Why Are There So Many Orthodox Jurisdictions?

Anyone who looks for an Orthodox church in an American city soon meets a puzzle. Within a few miles there may be a Greek Orthodox parish, an Antiochian parish, a parish of the Orthodox Church in America, a church of the Russian Church Outside of Russia, and Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian parishes besides. Each answers to a different bishop, often in the same city. To an outsider this looks like denominationalism.

The puzzle matters because Orthodox Christians claim to be one Church, united in faith and sacraments, keeping the ancient order in which each place has one bishop. Catholics reply that without a universal head such unity cannot hold. Protestants ask why Orthodoxy objects to denominations when it seems to have so many of its own. And since 2018, when Moscow broke communion with Constantinople over Ukraine, the question is no longer only about parish signs. This article explains how the Church is organized, how the present map came about, where the real disputes lie, and what Orthodox teaching does and does not say about them.

In brief

The Orthodox Church is a communion of self-governing ("autocephalous") churches sharing one faith and one Eucharist. That structure is old: the early canons assume regional churches led by their own first bishop, and the Council of Ephesus defended the right of Cyprus to ordain its own bishops. What is modern is the present list of churches, most of which took shape between 1850 and 1950 as empires broke into nation-states, and the overlapping dioceses of the "diaspora," which grew from immigration and the Russian Revolution. In 2009 every universally recognized Orthodox church agreed that this overlap involves canonical "anomalies" and set up Assemblies of Bishops to work toward a solution. None has come, chiefly because the churches disagree about who may grant autocephaly: Constantinople claims the right for the Ecumenical Patriarch, while Moscow holds that a mother church can release a daughter church and that Constantinople's primacy is one of honor. The same disagreement lies behind the partly recognized autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in America (1970) and the Ukrainian crisis of 2018 to 2019. These are disputes about jurisdiction, not the Creed, but they have produced real breaks in communion.

Thesis: The many Orthodox jurisdictions come from an ancient principle of local self-government applied through modern political history, and Orthodoxy's own councils admit that the present overlap falls short of its canonical ideal, so the honest answer is neither "nothing is wrong" nor "Orthodoxy is just denominations."

What the words mean

"Autocephalous" means "self-headed." Such a church elects its own primate and bishops and answers to no other church in its internal life, while remaining bound to the others by the same faith and by Eucharistic communion. Fourteen churches have this status by universal agreement: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Moscow, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) also claim it, but only some churches accept the claim.¹

"Autonomous" means partly self-governing. The document approved at the 2016 Council of Crete defines autonomy as "a canonical expression of the relative or partial independence of a particular ecclesial region from the canonical jurisdiction of the autocephalous Church to which it canonically belongs." An autonomous church's primate commemorates the primate of the mother church, and his name is not entered in the diptychs.²

The diptychs are the ordered list of primates that each primate commemorates in the Liturgy. Dropping a name announces a break. Even the order varies: Constantinople places Georgia after Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria, because its own tomos recognizing Georgia dates from 1990, while Moscow places Georgia directly after itself, because Georgia's independence is far older.³

The ancient pattern: local churches, one bishop per city

Regional self-government is not a modern invention. The Apostolic Canons, usually dated to the late fourth century, say that "the bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them and account him as their head," and add at once, "But neither let him (who is the first) do anything without the consent of all."⁴ "Nation" here meant a province or people, not a modern state, but the pattern of a first bishop bound to his synod is clear.

Nicaea (325) confirmed existing regional authority: "Let the ancient customs in Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis prevail, that the Bishop of Alexandria have jurisdiction in all these." Constantinople (381) told bishops "not to go beyond their dioceses to churches lying outside of their bounds, nor bring confusion on the churches," and ranked the capital second: "The Bishop of Constantinople, however, shall have the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is New Rome."⁵

The clearest early case of what we now call autocephaly came at Ephesus in 431. When the Bishop of Antioch ordained bishops in Cyprus, the council ruled that the Cypriot church should keep "the right of performing for themselves the ordination of their excellent Bishops," and that no bishop "shall assume control of any province which has not heretofore, from the very beginning, been under his own hand or that of his predecessors."⁶ {{very-strong: By the fifth century the Church was organized as a set of regional churches with defended boundaries, not as one centrally governed body.}}

The rule of one bishop per city also appears early. Nicaea's eighth canon, on clergy returning from the Novatianist schism, arranges matters "that there may not be two bishops in the city."⁷ Its subject is narrow, but parallel bishops were already abnormal.

