Eastern Orthodox Church organization

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(Redirected from Eastern Orthodox Communion)

This article treats the manner in which the Eastern Orthodox Churches are organized, rather than the doctrines, traditions, practices, or other aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy.

1 Eastern Orthodoxy
2 Background
3 Jurisdictions
4 Sources and external links

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Eastern Orthodoxy

The Eastern Orthodox Church is a communion comprising the collective body of fourteen or fifteen separate autocephalous hierarchical churches that recognize each other as "canonical" Orthodox Christian churches (there is an essentially political disagreement about whether the number is 14 or 15).

The head of the Body of Christ can be only Christ. The Eastern Churches have no one so powerful as the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church. The highest-ranking bishop of the communion is the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is also primate of one of the fourteen or fifteen churches. These organizations are in full communion with each other, so any priest of any of those churches may lawfully minister to any member of any of them, and no member of any is excluded from any form of worship in any of the others. Despite the fact that, like the Roman Catholic church, they are "closed communion" churches, i.e. with rare exceptions excluding non-members from receiving the Eucharist, nonetheless they admit each other's members to that sacrament. This is completely non-paradoxical as far as the Orthodox are concerned, since, even though there may be many "Churches", there is only one Church, in Orthodox ecclesiology. That is, each "Orthodox Church" is actually a portion of the Orthodox Church as a whole. Friction among them is over matters of church politics rather than doctrine.

Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox church claims to be the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

All the disagreements among persons of differing religious beliefs beget strange nomenclature, and accordingly a church adhering to so-called Western Orthodoxy is actually a Vicariate within the Antiochian Orthodox Church (it is never called the "Western Orthodox Church" by anyone who actually worships within that Vicariate) and thus a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church as that term is defined here.

Note that Oriental Orthodoxy separated from the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 5th century, well before the 11th century Great Schism. It should not be confused with Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Background

At the beginning of the 11th century, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church was ruled by five patriarchs: the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Each patriarch had jurisdiction over bishops in a specified geographic region.

The patriarch of Rome was "first in place of honor" among the five patriarchs. Did that mean he had authority over the other four patriarchs, or was his primacy merely honorary? Disagreement about the answer to that question was one of the causes of the Great Schism in the year 1054, which split the church into the western Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Patriarch of Rome, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, led by the four eastern patriarchs.

After the schism, in the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Patriarch of Constantinople has always had honorary primacy. The importance of the insistence that one patriarch does not have authority over the others (unlike the Catholic Pope) is seen in the fact that these separate churches are autocephalous. Since then, the Eastern Orthodox Church has expanded and reorganized, so that today it has fourteen or fifteen autocephalous churches rather than the four historical Eastern Patriarchates, which are now merely seen as their mother churches.

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Jurisdictions

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Autocephalous churches

Orthodox Church of Constantinople, under the Ecumenical Patriarch, in modern Turkey
Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Patriarch also styled Pope, historically second Patriarchate in rank
Orthodox Church of Antioch, historically third Patriarchate in rank
Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, historically fourth Patriarchate in rank
Russian Orthodox Church, younger but linked to Imperial Russia's claim to succeed to Byzantium as the Third Rome.
Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church
Serbian Orthodox Church
Romanian Orthodox Church
Bulgarian Orthodox Church
Orthodox Church of Cyprus
Church of Greece
Polish Orthodox Church
Albanian Orthodox Church
Czech and Slovak Orthodox Church
Orthodox Church in America (autocephaly not universally recognized)

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Autonomous churches

Orthodox Church of Mount Sinai (under the Patriarch of Jerusalem)
Finnish Orthodox Church (under the Patriarch of Constantinople)
Estonian Orthodox Church (under the Patriarch of Constantinople, autonomy not universally recognized)
Japanese Orthodox Church (under the Patriarch of Moscow, autonomy not universally recognized)
Chinese Orthodox Church (under the Patriarch of Moscow, autonomy not universally recognized)
Ukrainian Orthodox Church (under the Patriarch of Moscow, autonomy not universally recognized)
Metropolis of Western Europe (under the Patriarch of Moscow, autonomy not universally recognized)
Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia (comprising 23% of Moldovan Orthodox or 2 million in 2004; stayed under the Patriarchate of Romania after Imperial Russia annexed Bessarabia in 1812)
Moldovan Metropolitan Church (comprising 60% of Moldovan Orthodox; under the Patriarchate of Moscow)
Orthodox Ohrid Archbishopric (under the Patriarch of Belgrade, autonomy not universally recognized)

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Churches with ambiguous status

Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (In communion with some but not all of the above, especially not the Russian Orthodox Church, though rapprochement is currently underway).

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Churches in resistance

These Churches are resistant to what they perceive as the errors of Modernism and Ecumenism in mainstream Orthodoxy, but they do not consider themselves schismatic; they do refrain from concelebration of the Divine Liturgy with the mainline Orthodox Churches while they remain fully within the canonical boundaries of the Church, i.e. maintaining Orthodox belief, legitimate episcopal succession, and communities with historical continuity. They will commune the faithful from all the canonical jurisdictions and are recognized by and in communion with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.