Church Structure & Jurisdictions
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ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsApostolic SuccessionThe unbroken handing on of the apostolic ministry by the laying on of hands, bishop from bishop, from the Apostles to the present. Orthodoxy does not treat it as a mechanical pedigree: succession in the office is inseparable from succession in the faith, and a bishop who abandons the apostolic teaching is not held together with the Church by the validity of his consecration. So the succession that matters is of ordination and confession at once, which is why the Church has deposed bishops whose orders nobody doubted.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsEcumenical Patriarchate of ConstantinopleThe Church of Constantinople, the New Rome, whose archbishop has held the first place of honour among the Orthodox since Rome fell away, following the canons of the Second and Fourth Councils that gave the capital a place second only to Old Rome. From the Phanar in Istanbul the Patriarch leads a small flock in Turkey and a wide one abroad, with Mount Athos, Crete, the Dodecanese and many dioceses of the diaspora. What that first place includes is not agreed. Constantinople holds that it may convene the Churches, receive appeals from clergy of other Churches, and grant autocephaly by its own act. Moscow and others answer that primacy of honour gives no jurisdiction outside its territory, and that autocephaly needs the consent of all. The disagreement became a break in 2018, when Constantinople moved to grant autocephaly in Ukraine and Moscow ended communion with it. Patriarch Bartholomew has led it since 1991.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsPrimacy and the Papal ClaimsOrthodoxy holds a primacy of honour: the first see presides, convenes, and is appealed to, and it does not govern the other churches. Every bishop is fully a bishop and the Church is whole in each local eucharistic assembly, so authority is conciliar, and the Ecumenical Councils were received by the whole Church rather than ratified by one bishop. What Orthodoxy does not accept is universal immediate jurisdiction and personal infallibility, defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The Fathers read the rock of Matthew 16:18 as Peter's confession, an Ecumenical Council condemned a pope for heresy, and the canons that give Rome its rank give it for the honour of the city, which is an argument about order and not about office.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsThe PentarchyThe ordering of the ancient Church around five sees: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, in that order of honour. It is not a constitution handed down from the Apostles but a settlement arrived at by councils, and the canons that fix it say so plainly: Constantinople was given its place because it is the city of the emperor and the senate, not because an Apostle founded it. Honour in this scheme is precedence, not jurisdiction. No see in it governs another, and the order was never a ladder of authority, which is the whole of the Orthodox case against the later Roman reading of it. Since 1054 the East has continued with four.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsAutocephaly & Church OrganizationThe standing of a Church that is its own head: it elects its own primate and bishops through its own synod and answers to no other Church, while holding the one faith and the one Eucharist with all the rest. The ancient canon behind it tells the bishops of each nation to know who is first among them and to do nothing weighty without him, and he nothing without them. The Churches are listed in the diptychs, in an order of honour that they do not entirely agree on: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem first, then Moscow, and after it, in the order Constantinople keeps, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Below autocephaly stands autonomy, as at Sinai, Finland and Japan. How a Church becomes autocephalous is not agreed: Constantinople holds that it may grant it, others that the consent of all is needed, which is why the Churches of America, Ukraine and North Macedonia are counted differently by different Churches.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsPatriarchate of JerusalemOne of the four ancient patriarchates, guardian of the Holy Places. The Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre (Greek monks) has maintained custody of the holiest Christian sites, among them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity and the Tomb of the Theotokos, for centuries. The smallest patriarchate by population but immense in spiritual significance.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsRussian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate)The Church of Moscow and all Rus, by far the largest of the Orthodox Churches. It chose its own metropolitan in 1448, after Constantinople accepted union with Rome at Florence, and became a patriarchate in 1589; Peter the Great put it under a Synod in 1721, and the council of 1917 restored the patriarchate in the same weeks the Bolsheviks took power. Under Soviet rule tens of thousands of its clergy, monks and nuns were shot or died in the camps, and it has glorified more than a thousand of them by name as New Martyrs and Confessors. The Church Outside Russia, formed by emigré bishops, was reconciled with it in 2007. Patriarch Kirill has led it since 2009. In 2018 it broke communion with Constantinople over Ukraine. Its heart is still the Lavra of St Sergius at Sergiev Posad, and its saints, from Seraphim of Sarov to Matrona of Moscow, are loved across the whole Orthodox world.