Greek Orthodox Church Beliefs

1. Who the Greek Orthodox Are

Greek Orthodox Christians are the Greek-speaking and Byzantine-tradition part of the Eastern Orthodox communion, holding the faith of the first seven ecumenical councils and worshipping in the rite that developed around Constantinople. The name covers several self-governing Churches: the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Church of Greece, the Church of Cyprus, the ancient patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, and the archdioceses these bodies maintain in the Americas, Australia, Britain and western Europe. They are in full communion with the Slavic and other Eastern Orthodox Churches, and out of full communion with Rome.

The Greek Christian story starts in the New Testament itself. Paul crossed into Europe after the vision of a man from Macedonia calling him over (Acts 16:9), preached at Thessalonica and Beroea, argued with the philosophers on the Areopagus at Athens (Acts 17:22-34), and spent eighteen months at Corinth. Dionysius the Areopagite, converted at Athens, is honoured in Greek Orthodoxy as the city's first bishop. The New Testament comes down to us in Greek, the Old Testament read in Greek churches is the Septuagint, and the seven churches addressed in Revelation stood in Greek-speaking Asia Minor, a subject we treat in our guide to the seven churches of Revelation. Greek Orthodox Christians understand their Church as that community carried forward without a break.

Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Greek Catholic

Four labels are regularly confused, and getting them right is the first courtesy owed to any of these communities.

Greek Orthodox means the Byzantine-rite Churches in the Greek tradition listed above. Eastern Orthodox is the wider communion they belong to, which also includes the Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Polish, Albanian and other Churches; our full treatment of the doctrine and disputes of that communion is the guide to Eastern Orthodox Church beliefs. Oriental Orthodox is a separate communion, made up of the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara Churches, which accepts three ecumenical councils and parted from the rest over the Christological language of Chalcedon in 451; those Churches are not in communion with the Greek Orthodox and should never be described as though they were. Greek Catholic, sometimes called Byzantine Catholic, means a Church that keeps the Byzantine rite while remaining in full communion with Rome, and we cover those bodies in our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches.

Where the Greek Orthodox live

The Church of Greece serves most of the Greek mainland and the great majority of Orthodox Christians in Greece. Article 3 of the Constitution of Greece names the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ as the prevailing religion of the country, which gives the Church a legal standing in Greek public life that few Western Churches now hold. Cyprus has its own ancient autocephalous Church. Sizeable Greek Orthodox communities live in the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany and South Africa, and the Patriarchate of Antioch, though called Greek Orthodox because of its rite and tradition, is largely Arabic-speaking and centred on Syria and Lebanon.

On religious identification in Greece, see the Pew Research Center report Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century (2017), which found that a large majority of Greek adults identify as Orthodox Christian. Pew's global Orthodox totals include the Oriental Orthodox Churches, which are a separate communion from the Greek Orthodox.

2. What Greek Orthodox Christians Believe

Greek Orthodox belief is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed recited in the words the councils left, together with everything the first seven ecumenical councils defined. A Greek Orthodox Christian confesses one God in three persons, the Son as consubstantial with the Father, the Incarnation of the Word, the Virgin Mary as Theotokos or God-bearer, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. A Catholic reading the Creed as it is sung in a Greek parish will find one difference: the Greek text says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, without the Latin addition Filioque.

The seven councils

Greek Orthodoxy treats seven councils as the standard of the faith, and Greek bishops, cities and language shaped all of them. Nicaea I in 325 confessed the Son as of one being with the Father. Constantinople I in 381 completed the Creed and settled the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Ephesus in 431 defined Mary as Theotokos against Nestorius. Chalcedon in 451 confessed Christ in two natures. Constantinople II in 553 and Constantinople III in 680 to 681 clarified the person and the two wills of Christ. Nicaea II in 787 vindicated the veneration of icons. The Catholic Church accepts all seven, and counts later Western councils as ecumenical too, which is one of the concrete forms the authority question takes.

Scripture inside the Church

Greek Orthodoxy reads Scripture within the living Tradition of the Church, using the Septuagint as its Old Testament. The Greek canon is somewhat wider than the Catholic one, including in many editions 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh alongside the books Catholics call deuterocanonical. Against the Reformation principle of Scripture alone, Rome and the Greek Orthodox stand together, and our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture sets out the shared case.

