Chaldean monks return historic manuscripts to Iraqi archdiocese after more than 50 years
The Chaldean Antonian Order of St. Hormizd returned historic manuscripts belonging to the former Diocese of Akra to the diocese’s ecclesiastical authorities after safeguarding them for more than 50 years. The handover took place at a monastery in Ankawa, Iraq, with Archbishop Najeeb Michaeel of Mosul and Akra, Abbot Samer Soreshow, and monks in attendance. The manuscripts were entrusted to the order in the 1960s amid regional hardship and displacement so they could be protected until their safe return. The order described the collection as an essential part of the Chaldean Church’s historical and spiritual memory and identity.
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Chaldean Antonian monks have returned 93 historic manuscripts from the former Diocese of Akra to the Chaldean Catholic Archeparchy of Mosul and Akra after safeguarding them for more than 50 years. The handover followed years of identification, restoration, and cataloging; three other manuscripts have been located in a digitized archive, while one remains missing.
The collection was formally transferred at the Monastery of the Servant of God and Martyr Gabriel Danbo in Ankawa, a predominantly Christian district of Erbil. Those present included Archbishop Najeeb Michaeel of Mosul and Akra, Abbot Samer Soreshow of the Chaldean Antonian Order of St. Hormizd, and several monks.
The manuscripts were placed in the order’s care in the 1960s, amid unrest and displacement in the region. Abdul-Ahad Rabban, an order member who later became bishop of Akra, arranged their safekeeping to protect the church’s heritage until the collection could be returned.
Over the decades, the manuscripts were moved from the Monastery of Our Lady of the Seeds in Alqosh to St. George Monastery in Mosul, then to St. Anthony Monastery in Baghdad, and eventually to the order’s headquarters in Ankawa in 2021. The headquarters houses the Scriptorium Syriacum, a cultural center focused on preserving Syriac manuscripts.
Repeated moves led to the Akra manuscripts becoming mixed with other collections held by the order. The monks used earlier catalogs—including work by Bishop Addai Scher, Dominican orientalist Jacques-Marie Vosté, and Fathers Yousif Habbi, Boutros Haddad, and Jacques Isaac—to help identify and separate the volumes.
Beginning in 2021, the Scriptorium Syriacum team cleaned the manuscripts, gathered scattered pages, photographed and numbered them, reassembled complete volumes, and prepared catalogs. Father Yousif Ajim directed the work, assisted by staff members trained in Syriac at Salahaddin University in Erbil.
The collection originally contained 97 manuscripts. Of the four not handed over, three were identified in the Chaldean Patriarchate’s digitized archives, accessible through the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library; the fourth remains unaccounted for.
Akra was once an independent Chaldean Catholic diocese. After unrest and conflict in the 1960s displaced many Christians and reduced the local Church’s presence, the diocese was merged with the Archdiocese of Mosul in 2018 to form the Chaldean Catholic Archeparchy of Mosul and Akra, now headed by Michaeel.
Soreshow said the order and archdiocese are committed to keeping the manuscripts preserved and accessible to researchers, scholars, and clergy. He described the transfer as continuing the Church’s work of safeguarding its historical memory and heritage for future generations.
Ecclesial stewardship of manuscripts sustains communal memory
Ecclesial stewardship of manuscripts sustains communal memory because it preserves tangible witnesses through which the Church can remember, study, and hand on its life across generations. But manuscripts are not the whole of Tradition: Christian Tradition is a living transmission of faith, rooted in the apostolic witness and expressed in the Church’s life. The care of manuscripts serves that living memory when preservation is joined to responsible study, access, and truthful interpretation.
The Church’s memory is more than recollection of past events. John Paul II describes Tradition as the living memory of the risen Christ, handed on through the apostles and their successors, and embodied also in the historical and cultural heritage of particular Churches. It is therefore a continuity that reaches from the past into the present, rather than a dead store of old forms.
Manuscripts can give that continuity a material form. They may preserve evidence of worship, teaching, community life, and the circumstances in which local Churches lived their faith. Their importance is not simply that they are old or rare: they can help present generations understand how the Church’s faith was received and lived in particular places and times. John Paul II accordingly says that ecclesiastical archives preserve not only traces of human events, but also invite reflection on divine Providence in history; their documents can become “memory of evangelization” and a genuine pastoral instrument.
This does not make every manuscript a direct statement of doctrine, nor does it mean that a historical document by itself settles a theological or ecclesial question. Its testimony needs to be read carefully in context. But neglecting such records can impoverish the community’s ability to know its own past and to understand the path by which its faith has been transmitted.
The Church’s responsibility toward manuscripts involves preservation, but it does not end there. John Paul II praised the work of archivists and librarians not only for safeguarding books and records and handing them on, but also for making them available to scholars and supporting precise research and publication. Stewardship therefore joins physical care to knowledge: documents must survive, and their contents must be made responsibly available for study.
A related papal message describes this work in practical terms: cataloguing, maintenance, restoration, custody, and protection. It also presents cultural goods as belonging to the faithful community and to humanity more broadly, calling for their preservation with the attention they deserve. This suggests that custody is a form of service, not simply control over an object. The custodian’s task is to protect what has been entrusted, while enabling the community and qualified researchers to encounter its historical significance.
The return of manuscripts associated with the former Diocese of Akra by Chaldean monks illustrates this aspect of stewardship. The reported action reconnects historical records with an ecclesial community whose memory they may help illuminate. The available information does not establish the manuscripts’ contents, their precise provenance, or the legal circumstances of their custody, so those details should not be presumed. The general principle remains clear: the careful safeguarding and responsible transfer of ecclesial records can serve the continuity of communal memory.
A danger in speaking of heritage is to treat preservation as an effort to freeze the past. John Paul II explicitly rejects that idea: Tradition is not “an unchanging repetition of formulas,” but a living heritage that preserves its core while being understood and enriched in new historical circumstances. Manuscripts help the Church remember, but they do not replace the Church’s present task of interpreting and living the faith.
Pope Benedict XVI likewise warns that historical oblivion can weaken a society’s sense of identity, and he points to the Church’s historical experience as a resource for discerning its choices. He presents historical research as a careful investigation of the processes of receiving and handing on through which the Church’s life has taken shape. The value of archival work, then, is not merely antiquarian. It can help communities recognize continuity, learn from experience, and avoid a shallow picture of their own past.
Ecclesial manuscript stewardship has both an inward and an outward purpose. It serves the Church by supporting its historical self-understanding, and it can serve wider society by preserving records that form part of humanity’s cultural inheritance. John Paul II stressed that the Church’s historical record should be made known without fear, including its “lights and shadows.” Responsible stewardship does not require idealizing the past; honest memory can acknowledge complexity while remaining grateful for the ways the Church’s mission has continued amid changing circumstances.
Thus the claim is sound, with an important qualification: manuscripts sustain communal memory when they are cared for as witnesses within a living tradition, not treated as relics detached from the people and faith they record. Preservation, access, scholarship, and truthful interpretation belong together. Through these practices, a community receives its inheritance, understands it more deeply, and hands it on without confusing living Tradition with the mere survival of old documents.