On July 20, 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU) published its Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. These Guidelines open the way for competent authorities in the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East to establish procedures and provide appropriate means for the Chaldean and Assyrian faithful to receive the Eucharist of either Church under specific circumstances in cases of pastoral necessity. The principal issue for the Catholic Church in approving the decree related to the question of the validity of the Eucharist when celebrated with the Anaphora (or Eucharistic Prayer) of Addai and Mari which lacks a literal recitation of the Institution Narrative, Jesus’ words: “This is my Body, This is my Blood.” After careful study, the validity of this Anaphora was recognized by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) on January 17th 2001. Subsequently approved by Pope John Paul II, this has been recognized as an audacious decision: Robert Taft, SJ, an Archimandrite in the Ukrainian Catholic Church and a consultant for the Vatican Congregation for the Oriental Churches, has called the publication of the Guidelines “the most remarkable Catholic magisterial document since Vatican II.”
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The most interesting, and potentially most dramatic, ecumenical news this week was the proposal of Patriarch Raphael I (Louis Sako) of Bablyon, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, who proposed a plan for a united Church of the East that would entail his own resignation.

The schism between the Church of the East and the rest of the orthodox Christian world is the oldest surviving division in the Church, its origins dating back to the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD. It was the Christian Church in the Persian Empire, and has often (wrongly) been called Nestorian. Acknowledging that there is no brief way to do justice to the history of communion and schism between the Church of the East and the Catholic/Orthodox Church(es) in the last 1,600 years, suffice it to say that what remains is a very small community based in Baghdad but effectively existing as a diaspora community, with its leaders often in Exile.

There are three current churches succeeding from that original Church of the East, which was founded, according to tradition, by the apostle Thomas and by Mar Addai (Jude/Thaddeus, maybe, or a disciple of Thomas) and Mari, a disciple of Addai.
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