The Ecumenical Patriarchate Today

When the emperor Constantine moved his capital to the old town of Byzantium in 330, the city he renamed became New Rome, and its bishop rose quickly in rank. The Second Ecumenical Council (381) gave the bishop of Constantinople honor second only to Rome; the Fourth Council, at Chalcedon (451), in a canon that has been argued over ever since, ranked New Rome alongside Old Rome and assigned it wide responsibilities. After the schism with the Latin West and the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453, Constantinople became the first see of the Orthodox world and the natural point of reference among the Eastern churches.

Today the reality is humbler than the title suggests. The native Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul has dwindled to a few thousand, its historic theological school on the island of Halki has stood closed by Turkish law since 1971, and the Patriarch is a citizen of a secular republic with a Muslim majority. The current Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, elected in 1991, is by tradition the 270th to hold the see of Constantinople. The paradox of the Patriarchate is exactly this: a modest local church that carries an outsized place in the honor and coordination of a communion of some 200 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.

All Orthodox agree that the Ecumenical Patriarch is primus inter pares, "first among equals," and stands first in the diptychs, the ranked list of the churches. All agree, too, that this is not a papacy: he cannot govern another church's internal affairs, define doctrine by himself, or command his fellow patriarchs. Orthodox theology recognizes no universal earthly head over the Church but Christ (more here).

The dispute begins past that point. Constantinople understands its primacy to carry real initiative: the responsibility to convene and preside over pan-Orthodox gatherings, to receive certain appeals from other churches, to care for Orthodox lands that lie outside every established patriarchate (the "diaspora"), and — on its reading of the 28th canon of Chalcedon — a special charge over churches "among the barbarians." Other churches, most forcefully the Patriarchate of Moscow, answer that the primacy is one of honor only, that pan-Orthodox decisions require the consensus of all and not the direction of one, and that no see may extend its authority into territory the others have not granted it. Both sides appeal to the same canons and the same history and read them differently. The Church has never formally settled how much a first see may do, and that unsettled question sits beneath nearly every modern inter-Orthodox strain (see autocephaly).

Whatever the theory, the Patriarchate carries a heavy practical portfolio. It has direct oversight of the monastic republic of Mount Athos, the semi-autonomous Church of Crete, and the Dodecanese islands; it shepherds the Greek Orthodox archdioceses of America, Australia, and much of Europe; and Patriarch Bartholomew has become known internationally as the "Green Patriarch" for linking Orthodox theology to the care of creation, alongside decades of ecumenical dialogue with Rome and others.

It was also Constantinople that in 2018 granted a tomos of autocephaly to a church in Ukraine, an act Moscow rejected as an intrusion into its own territory; Moscow responded by breaking communion with Constantinople, and the rupture is not healed (the Ukrainian dispute). Here the encyclopedia keeps to what is undisputed: the two largest voices in Orthodoxy read the rights of the first see differently, each in good conscience appeals to the canons, and the wider Orthodox world remains divided over which reading is correct.