Church boundaries were also meant to follow civil ones, and this caused friction. Chalcedon (451) ruled that when a city is newly founded by imperial authority, "let the order of the ecclesiastical parishes follow the political and municipal example." Its twenty-eighth canon gave Constantinople privileges equal to Rome's, ranking next after it, because it was the imperial city, with the right to ordain metropolitans of three civil dioceses and "such bishops also of the Dioceses aforesaid as are among the barbarians."⁸ Pope Leo rejected the canon, rebuking Anatolius of Constantinople for trying "to break down the most sacred constitutions of the Nicene canons."⁹ That phrase about "barbarians" would later be read as a basis for Constantinople's claim to oversee Orthodox communities beyond the historic churches. Its meaning is argued.

How the modern map was drawn

Most of today's autocephalous churches took their present form as the Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg empires fell, and their histories are messy. The Orthodox historian Matthew Namee has traced them church by church; on his reckoning ten of the fourteen reached their present institutional form between 1850 and 1945:¹⁰

• Greece: declared autocephalous by the Bavarian-led government in 1833, under heavy state control; Constantinople issued its tomos in 1850.
• Romania: declared independent by Prince Cuza in 1864; Constantinople issued its tomos in 1885.
• Bulgaria: a separate Exarchate created by the Ottoman government in 1870 and condemned by a council in Constantinople in 1872; the schism was healed in 1945.
• Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia: Constantinople granted Poland autocephaly in 1924 and Moscow did so again in 1948; Moscow granted the Czechoslovak church autocephaly in 1951 and Constantinople only in 1998.
• Georgia: an ancient church abolished by the Russian Empire in 1811, restored by Georgians in 1917, recognized by Moscow in 1943 and by Constantinople in 1990.

Namee is frank that in some cases "a domineering ruler" declared a church autocephalous "as a way to assert greater control over it."¹¹

The Bulgarian case produced the most important modern statement on ethnicity and church order. The 1872 council declared: "We censure, condemn, and declare contrary to the teachings of the Gospel and the sacred canons of the holy Fathers the doctrine of phyletism, or the difference of races and national diversity in the bosom of the Church of Christ."¹² The principle is that the Church is organized by place, not ethnicity. Critics note that the Bulgarians were reacting to Greek-speaking control and that the council was largely Greek. Both can be true: the principle is sound, and the council that stated it was not free of national interest.

Who can grant autocephaly?

This unresolved question lies behind almost every modern dispute. In a 2014 essay, Metropolitan Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), now Archbishop of America, argued that the Archbishop of Constantinople is, as Ecumenical Patriarch, "the first without equals (primus sine paribus)," with primacy that includes "the right of appeal and the right to grant or remove autocephaly."¹³ The Moscow Patriarchate's 2013 statement on primacy teaches instead that at the level of the whole Church "primacy is determined in conformity with the tradition of sacred diptychs and represents primacy in honour," that the canons behind the diptychs "do not vest the primus (such as the bishop of Rome used to be at the time of Ecumenical Councils) with any powers on the church-wide scale," and that "the content of this primacy is defined by a consensus of Local Orthodox Churches."¹⁴

The churches could not agree on this before the 2016 Council of Crete, so autocephaly was left off its agenda. The OCA's Archpriest John Jillions wrote that year that "the very question of what autocephaly means and who has the authority to grant autocephaly remains charged and unsettled."¹⁵

The American "diaspora"

Orthodoxy in North America began with the Russian mission to Alaska in 1794, the mission of St Herman.¹⁶ The Russian diocese gathered immigrant parishes of many backgrounds; its 1918 directory, Jillions notes, included Arabic, Albanian, Serbian, Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian parishes.¹⁷ But its claim to all American Orthodox was never universally accepted. In 1908 Constantinople placed the Greek diaspora under the Church of Greece. In 1922 Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis revoked that decision and claimed, in the English given by Namee, "direct supervision and management of all Orthodox parishes located outside the borders of the Local Orthodox Churches, without exception, in Europe, America, and other places," and that May placed the Greek Archdiocese of North and South America under Constantinople.¹⁸

The Russian Revolution then split the Russian diocese. The "Metropolia" lived in de facto independence from a Moscow Patriarchate under Soviet control, while the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) describes itself as "called into existence by Patriarch Tikhon in 1920" so that free Russian Orthodoxy could exist independently.¹⁹ Each immigrant community looked to its mother church for bishops, and the result was overlapping dioceses organized in practice by ethnic origin, close to what 1872 had condemned.