Sin, grace and the human person

Greek theology speaks of ancestral sin. Adam's fall passes to his descendants as mortality, corruption and a will inclined to sin, and personal guilt is not inherited with it. The human person is made in the image of God and called to grow into his likeness, and grace is God's own uncreated life given to the believer rather than a created gift standing between God and the soul. That single conviction shapes the Greek account of salvation, of prayer and of the sacraments, and section 8 below follows it out.

The last things

Greek Orthodox Christians pray for the dead at every Divine Liturgy, keep memorial services on the third, ninth and fortieth days and on anniversaries, and bring koliva, boiled wheat with sugar and pomegranate, in memory of the words of Christ that a grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die (John 12:24). They expect the Second Coming, the general resurrection and the last judgment. Greek theology declines the Latin framework of a purifying fire and a satisfaction owed for temporal punishment, holding that the state of the departed before the judgment is a mystery the Church has not defined, while praying for them all the same. Our guide to purgatory sets out the Catholic doctrine and the Eastern reservations about it at length.

3. The Greek Orthodox Churches and Their Sees

There is no single Greek Orthodox headquarters with authority over the rest. The Greek Orthodox world is a set of self-governing Churches, each with its own synod and primate, recognising one another and sharing the same faith and sacraments. Understanding which see does what removes most of the confusion English-speaking readers meet.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople

The Ecumenical Patriarchate holds first place in the order of honour among all the Orthodox Churches, and its patriarch is titled Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch. His see is in the Phanar district of Istanbul, and the Christian population of the city is now very small, so the patriarchate's importance rests on its role as first among equals rather than on numbers. Canon 3 of Constantinople in 381 and canon 28 of Chalcedon in 451 gave the see its rank because it was the new imperial capital, a logic that treats the order of sees as an ecclesiastical arrangement. The Ecumenical Patriarch convenes pan-Orthodox meetings, grants autocephaly, hears certain appeals on a reading of the Chalcedonian canons that the Moscow Patriarchate contests, and governs the Greek Orthodox archdioceses of the diaspora directly. The patriarchate's theological school on the island of Halki has been closed since 1971 under Turkish legislation on private higher education, and successive patriarchs have asked for permission to reopen it.

The Church of Greece

The Church of Greece governs the Orthodox parishes of most of the Greek state and is headed by the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece with a permanent Holy Synod. After Greek independence the Church declared itself self-governing in 1833, separating from Constantinople in the political circumstances of the new kingdom, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate recognised the autocephaly by a patriarchal tomos in 1850. Some Greek dioceses, chiefly in the north and on several islands, remain canonically under Constantinople while being administered by the Church of Greece, and Crete and the Dodecanese stand under Constantinople directly.

The ancient patriarchates and Cyprus

Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem are the three ancient Eastern patriarchates that stand alongside Constantinople in the Orthodox order of honour, and all three are Greek Orthodox in rite and tradition. The Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa has grown considerably through African mission work. The Patriarchate of Antioch, based in Damascus, serves a mainly Arabic-speaking flock across Syria, Lebanon and their diaspora, and its people call themselves Rum, meaning Roman in the Byzantine sense. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem cares for the holy places, and its Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre shares custody of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with the Armenian and Latin communities under the Status Quo arrangement. The Church of Cyprus has been autocephalous since the Council of Ephesus in 431, one of the oldest self-governing Churches in Christendom.

Monastic republics

Two Greek monastic centres carry weight out of all proportion to their size. Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, is a peninsula in northern Greece holding twenty ruling monasteries with their dependencies, self-governed by a Holy Community at Karyes under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and given a special constitutional status within Greece. Its ancient rule of avaton bars women from the peninsula. The monasteries of Meteora in Thessaly, built on sandstone pillars, remain in use and receive visitors. Athonite opinion has often been among the more cautious Greek voices on relations with Rome, and monks from the Holy Mountain publicly opposed the 2001 papal visit to Athens.