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsThe DiptychsThe lists of names commemorated aloud at the Liturgy: the primates of the autocephalous churches, each in his place, read by the bishop or the priest at the anaphora. They are the plainest instrument the Orthodox Church has for saying who is in communion with whom, because a name is either said or it is not, and everyone present hears which. A church that breaks communion strikes a name from them, and restoring communion means putting it back. The order of the lists is the order of honour, and the churches do not all keep identical lists, which is one of the ways a dispute about rank shows itself without anyone having to announce it.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsThe Ukrainian QuestionIn 1686 the metropolitanate of Kiev passed under Moscow by a letter of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the two churches have never agreed on what that letter did. In 2018 the Ecumenical Patriarchate judged it a temporary arrangement, revoked it, lifted the anathemas on two bodies not in communion, and in January 2019 granted a tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Moscow broke communion with Constantinople, and afterwards with the primates of Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus as each recognised the new church. Most of the other local churches have not recognised it, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow remained the largest body in the country and declared its own independence from Moscow in 2022 under the conditions of the war. This site states the positions and does not adjudicate between them, because no pan-Orthodox council has.Church Structure & JurisdictionsBulgarian Orthodox ChurchBulgaria was Christianized in 864 under Khan Boris I. The Bulgarian Church became a center of Slavonic literacy: the First Bulgarian Empire produced the Cyrillic alphabet, and the First and Second trained clergy for all Slavic lands and developed rich literary traditions. Patriarchate twice in the medieval period and permanently since 1953. Survived Ottoman and Communist persecution.Church Structure & JurisdictionsChurch of CyprusOne of the oldest autocephalous churches (autocephaly since the Council of Ephesus, 431). Founded by the Apostles Paul and Barnabas. The Archbishop of Cyprus has the unique privilege of signing in red ink and wearing a purple mantle: imperial prerogatives granted by Emperor Zeno. Currently Archbishop Georgios.Church Structure & JurisdictionsChurch of GreeceThe Church of the Greek state, whose autocephaly was declared by the state in 1833 and granted by Constantinople in 1850. It is governed by a Holy Synod under the Archbishop of Athens, Ieronymos II since 2008. Its map is not simple: Crete and the Dodecanese belong to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as Mount Athos does, and the dioceses of the New Lands, won in the Balkan wars, belong to Constantinople but are administered by the Church of Greece under an arrangement of 1928. Most Greeks are baptised into it, the Constitution names Orthodoxy the prevailing religion, and its feasts are the calendar of the nation. It gave the twentieth century St Nektarios of Aegina and the elders Paisios and Porphyrios, and it keeps the new calendar for its fixed feasts, adopted in 1924.Church Structure & JurisdictionsGeorgian Orthodox ChurchOne of the oldest Christian nations: Georgia was Christianized by St. Nino in the 4th century. Autocephalous since the 5th century (autocephaly granted by Antioch c. 486, recognized by Constantinople in 1990). Rich literary and artistic tradition. The Georgian alphabet was most probably created to translate Scripture. Survived Persian, Arab, Mongol, and Soviet domination. Patriarchate since the 11th century.Church Structure & JurisdictionsPatriarchate of AlexandriaOne of the four ancient patriarchates, traditionally founded by the Evangelist Mark. Historically the center of Christological theology (Athanasius, Cyril). After the Arab conquest (642), the Greek-speaking Orthodox community shrank dramatically. Today the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria has jurisdiction over all of Africa and has a growing missionary presence.Church Structure & JurisdictionsPatriarchate of AntiochThe Church of the city where the disciples were first called Christians, whose first bishop, by tradition, was St Peter, and whose bishops include St Ignatius and St Meletius, who baptised St John Chrysostom. Its patriarchs have sat in Damascus since the fourteenth century, and its faithful are mostly Arabic-speaking Christians of Syria and Lebanon, with a large diaspora. In 1724 part of it entered communion with Rome as the Melkite Church, so that two patriarchs of Antioch have claimed the see since. Its Archdiocese of North America, gathered in the first place by St Raphael of Brooklyn, received in 1987 a whole body of American evangelical Christians who had found their way to Orthodoxy on their own. Patriarch John X has led it since 2012, through the war in Syria and the kidnapping of its Metropolitan of Aleppo, Paul, in 2013.Church Structure & JurisdictionsRomanian Orthodox ChurchThe second largest of the Orthodox Churches, with some sixteen million faithful. It serves in Romanian, a language descended from Latin, in the Byzantine rite, so that the Liturgy of Constantinople is sung there in the speech of Rome. Its autocephaly was recognised by Constantinople in 1885 and it became a patriarchate in 1925. Its monastic life was renewed in the eighteenth century by St Paisius Velichkovsky at Neamt, whose disciples carried the Jesus Prayer from there to Russia, and its monasteries of Bucovina are painted inside and out, their walls a Bible in colour. Under communism its priests and monks filled the prisons, and one of them, St Dumitru Staniloae, spent five years in them; he