Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Diamper

The acts open with the summons issued by Aleixo de Menezes and then record nine sittings, called actions: the profession of faith sworn by all present, the decrees on doctrine and on the Syriac books, and the decrees on the sacraments, the clergy and the customs of the people. They close with an account of the signing.

The text is the record made by the side that called the synod. Its title page says that it was printed at Coimbra in 1606, and the translator’s preface says that it stood at the end of the history of Menezes’s visitation written by the Augustinian friar António de Gouvea at the command of his order. What the Thomas Christians thought of the proceedings appears in it only as the synod describes it, for example in the decree annulling the oaths they had sworn against obedience to Rome.

The translator, Michael Geddes, was an Anglican clergyman. He says in his preface that he published the acts to show Protestants the methods of the Roman prelates and to argue that the church of Malabar had never held the pope’s supremacy, and he adds notes of his own in that sense. The notes are his; the decrees are cited here for what they order.