Daphne

The Malankara Orthodox-Jacobite church dispute or the Schism of 1912 was the split in the Malankara Syrian Church that led to an ongoing series of church disputes in Kerala, India. The dispute, also known as the Second Community Case or the Second Vaṭṭippaṇa Case (Malayalam: രണ്ടാം സമുദായക്കേസ്, രണ്ടാം വട്ടിപ്പണക്കേസ്), has been intertwined with continuous litigations and has resulted in the formation of two rival church bodies, namely the autocephalous Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church and the Malankara Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church, an autonomous church under the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate of Antioch.^[1] Although the Indian supreme court judgement of 1995 made a terminal legal conclusion of the dispute, the disagreements related to the administration of the parish church property continues to cause occasional law and order problems and significant obstruction to a permanent solution of the dispute.^[2] The dispute in three of these parishes was moved to the court and its final verdict was made by the Supreme Court in 2017, in favour of the Malankara Orthodox Church.^[3] But the dispute remains unresolved, and police interventions to implement the judgement continue to meet intense protest and confrontation in churches currently administered by the Jacobite Church. The continuing dispute also led to increased sectarianism among members of the once undivided community and the solidification of the schism between the two rival factions.^[4][5]

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