translated the Philokalia into Romanian in twelve volumes and wrote a dogmatic theology that is read across the Orthodox world. The relics of St Parascheva at Iasi draw one of the largest pilgrimages in Europe each October.Church Structure & JurisdictionsSerbian Orthodox ChurchThe Church St Sava made self-governing in 1219, when he was consecrated its first archbishop at Nicaea with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople in exile there. It became a patriarchate at Peć in 1346, lost it to the Ottomans in 1766 and regained it at Belgrade in 1920. The medieval monasteries of Kosovo, Peć, Dečani and Gračanica, keep some of the finest frescoes of the Orthodox world. In the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Serbs, priests and bishops among them, were killed in the Independent State of Croatia, and under communism the Church was watched and constrained. Its twentieth century also gave the whole Church St Justin Popovic and St Nikolaj Velimirovic. In 2022 it granted autocephaly to the Church of North Macedonia, which it had long refused to recognise. Patriarch Porfirije has led it since 2021.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Autonomous Church of SinaiThe smallest autonomous church in the Orthodox world: one monastery, its dependencies, and an archbishop who is also its abbot, elected by the brotherhood and consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. St Catherine’s at the foot of the mountain has never been destroyed or abandoned since Justinian built its walls in the sixth century, which makes it the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery on earth, and its independence is a recognition of that continuity rather than a modern grant.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Japanese Orthodox ChurchFounded by one man. St Nicholas Kasatkin arrived at Hakodate in 1861 as chaplain to the Russian consulate, spent eight years learning the language and the classics before he preached at all, and converted the samurai priest who had come to kill him. By his death in 1912 there were more than thirty thousand Japanese Orthodox, a cathedral in Tokyo that Tokyo still calls Nikorai-do, and the services and the Scriptures in Japanese. During the Russo-Japanese war he told his flock to pray for the victory of their own country and stayed to minister to Russian prisoners. Autonomous under Moscow since 1970.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Orthodox Church of AlbaniaAutocephaly was declared in 1922 and recognised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1937. In 1967 Albania declared itself the first officially atheist state in the world and closed or destroyed every church and mosque in the country; clergy were imprisoned or shot and public worship of any kind was a criminal offence for more than twenty years. When the regime fell there were reportedly twenty-two surviving Orthodox clergy in the whole country. The church was rebuilt from that point from 1991 under Archbishop Anastasios, and now has hundreds of parishes, a seminary and a full hierarchy, which is one of the clearest cases in modern Orthodox history of a local church raised from nothing.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Orthodox Church of FinlandAutonomous under the Ecumenical Patriarchate since 1923, and the one Orthodox church in the world that keeps Pascha on the Gregorian reckoning, by a decision of the Finnish state in 1923 that the church has not reversed. Its people are largely the Karelians who were evacuated when the Soviet Union took Karelia in 1940, and the monastery of New Valamo at Heinavesi is the old Valamo carried west in the evacuation, monks, bells, icons and all. It is a state-recognised church in a Lutheran country and its services are sung in Finnish.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and SlovakiaA small church with a heavy history. It traces itself to the mission of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Great Moravia in the ninth century, and in its modern form to St Gorazd of Prague, who was consecrated in 1921 and was shot by the Germans in 1942 after the cathedral crypt in Prague was found to have sheltered the men who killed Heydrich. The church was suppressed entirely for the rest of the occupation. Moscow granted it autocephaly in 1951 and the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted its own in 1998.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Polish Orthodox ChurchThe Orthodox of the lands that became interwar Poland received a tomos of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1924, which Moscow did not accept; Moscow granted its own in 1948, which is why the church keeps two dates. Its people are largely the Orthodox of the eastern borderlands and the Lemkos deported westward in 1947. The monastery on the Holy Mountain of Grabarka, covered in the crosses pilgrims carry up to it, is its best known place. It is small, around half a million faithful, and it holds a position of some delicacy between the Slavic churches.Church Structure & JurisdictionsOrthodox Church in America (OCA)The Orthodox Church in America, which grew from the mission eight monks of Valaam brought to Alaska in 1794, among them St Herman. St Innocent built it up in Alaska, St Tikhon led it as archbishop in North America before he became Patriarch of Moscow, and St Raphael of Brooklyn gathered its Arab faithful. After the Russian revolution it governed itself as the Metropolia, and in 1970 the Moscow Patriarchate granted it autocephaly, which Constantinople and several other Churches have not recognised. It worships largely in English, and its seminary of St Vladimir’s gave the Church Fr Alexander Schmemann, Fr John Meyendorff and Fr Thomas Hopko. Metropolitan Tikhon has led it since 2012.