics who died in the Sayfo — and became, in the 20th century, the first Chaldean Catholic martyr to be formally beatified by the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis approved his beatification in 2015 — 100 years after his martyrdom. His feast day is October 3. He is the patron of all Chaldean Catholics who have been forced from their homeland by violence, and his face looks down from the walls of Chaldean parishes from Baghdad to Detroit to Sydney, a reminder that the ancient faith has always been worth dying for.
Other Martyrs of the Sayfo
Blessed Flavien Melki was not the only Chaldean Catholic martyr of the Sayfo. The massacre of 1915–1918 produced countless martyrs whose names have not yet been formally examined by the Church but who are remembered in family memory, in community liturgy, and in the oral traditions of the Chaldean diaspora. The Chaldean Catholic Church has formally requested that the Vatican open cause processes for other victims of the Sayfo, and the larger canonization process for the martyrs of this period remains an important pastoral priority for the church.
Among those whose causes have been discussed are Blessed Petros Mouche and Blessed Toma Saleh, Chaldean Catholic priests killed in 1918 whose beatification causes have been introduced. Their courage — refusing to apostatize even when apostasy was the price of survival — mirrors that of Simeon Bar Sabba’e sixteen centuries earlier. The Chaldean tradition of martyrdom has never been merely historical.
Modern Martyrs of Iraq: Faith Under Fire in the 21st Century
The martyrdom of the Chaldean Church did not end with the Sayfo. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath unleashed a catastrophic wave of targeted violence against Iraq’s ancient Christian communities — bombings of churches, assassinations of priests, kidnappings of bishops, and systematic intimidation that caused a massive exodus of Christians from the country that had been their home for two thousand years. Between 2003 and 2014, the Christian population of Iraq fell from approximately 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. Then came ISIS, and the genocidal campaign of 2014–2017 that drove the remaining Christians of the Nineveh Plain — the heartland of Chaldean Christianity — from their ancestral villages.
Father Raghid Ganni and Three Deacons (2007)
On June 3, 2007, Father Raghid Ganni, a Chaldean Catholic priest serving in Mosul, was abducted and shot by al-Qaeda militants along with three of his deacons: Basman Yousef Daud, Wahid Hanna Isho, and Gassan Isam Bidawed. Father Ganni had been warned to leave Mosul or be killed. He refused to abandon his parish. He was 35 years old. His death — and the deaths of his deacons — sent a tremor of grief through the Chaldean diaspora worldwide and galvanized the Church’s awareness that the ancient homeland of Chaldean Christianity was at risk of losing its Christian population entirely.
Father Ganni’s cause for beatification has been opened. He is already venerated informally throughout the Chaldean Catholic world as a martyr whose death in 2007 stands in the same lineage as the martyrs of Shapur and the Sayfo.
Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho (2008)
Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped on February 29, 2008, following a Stations of the Cross service at his cathedral. Three of his bodyguards were killed in the abduction. The archbishop, who had diabetes and heart disease, was found dead on March 13, 2008, having been held for two weeks. He was 65 years old.
Archbishop Rahho had refused to leave Mosul despite repeated warnings and the murders of priests in the region. He had said publicly: “I am not afraid of death. Death is not the end for a believer. It is the beginning.” His death shocked the Catholic world and prompted direct appeals from Pope Benedict XVI. His cause for beatification has been formally introduced, and the Church of Iraq regards him as a martyr in the fullest sense of the word.
The Martyrs of Our Lady of Salvation Church (2010)
On October 31, 2010 — All Hallows’ Eve — al-Qaeda militants attacked the Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic cathedral in Baghdad during Sunday evening Mass. They took the congregation hostage and, when security forces arrived, began executing hostages. By the time it ended, 58 people were dead: 44 parishioners, two priests, and 14 security forces. Dozens more were wounded. It was the deadliest attack on Christians in Iraq’s history.
The two priests who died — Father Wasim Sabeeh and Father Thaer Saad Abdal — are venerated throughout Iraq’s Christian community as martyrs. The dozens of lay faithful who died because they refused to leave the house of God are regarded in the same light. Their names are read aloud in Chaldean parishes around the world on the anniversary of their deaths.
The Nineveh Plain Displacement (2014)
In August 2014, ISIS forces overran the Nineveh Plain — the ancient heartland of Assyrian and Chaldean Christianity, home to towns like Karamles, Bartella, Bakhdida (Qaraqosh), and Telskof that had been Christian for nearly two thousand years. Within days, 120,000 to 200,000 Christians were driven from their homes, many with only hours’ notice, forced to flee with nothing. Churches were desecrated; crosses were torn down and replaced with black flags; ancient Christian manuscripts and icons were destroyed.
Many of those who fled became martyrs of a different kind — not through death but through the sacrifice of everything they had ever known, offered for the faith they refused to renounce even in flight. Pope Francis, visiting the Nineveh Plain in March 2021, described the Christian communities of Iraq as “witnesses to an indestructible faith.” He stood in the ruins of a bombed church in Mosul and prayed. The stones of those ruins are as much a Chaldean Catholic relic as any medieval martyr’s tomb.