On 10 April 1970 the Russian Church proclaimed the Metropolia autocephalous as the OCA. Jillions explains that its founders saw this as "a temporary measure" toward one church for all North American Orthodox, troubled by "the blatantly uncanonical pluralism of jurisdictions." Constantinople, reading it as a claim to exclusive jurisdiction in America, objected that "only an Ecumenical Council, or at the very least the Patriarch of Constantinople himself, has the right to grant autocephaly," while Moscow called it "an internal matter of the Russian Orthodox Church."²⁰ Metropolitan Tikhon of the OCA has stated that "the Russian Orthodox Church, together with the Churches of Georgia, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, affirm and recognize the autocephaly of our Church," and that the Ecumenical Patriarch, while counting the OCA among "the family of canonical Orthodox Churches," maintains that its autocephaly "is not recognized."²¹ {{strong: The OCA is accepted as canonical by all Orthodox churches, but its autocephaly is recognized by only a minority of them.}}

On 17 May 2007 Patriarch Alexy II and Metropolitan Laurus signed the Act of Canonical Communion, ending some eighty years of division. It describes ROCOR as "an indissoluble, self-governing part of the Local Russian Orthodox Church."²² That healed a breach but did not reduce the number of American jurisdictions, since ROCOR and Moscow's own parishes remain separate structures.

In June 2009, at Chambésy in Switzerland, representatives of all the universally recognized churches "recognized substantial canonical 'anomalies' in the organization and life of the Church in these regions," which "give an appearance of disunity in the one holy Church," and created regional Assemblies of Bishops to heal them.²³ The American Assembly's directory lists the Greek, Antiochian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Albanian and Carpatho-Russian dioceses, the OCA, ROCOR, the Moscow Patriarchal Parishes, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA under Constantinople.²⁴ The 2016 Council of Crete kept the arrangement, affirming the will "that the problem of the Orthodox Diaspora be resolved as quickly as possible," but conceding that "it is not possible, for historical and pastoral reasons, an immediate transition to the strictly canonical order of the Church on this issue, that is, the existence of only one bishop in the same place." The assemblies are "chaired by the first among the hierarchs of the Church of Constantinople."²⁵ Four of the fourteen churches, Antioch, Russia, Bulgaria and Georgia, did not attend Crete, and the OCA was not invited.²⁶

Ukraine and the Moscow–Constantinople break

Since the late seventeenth century the Metropolis of Kyiv had been under Moscow, on the basis of a synodal letter of Constantinople issued in 1686. After Ukrainian independence there were several Orthodox bodies in Ukraine: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry, in communion with Moscow, and groups that the other churches considered schismatic.

On 11 October 2018 Constantinople's synod renewed its decision to grant Ukraine autocephaly, restored the leaders of those groups to their rank, and resolved "to revoke the legal binding of the Synodal Letter of the year 1686, issued for the circumstances of that time, which granted the right through oikonomia to the Patriarch of Moscow to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv."²⁷ In Constantinople's reading, 1686 was a conditional permission, not a transfer of territory. The new Orthodox Church of Ukraine elected Metropolitan Epiphanius in December 2018, and Patriarch Bartholomew signed its tomos on 5 January 2019 and presented it the next day. Epiphanius said "the old injustice is eliminated"; a spokesman for the Moscow-linked church called it "an even greater schism."²⁸

Moscow's synod, meeting in Minsk on 15 October 2018, answered that receiving the anathematized and encroaching on "somebody else's canonical parts" "places the Patriarchate of Constantinople outside the canonical space and, to our great sorrow, makes it impossible for us to continue the Eucharistic communion with its hierarchy, clergy and laity."²⁹ ROCOR agreed three days later, calling Metropolitan Onufry's church "the sole canonical body within that blessed land," and withdrew from Assemblies of Bishops "chaired or co-chaired by clerics or hierarchy of the Church of Constantinople."³⁰ By 2022 the OCU was recognized only by Constantinople, Alexandria, Cyprus and Greece, "and in some cases, only parts of those churches."³¹ We found no public announcement that communion between Moscow and Constantinople has been restored. {{debated: Whether Constantinople acted within its canonical rights in Ukraine is disputed among the Orthodox churches themselves.}}

Nor is this only a Greek–Russian quarrel. Antioch broke communion with Jerusalem on 29 April 2014 because both claimed Qatar, and restored it on 20 October 2023 without giving up its claim.³²

What the Orthodox Church actually teaches

Dogma. The Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic, as the Creed confesses, and its unity is one of faith, sacraments and bishops in apostolic succession gathered around the Eucharist. No autocephalous church holds a different Creed, Eucharist or set of councils from the others. Even so, ROCOR, endorsing Moscow, accused Constantinople of "false and alien teachings about primacy," so for some the quarrel touches teaching, not only administration.³⁰

Common canonical tradition. Regional churches, each with a first bishop acting with his synod; one bishop per place; no interference in another church's territory; and the condemnation of phyletism. All the churches agreed in 2009, and the Council of Crete repeated in 2016, that the diaspora arrangements are an exception to this order, tolerated for "historical and pastoral reasons."

