Patriarchate of Antioch

The 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.