4. The Divine Liturgy in Greek

The Divine Liturgy is the Greek Orthodox celebration of the Eucharist, and it is the centre of the whole tradition. The usual form is the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, with the longer Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great appointed for ten days of the year, including the Sundays of Great Lent, and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts served on Lenten weekdays. The service is sung from beginning to end, normally without instruments, in Byzantine chant built on a system of eight tones. Greek Orthodox worship treats the liturgy as the earthly assembly joining a worship already going on in heaven.

How the service runs

The liturgy opens with the Great Litany and the antiphons, moves through the Little Entrance with the Gospel book, the readings from the Epistle and the Gospel, and the sermon. The Great Entrance carries the bread and wine from the table of preparation to the altar. The Creed is recited aloud in the Greek text without the Filioque, by the whole congregation or by a single reader on its behalf according to local custom. The anaphora follows, with the words of institution and the epiclesis, the invocation asking the Father to send the Holy Spirit to change the gifts, which Greek theology treats as the moment of consecration. Communion is given from a spoon, the consecrated bread in the chalice with the wine, to the baptised Orthodox faithful. At the end everyone present, visitors included, is offered antidoron, blessed bread that has not been consecrated.

The iconostasis and the altar

A screen of icons called the iconostasis stands between the nave and the sanctuary, with the royal doors at its centre and fixed icons of Christ, the Theotokos, the patron of the church and Saint John the Baptist. The screen conceals part of the altar action, which Greek commentary explains as reverence for a mystery rather than exclusion of the people. The altar carries the Gospel book and a cross, and relics of martyrs are sewn into the antimension, the cloth on which the gifts are consecrated, so that every liturgy is offered on a martyr's witness.

What a Catholic will recognise, and what will be new

A Catholic attending a Greek Orthodox liturgy recognises the shape at once: readings, creed, offering, eucharistic prayer, communion. The differences are of manner. The service runs long, often two hours or more. People stand, and traditional Greek churches provide seating along the walls rather than pews throughout. Worshippers venerate icons on entering, light candles, and cross themselves from right shoulder to left. The Catholic Mass and the Divine Liturgy are two forms of one sacrifice, a point our guide to the Mass develops from the Latin side.

5. The Seven Mysteries

Greek Orthodox Christians celebrate the same seven sacraments the Catholic Church does, and normally call them mysteries, from the Greek mysterion. Greek theology is reluctant to fix the number at seven as a matter of dogma, since blessings such as monastic tonsure and the burial service are also understood to convey grace, and the count of seven is used and taught all the same. The differences from Latin practice are matters of discipline and emphasis.

Baptism, chrismation and first communion

An infant is baptised by triple immersion in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, is anointed at once with holy myron in the mystery of chrismation, which corresponds to Latin confirmation, and receives Holy Communion at the same liturgy. Greek Orthodox children therefore commune from infancy. The godparent, nonos or nona, takes a lifelong role in the child's Christian upbringing. The child is normally given the name of a saint, and the saint's feast becomes the name day that Greek families celebrate more warmly than birthdays.

Confession and the Eucharist

Confession in the Greek tradition is made standing beside the priest before an icon or the Gospel book, with the priest understood as a witness and physician rather than a judge, and the emphasis falls on healing and counsel. Greek Orthodox practice normally expects confession and a period of fasting before receiving Holy Communion, which is why many faithful commune less often than Catholics do. On the Eucharist itself the two Churches agree that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, and our guide to the Eucharist covers the Catholic doctrine and the language of transubstantiation, which Greek theology has used without adopting the scholastic apparatus behind it.

Marriage and holy orders

Greek Orthodox marriage is celebrated as the mystery of crowning: the couple wear stefana, crowns joined by a ribbon, and are led three times around the table in the dance of Isaiah while the choir sings. Greek usage has no exchange of vows, because Orthodox theology treats the priest as the minister of the mystery and takes the couple's consent as given by their coming freely to the service and receiving the crowns. On divorce, Greek Orthodoxy permits remarriage in limited cases by oikonomia, a pastoral discretion the Eastern canons allow, with a penitential form of service for a second marriage. Married men may be ordained deacon and priest if they married before ordination, priests may not marry after ordination, and bishops are chosen from among the celibate monastic clergy.