Disputed opinion. Who may grant autocephaly; what Constantinople's primacy includes; whether Chalcedon's "barbarians" cover all lands outside the historic churches; whether 1686 transferred Kyiv permanently; how the diaspora should finally be organized. Some theologians seek a firmer basis for autocephaly. Nicholas Denysenko, a supporter of Ukrainian autocephaly, argues (in his article's abstract) that it "must no longer be seen as simply the outgrowth or even the 'right' of ethnic nation-states" but as a sign of a church's spiritual maturity.³³

Objections, and fair replies

"Without a pope, unity was bound to fail" (Catholic)

Catholic writers argue that these quarrels show the need for a universal primate with real authority. Commenting on a Moscow delegate's walkout at the Catholic–Orthodox dialogue in Ravenna in 2007, the Catholic theologian Aidan Nichols wrote that it demonstrated "the need precisely for a strong universal primacy so as to balance synodality in the Church."³⁴ Orthodox readers should take this seriously: the lack of an agreed way to settle disputes is the visible weakness of the present arrangement. The Orthodox reply is that the first-millennium Church, which both sides honor, was also a communion of regional churches with contested boundaries, as Cyprus and canon 28 show, and that Leo himself defended the Nicene order of regional sees. The Orthodox look for the remedy in conciliarity, the agreement of the churches, rather than in the jurisdiction of one see.

"Orthodoxy is just denominations under another name" (Protestant)

The resemblance is real at the level of parish signs. The difference lies in what separates them. Protestant denominations usually differ on doctrine and practice, such as baptism or the Lord's Supper. The Orthodox jurisdictions share one faith, liturgy and set of councils, and in normal times their members receive Communion in one another's churches. Yet the comparison is not wholly unfair: since October 2018 the Moscow Patriarchate, and ROCOR with it, have told their faithful that they may not receive Communion in churches of Constantinople, so for many Orthodox the division is no longer only administrative.²⁹

"Autocephaly simply follows politics" (skeptical)

This objection has real evidence behind it. The canons tied church boundaries to civil ones; governments declared Greece and Romania autocephalous; Moscow's tomoses for Poland and Czechoslovakia came as those countries entered the Soviet sphere; and the Ukrainian crisis cannot be separated from the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Orthodoxy's councils have named and condemned the confusion of church and nation, and the faith confessed by all these churches stayed the same through every political change. Political pressure explains much of the map, and that calls for repentance, not pride.

What we can say confidently

• The Church was organized as a communion of regional self-governing churches from early centuries, as the canons of Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus show.
• Most of today's autocephalous churches reached their present form between 1850 and 1950, often under political pressure.
• The American overlap arose from immigration, Constantinople's decisions of 1908 and 1922, and the Russian Revolution.
• All the universally recognized churches agreed in 2009 that the overlap is a canonical anomaly, and Crete (2016), which four churches did not attend, kept the Assemblies of Bishops as a temporary measure.
• Moscow broke communion with Constantinople in October 2018 over Ukraine.

What remains disputed

• Whether the right to grant autocephaly belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarch, to a mother church, or only to the consensus of all the churches.
• What Constantinople's primacy includes, and whether canon 28 of Chalcedon gives it oversight of the diaspora.
• Whether the 1686 letter transferred Kyiv to Moscow permanently.
• Whether the OCA and the OCU are autocephalous, and how the American jurisdictions will finally be united.

Conclusion

The many Orthodox jurisdictions are not many churches with many faiths. They are one Church, confessing the Nicene Creed and sharing one Cup, whose administration has been bent by empires, revolutions and migrations, and whose bishops do not yet agree on how to straighten it. Orthodox Christians can say this plainly because their own councils have said it: the diaspora is an anomaly, the mixing of church and nation was condemned in 1872, and two bishops for one city is not the ancient order.

