The Autocephalous Orthodox Churches

1. What Autocephaly Means

Autocephaly is the Orthodox term for full self-government, from the Greek autos (self) and kephale (head). An autocephalous church has its own head and answers to no higher church authority on earth. It elects its own primate and consecrates its own bishops with no confirmation required from outside, tries its own bishops in its own courts, sets its own statutes, calendar and disciplinary rules, and in most cases consecrates its own holy chrism.

The word describes government rather than doctrine. Every autocephalous Orthodox church holds the same faith, defined by the first seven ecumenical councils, celebrates the same Divine Liturgy in its own language, and recognises the baptisms, ordinations and Eucharist of all the others without qualification. A Serbian Orthodox Christian communes in a Romanian church, a Greek priest concelebrates with a Georgian bishop, and neither has crossed a boundary in the sense a Catholic would attach to the word. The bond that makes them one church is mutual commemoration in the liturgy and a shared cup.

Where the idea comes from

The pattern is older than the word. The New Testament speaks of churches in the plural, each located in a city and each fully the Church of God in that place: Paul writes to the church of God in Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:2), and Revelation addresses seven distinct churches in the province of Asia, each with its own angel and its own reckoning (Revelation 1:4, 2:1 to 3:22), which our guide to the seven churches of Revelation treats in detail. The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 shows the apostles and elders settling a disputed question in council rather than by a single decree issued from one desk.

By the fourth century that local reality had been organised into provinces and then into larger regions. Canon 6 of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 confirmed the customary authority of Alexandria, Rome and Antioch over their surrounding territories. Canon 2 of the First Council of Constantinople in 381 forbade bishops to intervene in dioceses outside their own region. Canon 8 of the Council of Ephesus in 431 protected the ancient independence of the Church of Cyprus against a claim from Antioch, and Orthodox canonists still cite it as the classic charter of autocephaly. The system that emerged, with five great sees at Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, is called the pentarchy.

What autocephaly does and does not deliver

An autocephalous church has complete internal freedom and remains bound to the communion as a whole. It cannot alter the Creed, cannot define doctrine on its own authority, cannot invade another church's territory, and cannot remain Orthodox while breaking communion with the rest. What it can do is govern itself entirely: pick its own leaders, run its own seminaries, canonise its own saints in most cases with pan-Orthodox reception following, negotiate with its own government, and speak in its own name.

2. Autocephaly, Autonomy and the Grades Between

Orthodox canon law recognises several degrees of self-government, and the difference between them turns on one question: who consecrates or confirms the primate. That single test sorts almost every case.

Autocephalous

The synod elects its primate and consecrates him without reference to anyone else. The primate is commemorated by name in the diptychs of the other churches. The church appears on the list of Orthodox churches in its own right. All fourteen undisputed churches sit here.

Autonomous

An autonomous church runs its own internal life, holds its own synod, elects its own bishops in practice, and has its primate confirmed, blessed or consecrated by a mother church. Its name appears under the mother church in the diptychs rather than on its own line. The Church of Finland and the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church are autonomous under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Japanese Orthodox Church and the Chinese Orthodox Church are autonomous under Moscow.

Semi-autonomous and self-governing

Several bodies sit between the two. The Church of Crete has its own synod and its own statutes while its metropolitans are elected by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, an arrangement usually called semi-autonomous. Moscow uses the phrase self-governing church for bodies such as the Latvian and Moldovan churches, which hold wide internal freedom under the Moscow Patriarchate without the title of autonomy. Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic republic of twenty ruling monasteries under the spiritual jurisdiction of Constantinople, governed by its own charter and by the Holy Community at Karyes.

Exarchates, metropolitanates and dioceses of the diaspora

Below all of these lie the ordinary structures a mother church erects outside its home territory: archdioceses, metropolitanates and exarchates in western Europe, the Americas, Australia, Asia and Africa. These have no independence at all. They are branches of their mother church living abroad, and their multiplication is the source of the diaspora problem treated in section 12.

3. Who Has the Right to Grant Autocephaly

Orthodoxy has never agreed on who may grant autocephaly, and that unresolved question is the direct cause of every current dispute on the list. Two positions are held, each with serious canonical argument behind it, and each held sincerely by large parts of the Orthodox world.

The Constantinopolitan position

The Ecumenical Patriarchate holds that the granting of autocephaly belongs to the first throne, acting with the consent of the other churches. The argument runs from canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which gave the see of Constantinople equal privileges with Rome and assigned it the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia and Thrace along with the churches among the barbarian peoples in those regions, and from canons 9 and 17 of the same council, which Constantinople reads as establishing a right of appeal to the see of the imperial city. On this view every modern autocephaly was in fact issued from the Phanar by a formal document called a tomos, and where another church has attempted to grant one, the act was outside its competence.