Anointing of the sick

The mystery of holy unction, euchelaion, is served for the sick and also for the whole congregation on Holy Wednesday of Great Week, when everyone present is anointed. The full form calls for seven priests, seven readings and seven prayers. Greek practice treats the mystery as a prayer for healing of body and soul rather than a rite reserved to the dying, which is close to the emphasis the Latin Church recovered in the twentieth century.

6. Fasting, Feasts and the Church Year

The Greek Orthodox year is built on four fasting seasons and twelve great feasts, and the fasting discipline is considerably stricter than the modern Latin one. The church year begins on 1 September. Fasting in the Greek tradition means abstaining from meat, dairy, eggs, fish, olive oil and wine on the stricter days, with shellfish permitted, and it is understood as training of the whole person rather than a penalty.

The four fasts

Great Lent runs for forty days before Holy Week and Pascha and is the strictest. The Nativity fast covers the forty days before Christmas. The Apostles' fast begins after the Sunday of All Saints and ends on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June, so its length varies with the date of Pascha. The Dormition fast runs for the first fourteen days of August. Wednesdays and Fridays are fast days through most of the year, and the Greek fasting cookery that results, with beans, greens, olives and seafood, is a recognisable part of Greek culture.

Pascha and Holy Week

Pascha is the feast of feasts in Greek Orthodoxy, and Holy Week is served almost continuously. The Bridegroom services open the week. On Holy Thursday evening the twelve Passion Gospels are read and the crucified Christ is carried in procession. On Holy Friday the Epitaphios, an embroidered icon of the burial, is decorated with flowers and carried through the streets at night. The Resurrection service begins before midnight on Holy Saturday, the church is darkened, the priest brings out the light with the call to come and receive it, and the people take the flame home in candles. The Paschal greeting Christos Anesti, Christ is risen, is answered Alithos Anesti, truly he is risen, for forty days.

The great feasts

Twelve great feasts stand alongside Pascha: the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Exaltation of the Cross, the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, the Nativity of Christ, Theophany on 6 January, the Meeting of the Lord, the Annunciation on 25 March, Palm Sunday, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Transfiguration on 6 August and the Dormition of the Theotokos on 15 August. The Dormition is the great summer feast in Greece, kept with pilgrimage, and the Annunciation coincides with Greek Independence Day, which binds the feast tightly to national memory.

Two calendars

Greek Orthodox Churches follow two different reckonings at once, and the reason is historical. In the 1920s the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece adopted the revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts, so Greek Orthodox Christmas falls on 25 December in step with the West, while a minority who rejected the change formed the Old Calendarist communities that persist in Greece today. Pascha continued to be calculated by the Julian reckoning across nearly all of Orthodoxy, which is why Greek Orthodox Easter usually falls after the Western date and sometimes coincides with it, as it did in 2025. Both Churches are applying the rule of Nicaea in 325, the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, with different astronomical tables.

7. Icons, Mount Athos and Hesychasm

Icons are doctrine in the Greek Orthodox Church, settled by a council rather than adopted as decoration. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787, closing the iconoclast crisis, taught that images of Christ, the Theotokos and the saints may be venerated with honour, proskynesis, while adoration, latreia, belongs to God alone. The argument rests on the Incarnation: the invisible God has taken a visible human face, so he can be depicted, and refusing the image implies a doubt about the flesh he took. The first Sunday of Great Lent is kept as the Sunday of Orthodoxy in memory of the restoration of the icons in 843.

The Catholic Church holds the same council and the same distinction, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats sacred images in paragraphs 1159 to 1162. Greek iconography follows canons of style deliberately: the figures are frontal, the perspective opens toward the viewer, and the painter, who says he writes rather than paints an icon, works within a received tradition rather than expressing himself.

Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer

Hesychasm is the Greek monastic practice of inner stillness, hesychia, cultivated through the repetition of the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." The prayer is often said with a knotted woollen rope, the komboskini, and joined to the breath, and the aim is that the mind should descend into the heart and the prayer become continuous, which the tradition reads out of Paul's instruction to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). The Philokalia, compiled in the eighteenth century by Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, is the standard Greek anthology of the texts on this practice.