For a visitor, any parish of the churches listed by the Assembly of Bishops offers the same Liturgy and confesses the same faith, though since 2018 not all of them share Communion, and bishops who disagree about jurisdiction still pray "for the peace of the whole world" and "for the union of all."³⁵ The divisions over Ukraine are a real wound. Orthodox Christians believe that the Church's unity is finally Christ's gift rather than an achievement of administrators, and that the Spirit who held the churches together through earlier quarrels can heal these too.

For more, see our articles on apostolic succession in the early Church, papal supremacy, why the Orthodox and Catholic churches split and how the Church recognizes ecumenical councils, and our guides to apostolic succession and the Christian traditions.

Notes

1. The list of fourteen follows the Ecumenical Patriarchate's diptych order as given in Matthew Namee, "When Did Today's Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?" Orthodox History, 24 May 2022, which also describes the disputed status of the OCA and OCU. Back
2. Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Crete, 2016), "Autonomy and the Means by Which it is Proclaimed," sections 1 and 3, holycouncil.org. Back
3. Namee, "When Did Today's Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?" (section on Georgia). Back
4. Apostolic Canons, canon 34, trans. Henry R. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14 (New Advent edition). Back
5. Nicaea I, canon 6; Constantinople I, canons 2 and 3, trans. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. Canon 3 of Constantinople is missing from the New Advent page and was checked in the CCEL text of the same volume. Back
6. Ephesus, canon 8, trans. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. Back
7. Nicaea I, canon 8, trans. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. The canon concerns clergy of the "Cathari" (Novatianists). Back
8. Chalcedon, canons 17 and 28, trans. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14. Back
9. Leo the Great, Letter 106 (to Anatolius), ch. 2, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF2 vol. 12 (New Advent edition). Back
10. Namee, "When Did Today's Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?" The dates in the list that follows are from the sections on each church. Back
11. Namee, "When Did Today's Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?" (section on Romania, comparing it with Greece). Back
12. "Decree of the Holy and Grand Council, assembled at Constantinople in the month of September, in the year of grace 1872," Art. 1, English translation from the Methodist Quarterly Review (January 1873), reprinted in Matthew Namee, "The 'Bulgarian Question' and the 1872 Council of Constantinople, Part 4," Orthodox History, 4 December 2012. Back
13. Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, Metropolitan of Bursa, "First Without Equals: A Response to the Text on Primacy of the Moscow Patriarchate" (2014), as reproduced by the Society of Saint John Chrysostom. Back
14. Moscow Patriarchate, "Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church" (December 2013), section 3 and conclusion, English text as published by Pravmir. Back
15. John Jillions, "The Tomos of Autocephaly: Forty-Six Years Later," Orthodox Church in America, 7 April 2016. Back
16. Jillions, "The Tomos of Autocephaly" ("What had begun in 1794 as the remotest mission of the Russian Church"). See our article Who Was St. Herman of Alaska? Back
17. Jillions, "The Tomos of Autocephaly." Back
18. Matthew Namee, "A Brief Life of Meletios Metaxakis," Orthodox History, 24 August 2020. The English wording of the 1922 decision is as Namee gives it; he does not name a translator. Back
19. Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Diocese of Great Britain and Western Europe, "The Act of Canonical Communion" (introduction), orthodox-europe.org. This is ROCOR's own account of its origin. Back
20. Jillions, "The Tomos of Autocephaly." The quoted words of Constantinople's and Moscow's positions are Jillions's summaries of the 1970 correspondence, published in St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 15:1-2; the reading of Constantinople's concern as exclusive jurisdiction is also Jillions's. Back
21. Metropolitan Tikhon (Mollard), "Statement of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon, on his trip to Constantinople," Orthodox Church in America (written before the 2016 Council, which the statement describes as forthcoming). Back
22. "Act of Canonical Communion" (2007), articles 1-2, full text in "The Act of Canonical Communion," orthodox-europe.org. Back
23. Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America, "About," assemblyofbishops.org. Back
24. Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the USA, "Jurisdictions" directory, assemblyofbishops.org. Back
25. Holy and Great Council (Crete, 2016), "The Orthodox Diaspora," sections 1a, 1b, 2 and 3, holycouncil.org. Back
26. Andrew Stephen Damick, "How I See Things After the Orthodox Council in Crete," Roads from Emmaus (Ancient Faith blogs), 7 July 2016. Fr Andrew writes as an Antiochian priest and is critical of how the council was run. Back
27. Ecumenical Patriarchate, Chief Secretariat of the Holy and Sacred Synod, Announcement of 11 October 2018, point 4, as published by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA. Back
28. Voice of America, "Independence Decree Presented to Ukrainian Orthodox Bishop," 6 January 2019 (including the remarks of Metropolitan Epiphanius and of Archbishop Kliment, spokesman of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in communion with Moscow). Back
29. "Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church has considered it impossible to remain in the Eucharistic communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople," Patriarchal Parishes in the USA (mospatusa.com), 15 October 2018, quoting the Synod's statement. Back
30. Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, statement of 18 October 2018, Eastern American Diocese (eadiocese.org). Back
31. Namee, "When Did Today's Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?" (introduction, 24 May 2022). Back
32. "Antiochian Patriarchate restores communion with Jerusalem Patriarchate," NÖK (Nachrichtendienst östliche Kirchen), 1 November 2023, citing orthochristian.com. Back
33. Nicholas Denysenko, "A Communion of the Holy Spirit in Ukraine: A Theological Rationale for Autocephaly," Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56, nos. 1-2 (2015): 1-28, abstract (written in the third person, so possibly by the journal rather than the author). Back
34. Aidan Nichols, Rome and the Eastern Churches, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 368-69, as quoted in Elpidophoros, "First Without Equals," n. 4. We did not open Nichols's book itself. Back
35. The Great Litany (Litany of Peace) at the opening of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, in the English text published at orthodoxprayer.org ("For the peace of the whole world, the welfare of the holy churches of God, and for the union of all"). Wording varies slightly between translations. Back