Prayer and Devotional Life in the Chaldean Catholic Tradition
The Chaldean Catholic tradition maintains a rich and distinctive devotional life, rooted in the East Syriac heritage and enriched by its communion with the universal Catholic Church. Several features are particularly distinctive.
The Liturgy of the Hours
The Chaldean Divine Office — the daily cycle of prayer — is one of the oldest structured systems of liturgical prayer in Christianity. The East Syriac tradition structures the Office around seven daily prayer times, rooted in the ancient Jewish and earliest Christian practice. The prayers are sung in Classical Syriac to melodies that in some cases go back fifteen centuries or more. The sound of the Chaldean Office — ancient, haunting, and unmistakably Middle Eastern in its melodic contour — is one of the most distinctive sounds in all of Eastern Christianity.
The Feast of the Apostles Addai and Mari
The feast of Saints Addai and Mari on August 5 is one of the central celebrations of the Chaldean liturgical year. It is observed with particular solemnity in parishes throughout Iraq and in the diaspora, with the full celebration of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari and special commemorative prayers for the founders of the Mesopotamian church. The feast is an annual reminder that the Chaldean Church is not merely old but apostolic — founded by those who walked with the disciples of Jesus himself.
The Fast of Nineveh (Bautha d’Ninwaye)
One of the most distinctive Chaldean devotional practices is the three-day Fast of Nineveh — observed on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the third week before Great Lent. This fast, rooted in the Book of Jonah and the repentance of the ancient city of Nineveh, is peculiar to the East Syriac tradition and observed by both Chaldean Catholics and the Assyrian Church of the East. It is one of the oldest Christian fasting traditions in the world, possibly predating the Roman and Byzantine Lenten practices. In Iraq, the Fast of Nineveh was traditionally a community event, with families fasting together and parishes holding special services each of the three days.
Marian Devotion
The Chaldean tradition maintains a deep veneration of the Theotokos — the Mother of God — under her Syriac title Yoldath Alaha (God-bearer). The use of this title in the East Syriac tradition predates the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and reflects the oldest stratum of Marian theology in the Christian world. Many Chaldean parishes are named for Mary under various titles, and the Marian feasts of the liturgical calendar are celebrated with special solemnity. The intercession of the Virgin is sought in times of danger, displacement, and suffering — exactly the conditions that have defined the Chaldean experience for the past century.
Veneration of Martyrs
More than perhaps any other Christian community, the Chaldean Catholics live in continuous proximity to their martyrs. The martyr shrines and tombs of the early Persian martyrs have been venerated for sixteen centuries. The graves of modern martyrs — some barely a decade old — are visited by families who knew the martyrs personally. The distinction between “ancient” and “modern” martyrdom is not primarily historical for the Chaldean Church. It is devotional and pastoral. The martyr is not a figure from a distant past but a companion in an ongoing struggle.
Chaldean Catholic Prayer Cards
The Eastern Church carries handcrafted prayer cards honoring saints from the Chaldean Catholic and broader East Syriac tradition — each one made by hand and prayed over throughout the creation process in Austin, Texas. If you are Chaldean Catholic, or drawn to this ancient tradition, these cards are made for you.
Browse our complete collection of Chaldean Catholic prayer cards and Eastern Catholic prayer cards, each $3, with bulk discounts for parishes. Every card is printed, cut, and finished by hand, and prayed over throughout the entire creation process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Explore the Eastern Christian World
The Chaldean Catholic Church is one of many ancient Eastern Christian traditions. Discover their histories, saints, and living faith.
History of the Church of the East
The complete history of the apostolic church from which the Chaldean Catholic tradition emerged — from Mesopotamia to China.
Read the history →Who Are the Syriac Catholic Saints?
The saints of the closely related Syriac Catholic tradition — another ancient Aramaic-speaking Eastern Christian community in full communion with Rome.
Read the guide →Bautha: The Chaldean Fast of Nineveh
The ancient three-day fast unique to the East Syriac tradition — one of the oldest Christian fasting practices in the world.
Read the guide →Chaldean Catholic Prayer Books for Beginners
Curated resources for those entering or deepening their connection to the East Syriac liturgical and devotional tradition.
Read the guide →Who Are the Melkite Catholic Saints?
The saints of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church — the Byzantine Catholics of Antioch whose tradition shares roots with the earliest Chaldean missions.
Read the guide →Exploring Eastern Catholic Churches
A guide to the full family of Eastern Catholic churches — their rites, histories, languages, and place in the universal Church.
Read the guide →A Faith Worth Every Sacrifice
The story of the Chaldean Catholic saints reminds us that holiness often blooms in the hardest soil. From the apostolic missions of Addai and Mari to the martyrs of the Sayfo to the priests killed in Mosul in the 21st century, the Chaldean saints proclaim the same truth across twenty centuries: that Christ is worth every sacrifice. The ancient faith of the land between the rivers has not been extinguished by exile. It burns wherever Chaldean Catholics gather to celebrate the Anaphora that the apostles of Mesopotamia first composed — in the same language that Jesus spoke, in the same faith that Abraham’s descendants carried to the ends of the earth.
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