The Muscovite position

The Moscow Patriarchate holds that autocephaly is granted by the mother church from whose territory the new church separates, and that any pan-Orthodox dimension belongs to an ecumenical council rather than to one see. On this reading Moscow's own tomos to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970 was valid because North America had been evangelised from Russia, and Constantinople's tomos to Ukraine in 2019 was invalid because Ukraine had long since ceased to be Constantinopolitan territory. Moscow also insists that canon 28 of Chalcedon concerns the specific regions it names, and that the phrase about barbarian lands describes the barbarians of Pontus, Asia and Thrace rather than the whole world outside the ancient patriarchates.

The attempt to settle it, and its failure

The pre-conciliar process that ran from the 1960s toward the Holy and Great Council worked on autocephaly for decades. Meetings at Chambesy in Switzerland produced substantial agreement on a procedure: the mother church would initiate, the consent of all the autocephalous churches would be sought, and the Ecumenical Patriarch would issue the tomos. Agreement broke down on one remaining detail, the manner in which the tomos would be signed and whether the other primates signed as co-grantors or as witnesses. Because the point stayed open, autocephaly and the diptychs were both dropped from the agenda of the Holy and Great Council held in Crete in June 2016, and four churches, Antioch, Moscow, Georgia and Bulgaria, did not attend the council in any case.

The practical consequence is that Orthodoxy went into the Ukrainian crisis of 2018 with no agreed procedure for the very act at issue. Both sides could act in good conscience and neither could be shown to be procedurally wrong, because no procedure had been ratified.

What a tomos actually is

A tomos of autocephaly is a formal patriarchal and synodal document, written on parchment, signed and sealed, which declares a church self-heading and sets out the terms. Terms vary, and the variation matters. The Ukrainian tomos of 2019, for example, reserves certain matters to Constantinople, including the reception of appeals from Ukrainian bishops and the supply of holy chrism, and restricts the new church's jurisdiction to the territory of Ukraine, which prevents it from organising its own diaspora. Critics inside Ukraine and elsewhere have called those terms a limited autocephaly. Constantinople answers that every tomos in the modern era carried conditions of some kind.

4. The Diptychs: The Order of the Churches

The diptychs are the ordered list of primates commemorated by name during the Divine Liturgy, and they function as Orthodoxy's official register of who is in communion with whom. The name comes from the hinged writing tablets of antiquity on which the names of the living and the dead were recorded and read aloud at the altar. To be entered in the diptychs is to be recognised. To be struck from them is to be out of communion.

Order in the diptychs is a matter of honour rather than power. A church higher on the list has no authority over one lower down. The order encodes a mixture of apostolic antiquity, the civil importance of the city in late antiquity, and the sequence in which modern autocephalies were granted.

The order Constantinople keeps

The Ecumenical Patriarchate commemorates the churches in this sequence: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

The order Moscow keeps

The Moscow Patriarchate keeps the same four ancient sees at the head and then places Georgia sixth, immediately after Moscow, on the ground of Georgian antiquity, pushing Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria down one place each. Moscow then appends the Orthodox Church in America at the end. The two lists differ over honour rather than doctrine, and they are a standing reminder that Orthodoxy keeps no single register in one place.

Why Rome is no longer on the list

Rome held the first place in the diptychs of the undivided Church, and the name of the Bishop of Rome dropped out of the Eastern diptychs during the eleventh century, in the long estrangement whose conventional date is the mutual excommunications of 1054. Our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 sets out how that happened and why the date is a convenience rather than a clean break. When Constantinople moved up to first place, it moved up into a place that had been vacated rather than into a place it had conquered, and Orthodox writers are careful to say that the first place remains Rome's if communion is restored.

5. The Four Ancient Patriarchates

Four Orthodox churches trace their standing to the pentarchy of the first millennium. Each is small in population today by comparison with the Slavic churches, and each carries an authority in Orthodox reckoning that has nothing to do with size.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople

The Ecumenical Patriarchate is first in the diptychs and holds the primacy of honour in the Orthodox world. Its full style is Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch, and its seat is at the Phanar in Istanbul. Its ranking rests on canon 3 of the First Council of Constantinople in 381, which gave the bishop of Constantinople the prerogative of honour after the bishop of Rome because Constantinople was New Rome, and on canon 28 of Chalcedon in 451, which Rome declined to receive.

Its direct territory in Turkey is very small, and its jurisdiction abroad is large: the Greek Orthodox archdioceses of America, Britain, Australia and much of western Europe, the monasteries of Mount Athos, the Church of Crete, the Dodecanese, and the autonomous churches of Finland and Estonia. The patriarch presides at pan-Orthodox meetings, convenes councils, and receives appeals. Bartholomew I has held the office since 1991.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa

Alexandria is second in the diptychs, with a see founded by tradition by Saint Mark and a territory that now covers the whole African continent. Its patriarch bears the title Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, a use of the word pope that predates its Roman monopoly. The Greek Orthodox community in Egypt is small, and the patriarchate's growth over the last century has come from sub-Saharan Africa, where it has established metropolitanates across east, west and southern Africa and ordains African clergy. Our guide to Christianity in Africa covers that wider picture.

