Abraham Shimonaya

Mar Abraham Shimonaya (* around 1862; † summer 1915 ) was a bishop of the autocephalous East Syrian "Church of the East" and the Chaldean Catholic Church .

Origin and first work

Mar Abraham Shimonaya ( alias d'Mar Shimun) was like his older brother Nimrod Shimonaya a nephew of the Catholicos patriarch Mar Abraham Shimun XIX. (approx. 1820–1861) and a cousin of the Catholicos patriarch Mar Rowil (Ruben) Shimun XX. (1861-1903). As his successor was chosen, he was ordained bishop before or in 1884. Around 1890, relations between relatives obviously deteriorated, not least because of different views on political and ecclesiastical alliance policy. The group around Nimrod Shimonaya warned against anti-Ottoman undertakings in the interests of and on the side of Russia and advocated rapprochement with the Catholics instead of Russian Orthodoxy . In 1889, Nimrod and several princes of the Assyrian tribes of the Hakkari, together with Mar Abraham, submitted to the Pope in Rome a written proposal for a union based on the model of the Chaldean Catholic Church. Mar Abraham and members of his family were to become head of the planned new church united with Rome, so the hereditary principle of filling the highest church offices, unlike in the Chaldean Catholic Church, was to be preserved. In 1893 Patriarch Shimun XX. Mar Abraham headed his diocese. From 1895 Abraham was no longer considered the future patriarch, but the son of Rubens half-brother Eshai, Benyamin (* 1887). This took over after Shimuns XX. Death in 1903 at the age of fifteen as Shimun XXI. the office of Catholicos Patriarch. He pursued pro-Russian and anti-Ottoman policies and was a victim himself in 1918.

Catholic life phase

In March 1903, Mar Abraham and his brother Nimrod, other members of the patriarchal family and Mar Isho'yahb Yawallaha of Barwar in Mosul publicly converted to Catholicism and was appointed Metropolitan and Bishop of Hakkâri for the Chaldean Catholic Church. The state-Ottoman recognition was a long time coming. In 1907, Mar Abraham served as a kind of auxiliary bishop of Mar Yaku (Yaˁqob, ​​Jacques) Manna, the Chaldean Catholic patriarchal vicar and bishop in Van . In later years he returned to his clan in Dez, where the patriarchal family was staying, and was ordered by Shimun's XXI. isolated. Assyrian-Christian warriors killed Abraham's brother Nimrod on May 5, 1915 in the patriarchal village of Qudschanis , who rejected the impending Assyrian declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire . During the general escape from the Kurdish- Turkish troops in the summer of 1915, Catholic sympathizers took Mar Abraham, who had meanwhile become seriously ill, with them and then left him in Chamba d'Malik at their own request. The lonely deceased there was buried in August 1915 by Catholics from Ashita in Unter-Tiari.

With the deaths of Nimrod and Abraham, the brief history of modern Catholicism in Hakkari ended; the end of Christianity soon followed in this area. The biography of the two brothers makes it clear that the Christian Assyrians were not only victims of their modern history, but also their co-creators.

literature

• James Farwell Coakley: The Church of the East and the Church of England. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992. 95, 130, 131f. 175, 181f.1 97, 259f. 262,395 - ISBN 0-19-826744-4 .
• Joseph Alichoran: Quand le Hakkari penchait pour le catholicisme. In: Proche-Orient Chrétien 41, 1 (1991) 34-55.
• David Wilmshurst: The Ecclesiastical Organization of the Church of the East, 1318-1913 (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 582 / Subs. 104). Peeters, Leuven 2000, 292.