The Oath

On 24 January 1653, before the great open granite cross at Our Lady's Church in Mattanchery, the Saint Thomas Christians of Malabar took a solemn oath. They rejected the authority of Archbishop Francisco Garcia and the Jesuit Padroado prelates who had governed them since the Synod of Diamper.

Tradition records that ropes were tied to the cross and held by the multitude — and that the weight of the crowd caused the cross to bend slightly. From that day, the cross — and the oath taken before it — bore the name Koonan Kurishu, the Bent Cross.

The immediate cause was the case of Mar Ahatallah, a Syriac prelate who had arrived in India in 1652 claiming jurisdiction over the Malabar church, and whose detention by the Portuguese became a focal point of long-standing grievances about liturgy, jurisdiction, and the treatment of indigenous Christians under the Padroado.

The oath at Mattanchery did not seek a break from communion with the wider church — it was a refusal of a particular jurisdiction. The events that followed, including the Carmelite mission of Joseph Sebastiani from 1657 onwards, reconciled most of the community to Rome under a different authority, while a minority became the kernel of what is today the Malankara tradition.