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Schaff, Philip, and Henry Wace, eds. The Seven Ecumenical Councils. Trans. Henry R. Percival. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900. (Apostolic Canons; canons of Nicaea, Constantinople I, Ephesus and Chalcedon.) newadvent.org/fathers and ccel.org.
• Leo the Great. Letter 106, to Anatolius. Trans. Charles Lett Feltoe. NPNF2 vol. 12. newadvent.org/fathers/3604106.htm.
• Council of Constantinople (1872). Decree on phyletism. Trans. in Methodist Quarterly Review, January 1873; reprinted by Matthew Namee, Orthodox History, 4 December 2012.
• Act of Canonical Communion between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (17 May 2007). orthodox-europe.org/english/rocor/act/.
• Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church (Crete, 2016). "The Orthodox Diaspora" and "Autonomy and the Means by Which it is Proclaimed." holycouncil.org.
• Ecumenical Patriarchate. Announcement of the Holy and Sacred Synod, 11 October 2018. uocofusa.org/news_181013_1.
• Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Statement of 15 October 2018, as reported by the Patriarchal Parishes in the USA. mospatusa.com/news_181015_7.
• Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Statement of 18 October 2018. eadiocese.org/news_181022_1.
• Moscow Patriarchate. "Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church." December 2013. pravmir.com.
• Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America. "About" and "Jurisdictions." assemblyofbishops.org.
• The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Great Litany. English text at orthodoxprayer.org.
• Tikhon (Mollard), Metropolitan. "Statement of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon, on his trip to Constantinople." oca.org.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), Metropolitan of Bursa. "First Without Equals: A Response to the Text on Primacy of the Moscow Patriarchate." 2014. ssjc.uk/first-without-equals-ecumenical/.
• Jillions, John. "The Tomos of Autocephaly: Forty-Six Years Later." Orthodox Church in America, 7 April 2016. oca.org.
• Namee, Matthew. "When Did Today's Autocephalous Churches Come into Being?" Orthodox History, 24 May 2022. orthodoxhistory.org.
• Namee, Matthew. "A Brief Life of Meletios Metaxakis." Orthodox History, 24 August 2020. orthodoxhistory.org.
• Damick, Andrew Stephen. "How I See Things After the Orthodox Council in Crete." Ancient Faith blogs, 7 July 2016. blogs.ancientfaith.com/asd.
• Denysenko, Nicholas. "A Communion of the Holy Spirit in Ukraine: A Theological Rationale for Autocephaly." Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56, nos. 1-2 (2015): 1-28.

Other scholarship and reporting (including critics of Orthodox practice)

• Nichols, Aidan. Rome and the Eastern Churches. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010. (Quoted from Elpidophoros, "First Without Equals," n. 4; the book itself was not opened.)
• Voice of America. "Independence Decree Presented to Ukrainian Orthodox Bishop." 6 January 2019. voanews.com.
• NÖK (Nachrichtendienst östliche Kirchen). "Antiochian Patriarchate restores communion with Jerusalem Patriarchate." 1 November 2023. noek.info.