Russia’s Challenge to Ecumenical Patriarchal Primacy

After His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in January 2019, the Moscow Patriarchate severed communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and adopted a policy that is severely threatening to Orthodox unity worldwide. It has even gone so far as to establish churches in the Patriarchate of Alexandria and other areas outside its jurisdiction, in direct defiance of the established canonical order. Russia is also working to undermine the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s unique status as primus inter pares among the Orthodox Patriarchates, and to supplant it as the Church with the unique responsibility, granted to the Church of Constantinople by the Ecumenical Councils, to settle disputes among the Churches and to grant autocephaly to Churches as needed.

The Moscow Patriarchate also continues to bless Russia’s unholy, unprovoked, and unjust war against its fellow Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, and to ignore the entreaties of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to end its support for this war and restore the unity that all Orthodox jurisdictions should maintain.