A little over a century ago, in his 1920 encyclical Principi Apostolorum Petro, Pope Benedict XV declared the 4th century poet, theologian, and writer, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the Deacon of Edessa, to be a Doctor of the Church, a high and rare honor of the universal church. The 24th person so recognized since the Middle Ages, Saint Ephrem, was the first who did not come from the Western (Latin) Church or Eastern (Greek) Church. He was a speaker of Syriac and wrote exclusively in that language. In his encyclical, the pope mentioned the many clerics and bishops who encouraged him to take this step, especially the patriarchs of the Maronite, Chaldean, and Syriac Catholic churches, all spiritual descendants of Saint Ephrem.
Ephrem and many others are the subject of a recent book, The Syriac World, by French researchers Francoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debie, both scholars of Syriac, as is Jeffrey Haines, who translated the book from French into English. It is an essential book, superbly researched and illustrated, introducing Western audiences to the ancient riches of the Syriac Christian heritage—a heritage that one great scholar has called “the third lung” of Christendom, after Greek and Latin.
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