BLESSED ALVAREZ JULIUS (SEPT. 23RD)

 

Archbishop Alvarez Julius I

Edited by Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Blessed Alvarez Julius - Metropolitan and Archbishop, Apostolic Prefect of the Independent Catholic Orthodox Church of Ceylon, Goa, and India. He initiated one of the first modern Eastern missions in the world to establish Western Rite Orthodox Churches in the West. Blessed Alvarez Julius was born on the 29th of April, 1836. He went to his eternal reward on the 23rd of September, 1923.

Alvares Julius was consecrated to be a Latin Rite Orthodox Bishop on the 28th of July, 1889, by the Orthodox Bishops of Kottayam - Joseph Mar Dionysius, Geevarghese Mar Gregorios of Parumala, Mar Paulose Ivanios of Kandanadu and Mar Athanasios (Kadavil). He was elevated to Metropolitan Archbishop of Ceylon, Goa and India, excluding Malabar, on the following day. He took the episcopal name of Mar Julius I. 

Later, the controversial figures of Joseph René Vilatte and Vernon Ulrich Herford were both ordained and sent to the West as missionary bishops by Bp. Alvarez Julius and by his succeeding bishop, Mar Basilius (Luis Mariane Soares, who took the diocese into union with the Assyrian Church), in 1892 and 1902 respectively. These ordinations were hotly contested by Anglicans, who labeled them as “Episcopi Vagante,” and resulted in conciliar pressure by the British government to have the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and the Assyrian Church of the East disavow any connection to these Western Rite Missions, thus delaying the vision of the establishment of an Orthodox Church in the Western Rite by many decades. Many of the episcopal descendants of the Alvarez lineage later joined canonical Byzantine jurisdictions as priests, and provided much of the initial impetus for the formation of the Western Rite in the Eastern Orthodox Church in France and the United States. Only recently with the reception of several South American jurisdictions by the Syriac and Coptic Orthodox Churches, has a canonical pathway appeared for orphaned Western Rite churches to be regularized and received within the Oriental Orthodox Communion from these episcopal lineages. 

Mar Alvarez Julius accomplished something truly unique during his episcopal reign, founding Latin Rite communities in India, Goa and Sri Lanka, which practiced a Tridentine liturgy in a culturally Eastern context, taking back liturgical territories that Eastern Churches has previously reckoned lost, due to aggressive Spanish and Portuguese colonization. In many ways, this vision is now reflected in our East and Southeast Asian communities, which are liturgically Western, culturally Eastern, and have now been restored to the fullness of catholicity in the undivided Christian inheritance of Holy Orthodoxy. 

While the Ancient Church of the West has no connection with Mar Alvarez Julius and the jurisdictions that descend from him, we do remember and commemorate his involvement in helping establish the Western Rite in Eastern Churches, and celebrate the fruition of this vision in our midst, which fully realizes the potential of such a wonderful work of restoration and liturgical preservation! 

COLLECT

ALMIGHTY GOD, we pray for the Western Rite of the Holy Orthodox and Catholic Church. Fill it with Thy truth, in all truth with all peace. Where we are corrupt, purify us; where we are in error, direct us; where we are amiss, set us aright. Where we help the whole Orthodox Church, strengthen us; where we are in want and need, provide for us; where we are not accepted, reinforce us; for the sake of Jesus Christ Thy Son Our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the Unity of the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen!

A Rare Contemporary Print of Mar Alvarez Julius (Approx. 1880)

(Edited from information in Abba Seraphim’s book, “Flesh of Our Brethren” and the Mar Alvarez Julius Western Rite Research Project’s two volume set, “The Western Rites in the Eastern Churches.”)