The Holy Mountain

Mount Athos has been the training ground of this tradition for over a thousand years. The Great Lavra was founded by Saint Athanasius the Athonite in 963, and the twenty ruling monasteries now include Greek, Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian houses, all under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Athonite monks keep the old Julian calendar and Byzantine hours, and the manuscript libraries and icon collections held on the mountain have drawn scholars and conservators for generations. Pope John Paul II commended the Eastern monastic and contemplative tradition to the whole Catholic Church in his 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen. Catholics drawn to this rhythm without leaving the Latin rite often find its shape in our daily prayers, and our guide to Christian prayer covers the wider discipline.

8. Theosis and Gregory Palamas

Theosis, deification, is the Greek Orthodox account of what salvation is. God became man so that man might share in the life of God, and salvation is that real participation, beginning at baptism, deepened by the mysteries, prayer and ascetic struggle, and completed in the resurrection of the body. Greek theology takes the language from 2 Peter 1:4 and from Athanasius and Irenaeus, and it treats the whole person, body included, as the subject of the transformation.

What Palamas argued

Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk who became Archbishop of Thessalonica in the fourteenth century, gave theosis its classic Greek formulation during the hesychast controversy. Barlaam of Calabria held that the light the hesychast monks reported in prayer could only be a created effect, since God's own being lies beyond any creature's reach. Palamas answered by distinguishing the divine essence, which stays forever unknowable and cannot be shared, from the divine energies, which are uncreated, are truly God, and are the way God gives himself to be known and shared. On this account the light seen on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration was the uncreated light of God, and the apostles were given eyes to see it. Councils held at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld Palamas, and the second Sunday of Great Lent commemorates him.

The Catholic response

Catholic teaching affirms deification in the same terms. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 460 quotes Athanasius saying that the Son of God became man so that we might become God, and 2 Peter 1:4 carries the same weight in both traditions. Latin theology has hesitated over the distinction itself, since the scholastic doctrine of divine simplicity resists any real distinction within God, and the Latin tradition accounts for the same reality through created grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church has never condemned Palamas, several twentieth-century Catholic theologians read him as compatible with Aquinas, and the essence and energies question does not appear on the formal list of obstacles to communion.

9. How Greek Orthodoxy Governs Itself

Greek Orthodox governance runs on autocephaly and synodality. A Church is autocephalous when it elects its own primate and settles its own affairs without reference to any higher bishop, and decisions inside each Church are taken by a synod of bishops rather than by the primate alone. There is no Greek Orthodox curia and no bishop with jurisdiction over the whole communion. Unity is held by shared faith, shared mysteries and mutual recognition among the primates, expressed by naming one another in the diptychs at the liturgy.

First among equals

The Ecumenical Patriarch is primus inter pares, first among equals. He convenes pan-Orthodox gatherings, coordinates the common voice of the Churches, grants and recognises autocephaly, and cares directly for the Orthodox of the diaspora on his reading of canon 28 of Chalcedon. He does not appoint the bishops of another autocephalous Church, does not legislate for it and cannot overrule its synod. Greek Orthodox writers describe this as the model of the first millennium, and they read Rome's primacy in that period as the same kind of office exercised through appeal, mediation and witness.

Where the model strains

Autocephaly places real strain on Orthodox unity when jurisdictions disagree, and Greek Orthodox writers say so themselves. The Holy and Great Council held at the Orthodox Academy of Crete in June 2016, prepared over decades and convened by the Ecumenical Patriarch, met without the Churches of Antioch, Russia, Georgia and Bulgaria, which withdrew shortly beforehand. In 2018 the Moscow Patriarchate broke eucharistic communion with Constantinople over the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, formalised by a tomos in January 2019, and the Churches of Greece, Alexandria and Cyprus subsequently recognised the new Church while others did not. The extent of the first place is disputed inside Orthodoxy, and it is disputed in good faith by people who share a chalice.

10. What Divides Greek Orthodox and Catholics

Four doctrinal questions stand between the Greek Orthodox Churches and Rome, and they are the same four that stand between Rome and the whole Eastern Orthodox communion. Everything else on the usual popular list, married priests, leavened bread, infant communion, beards, calendars, belongs to discipline and custom. Our guide to Eastern Orthodox Church beliefs works through each of the four at length, and our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 covers how the estrangement hardened. This section states each question in short and says where the dialogue stands.

The Filioque

The Filioque is the Latin phrase meaning "and the Son", added in the West to the clause of the Creed confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. Greek objections come in two parts. The canonical objection is that the Council of Constantinople in 381 settled the text and the Council of Ephesus in 431 forbade composing a rival creed, so one part of the Church altered a conciliar text without a council. The theological objection, argued by Photius of Constantinople in the ninth century and by Mark of Ephesus in the fifteenth, is that the addition gives the Spirit two causes and blurs the monarchy of the Father as the single source within the Trinity. Rome teaches that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, and a 1995 clarification from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity affirmed that the Father alone is the origin without origin of the Holy Spirit, noting that the Greek verb in the Creed and the Latin verb do not carry the same force. Popes have recited the Creed in Greek without the Filioque alongside Orthodox patriarchs, and the Byzantine Catholic Churches recite it without the addition. For the underlying doctrine of the divine persons, see our guide to the Trinity.

Papal jurisdiction

Greek Orthodoxy grants the Bishop of Rome primacy of honour as first bishop and denies that this carries ordinary, immediate and universal jurisdiction over every diocese and every believer. The Catholic Church defined that jurisdiction at the First Vatican Council in 1870 in the constitution Pastor Aeternus, and the Second Vatican Council set it inside a doctrine of episcopal collegiality in Lumen Gentium 22 to 23. In the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint John Paul II asked church leaders and theologians to help him find a way of exercising the primacy open to a new situation while renouncing nothing essential to its mission. The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue has since produced the Ravenna Document of 2007, agreeing that primacy exists at the universal level and that Rome held the first place among the patriarchs while recording continuing disagreement about what that involved, the Chieti Document of 2016 on the first millennium, and the Alexandria Document of 2023 on synodality and primacy in the second.

Papal infallibility

Papal infallibility, defined at Vatican I on 18 July 1870, teaches that when the pope speaks ex cathedra, defining a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he is preserved from error, and that such definitions are irreformable of themselves and not by the consent of the Church. Greek Orthodox theology locates infallibility in the whole Church, made visible in the decisions of ecumenical councils once the whole body has received them, and the 1848 encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs replying to Pius IX put it sharply by naming the body of the faithful as the guardian of the faith. The Catholic answer is that this is the Church's own infallibility exercised in a particular way under narrow conditions, and that the Catechism sets the papal charism alongside the sensus fidei of the whole people (CCC 92, 891 to 892).

The Immaculate Conception

The Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in 1854, teaches that Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception. Greek Orthodox Christians honour Mary at least as highly as Catholics do, calling her Panagia, the All-Holy, and singing that she is more honourable than the cherubim, and they decline this definition. The main reason is that Greek theology has no doctrine of inherited guilt, so there is no stain at conception from which Mary would need preserving, and the definition looks like an answer to a Latin problem. A second reason is procedural, that a pope defined a dogma binding on the whole Church without a council. Rome holds that the definition states in Western terms what the Greek liturgy has always sung about the All-Holy Mother of God. Our guide to original sin sets out the Catholic doctrine that stands behind the difference.

What Rome recognises

The Catholic Church recognises Greek Orthodox bishops, priests, Eucharist and other sacraments as valid, because these Churches have kept apostolic succession unbroken and celebrate the sacraments the apostles handed on. The Second Vatican Council said so in the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 15, which states that the Eastern Churches possess true sacraments, above all the priesthood and the Eucharist. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 adds that the communion between Rome and these Churches is so profound that it lacks little of what a common celebration of the Lord's Eucharist would require.

The Catholic column follows Pastor Aeternus (1870), Unitatis Redintegratio 14 to 18 (1964) and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Greek Orthodox column describes the common position of the Greek Orthodox Churches and binds no autocephalous Church, since each governs its own discipline and speaks for itself.

11. The Wound of 1204 and the Athens Apology

The sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in April 1204 is the single event that made the separation between Greek Christians and Rome feel permanent. A Latin army that had set out for the Holy Land was diverted to the Byzantine capital, took the city, and spent three days plundering it. Churches were stripped, Hagia Sophia was desecrated, relics and treasures were carried west, and a Latin Empire was installed over Constantinople until the Byzantines recovered the city in 1261. Greek Orthodox memory holds that a Church whose bishops preached the same Christ did this, and the memory has never been an abstract grievance. Our guide to the Crusades covers 1204 as an episode within the crusading movement, with the military and political detail this page leaves aside.

What John Paul II said in Athens

On 4 May 2001 Pope John Paul II visited Athens, the first pope to set foot in Greece in centuries, and met Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and All Greece. In his address he asked the Lord's forgiveness for the occasions, past and present, on which sons and daughters of the Catholic Church have sinned by action or omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters, and he named 1204 explicitly, saying that Catholics feel deep regret that the men who sacked Constantinople were Latin Christians who had set out to secure Christian access to the Holy Land and turned their swords against fellow believers. Archbishop Christodoulos, who had listed Greek grievances plainly in his own address, acknowledged the words. Traditionalist groups and Athonite monks protested the visit, which is part of the record and worth stating.

The 2004 anniversary

Rome returned to the subject on the eight hundredth anniversary. On 29 June 2004, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I was in Rome, and John Paul II spoke of the pain and disgust that the events of 1204 still cause, and of the Catholic Church's sorrow for them. Patriarch Bartholomew received the words as an act of reconciliation. On 27 November 2004 the relics of Saint Gregory Nazianzen and Saint John Chrysostom, both Constantinopolitan bishops whose relics had been in Rome since the crusading period, were returned to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and are now venerated at the Phanar.

What an apology settles and what it leaves

The apologies settle a grievance and leave the doctrine where it was. Greek Orthodox commentators noted at the time that words about 1204 do not answer the questions of the Filioque, jurisdiction, infallibility or the Marian dogmas, and they are right about that. What the apologies do is remove a reason for refusing the conversation. The same is true of the mutual excommunications of 1054, which Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I lifted by a joint declaration on 7 December 1965, proclaimed the same day in Saint Peter's Basilica and at the Phanar, with both men stating that the act did not by itself restore communion. Contact has been continuous since: the Ecumenical Patriarch or his delegate attends the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome each June, and a Roman delegation attends the feast of Saint Andrew at the Phanar each November.

12. Greek Orthodoxy Outside Greece

Most English-speaking readers meet Greek Orthodoxy through a diaspora parish rather than in Greece. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, established in the early 1920s and under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, is the body most English-speaking readers in North America will encounter, with its seminary and school of theology at Brookline in Massachusetts. Comparable archdioceses serve Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany and other countries, all under Constantinople on its reading of canon 28 of Chalcedon.

Language and generations

Diaspora parishes handle language differently as generations pass. Many now serve the liturgy in a mix of Greek and the local language, with the readings and sermon in English and the fixed hymns in Greek, and the Creed and the Lord's Prayer often sung in both. Greek schools attached to parishes teach the language to children, and parish festivals have become the main point of contact between Greek Orthodox communities and their neighbours. Converts from other Christian traditions are a growing presence in North American parishes, which changes the balance between the Church as an ethnic home and the Church as a confession.

The jurisdictional tangle

Several Orthodox jurisdictions overlap in the same Western cities, with Greek, Antiochian, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and other bishops each governing their own parishes in one territory. Orthodox canon law expects one bishop for one city, so the arrangement is acknowledged on all sides as an anomaly produced by migration. Episcopal assemblies bringing the bishops of a region together were established after a pan-Orthodox meeting at Chambesy in 2009 to coordinate work while the canonical question waits. Anyone comparing Christian bodies in the West will meet this tangle quickly, and our guide to Christian denominations maps the wider landscape.

Antioch, Alexandria and mission

Two Greek Orthodox patriarchates carry stories that rarely reach Western coverage. The Patriarchate of Antioch serves Arabic-speaking Christians across Syria and Lebanon under conditions of war and emigration that have reduced ancient communities severely. The Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa has expanded through mission across sub-Saharan Africa, with liturgies in African languages and clergy drawn from local populations, so much of the recent growth in that patriarchate has come from African converts and African-born clergy. Our guide to Christianity in Africa covers that wider picture.

13. Visiting a Greek Orthodox Church

A Catholic is welcome to attend a Greek Orthodox Divine Liturgy, and a few points of etiquette will spare everyone embarrassment. Greek parishes are used to visitors and rarely expect them to know the customs, and knowing them anyway is a form of respect.

Before and during the service

Dress modestly. On entering, most people light a candle, venerate the icons at the entrance with a bow and a kiss, and cross themselves; a visitor may do this or simply stand quietly. Greek Orthodox Christians cross themselves from right shoulder to left, the reverse of the Latin direction. Standing is normal for much of the service, seating exists for those who need it, and people arrive and settle over the first part of the liturgy without anyone treating it as rudeness. Photography during the service is out of place unless you have asked.

Communion and antidoron

Do not go forward for Holy Communion. Greek Orthodox parishes reserve the chalice for Orthodox Christians who have prepared by fasting and confession, because Orthodox theology treats communion as the seal of full unity in faith. The rule is a statement about the state of the two Churches and carries no judgment of you personally. At the end of the liturgy the priest distributes antidoron, blessed bread that was never consecrated, and everyone present may receive it. Catholic canon law runs in the opposite direction, permitting a Catholic minister to give the Eucharist, penance and anointing to an Orthodox Christian who asks for them and is properly disposed (Code of Canon Law 844), so the recognition is not mutual in practice.

If you are considering conversion

People who love Byzantine worship sometimes assume that becoming Orthodox is the only way to have it. There is a Catholic answer to that: the Eastern Catholic Churches celebrate the same Byzantine liturgy, keep the same fasts, ordain married men and recite the Creed without the Filioque, while remaining in full communion with Rome, and any Catholic may attend and receive there. Our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches explains how that works. If the attraction is doctrinal rather than liturgical, the honest course is to study the four questions in section 10 in their strongest form on both sides before deciding, and our guide to ecumenism sets out the Catholic approach to Christian unity.

14. Common Misunderstandings, Corrected

Several claims about the Greek Orthodox Church circulate widely and are wrong. Correcting them is worth a section, because most arguments between Catholics and Orthodox online begin with one of them.

"Greek Orthodox is a different religion from Catholicism"

Greek Orthodox Christians and Catholics hold the same creed, the same Trinity, the same Incarnation, the same seven sacraments and the same apostolic succession, and Rome recognises Greek Orthodox orders and Eucharist as valid. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 describes the communion between them as lacking little of what a common Eucharist would require. Two Churches out of communion with each other are still two Churches holding one faith on almost every article of it.

"The Orthodox reject Mary and the saints"

Greek Orthodox devotion to Mary is at least as intense as the Catholic form. She is Panagia, the All-Holy, named in every liturgy, honoured with the Akathist hymn through Great Lent and with the great feast of the Dormition on 15 August. The saints are venerated with icons, relics, name days and feasts throughout the year. What the Greek Orthodox decline is two Latin dogmatic definitions about Mary and the papal authority by which they were made. Our guide to the saints sets out the shared practice.

"The schism happened in 1054 and that was that"

The excommunications of July 1054 were exchanged between a papal legation led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Patriarch Michael Cerularius, they named individuals rather than whole Churches, and Pope Leo IX had already died before the legates acted, which is one reason canonists have questioned the legation's standing. Contemporaries did not treat the year as the end of communion. The estrangement built over centuries and hardened with 1204. Our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 follows the sequence in detail.

"Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic are the same"

Greek Catholic, or Byzantine Catholic, means a Church in full communion with Rome that keeps the Byzantine rite. Greek Orthodox means a Church in the Orthodox communion and out of communion with Rome. Both worship in almost identical fashion, so the distinction is invisible from a pew and decisive on paper. The Joint International Commission addressed the sore history behind these Churches at Balamand in 1993, agreeing that uniatism is not an acceptable method for seeking unity while affirming that the Eastern Catholic Churches that exist have a right to exist and to care for their faithful.

"Orthodoxy never changes and Catholicism keeps inventing things"

Greek Orthodoxy has developed too. Palamite theology was defined by councils in the fourteenth century, the calendar was revised in the twentieth, autocephaly has been granted repeatedly in the modern period, and the pan-Orthodox process that produced the Council of Crete in 2016 was itself a development. Catholic theology accounts for change with an explicit doctrine of the development of doctrine, and Greek theology usually speaks instead of the unfolding of what the Church always held. The disagreement is about how development is recognised and by whom, and both Churches have a history rather than a frozen deposit.

15. Related Topics