Alexandria should not be confused with the Coptic Orthodox Church, which also has a patriarch of Alexandria and belongs to the Oriental Orthodox communion, a separate body of churches that accepts three ecumenical councils rather than seven. Our guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches explains why the two are not in communion with each other.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East

Antioch is third, with its see now at Damascus rather than in the ancient city, and its faithful are predominantly Arabic-speaking Christians of Syria, Lebanon and the surrounding region, together with a substantial emigration in the Americas. Antioch has been in a jurisdictional dispute with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem since 2013 over the establishment of a Jerusalem archdiocese in Qatar, which Antioch regards as its own territory. Antioch has suspended concelebration with Jerusalem over the question and stayed away from the Council of Crete in 2016 partly for that reason.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem

Jerusalem is fourth, and its distinctive work is custody of the holy places, carried out through the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, a Greek-speaking monastic confraternity from which the patriarch and the bishops are drawn, serving a laity that is largely Arabic-speaking. Its territory covers Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and it shares rights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with the Armenian and Latin communities under the arrangements known as the status quo. Our guide to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre explains how those shared rights work.

6. The Later Patriarchates

Five Orthodox churches hold the rank of patriarchate by later grant: Moscow, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. Each of the five became autocephalous in the age of national states, and each carries the mark of that history.

The Russian Orthodox Church

Moscow is fifth in the diptychs and by a wide margin the largest Orthodox church by population. The metropolitanate of Kyiv, founded after the baptism of Rus in 988, was a province of Constantinople for four and a half centuries. In 1448 the Russian bishops elected Metropolitan Jonah without reference to Constantinople, an act taken in the aftermath of the Council of Florence and treated in Russia as the beginning of Russian autocephaly. Constantinople recognised Moscow as a patriarchate in 1589, when Patriarch Jeremias II travelled to Moscow and installed Job, and synods at Constantinople in 1590 and 1593 confirmed the act and fixed Moscow's rank as fifth.

Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate in 1721 and governed the church through a Holy Synod on a state model until 1917, when the Local Council restored the patriarchate and elected Tikhon. The persecution that followed under the Soviet state, the restoration of the patriarchate's public life in 1943, and the church's rebuilding after 1988 are covered in our guide to the Russian Orthodox Church, which also treats the Havana meeting of 2016 and the current relationship with Rome.

The Serbian Orthodox Church

Serbia was made an autocephalous archbishopric in 1219, when Sava, son of the Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja, obtained autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarch then residing in exile at Nicaea and became the first Serbian archbishop. The archbishopric was raised to a patriarchate at Pec in 1346 and abolished by the Ottoman authorities in 1766. Autocephaly was recognised again for the principality of Serbia in 1879, and the various Serbian church bodies in the new Yugoslav state were united into a single patriarchate in 1920, recognised by Constantinople in 1922. Its territory covers Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and North Macedonia, with dioceses across the diaspora, and the status of the church in Montenegro has been politically contested for decades.

The Romanian Orthodox Church

Romania is the second largest Orthodox church by population and the only one of the fourteen that worships in a Romance language. The metropolitanates of Wallachia and Moldavia had long enjoyed wide practical freedom under Constantinople, and after the union of the principalities the united Romanian church received a tomos of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1885. It was raised to the rank of patriarchate in 1925, an act Constantinople recognised. Romanian Orthodoxy is notable for the vigour of its monastic life and for a strong current of hesychast spirituality associated with the Philokalia, which Dumitru Staniloae translated and annotated across many volumes in the twentieth century.

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Bulgaria has the most turbulent autocephaly history of the five. A Bulgarian patriarchate existed in the medieval period and disappeared under Ottoman rule. In 1870 an Ottoman firman created a Bulgarian Exarchate, giving the Bulgarians a church organised by nationality inside the Ottoman capital and inside Constantinople's own territory. A council held at Constantinople in 1872 condemned that arrangement and coined the charge of phyletism, the subordination of the church to ethnic or national identity, declaring the Bulgarian church body schismatic. The schism lasted until 1945, when Constantinople recognised Bulgarian autocephaly. The patriarchate was restored in 1953 and recognised as such by Constantinople in 1961.

The condemnation of phyletism issued in that quarrel became one of the most cited principles in modern Orthodoxy, and it is aimed at exactly the temptation that autocephaly creates. Section 12 returns to it.

The Georgian Orthodox Church

Georgia is one of the oldest churches in the world, converted in the fourth century through the witness of Saint Nino, and its primate is styled Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia. Originally under Antioch, it was self-governing long before the modern period, and Georgian and Antiochene accounts date the grant of autocephaly differently, between the fifth century and the ninth. The Russian Empire abolished Georgian autocephaly in 1811 and absorbed the church into the Russian synodal system. Georgian bishops restored their autocephaly unilaterally in 1917, which Moscow refused to recognise until 1943. Constantinople recognised Georgian autocephaly in 1990 and issued a tomos confirming the patriarchal dignity the same year.

The two membership rankings used in this guide, Russia as the largest Orthodox church and Romania as the second largest, follow the country-level Orthodox populations published by the Pew Research Center in Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century (2017). No ranking is attempted further down the list. Published estimates diverge widely, and Pew counts the Oriental Orthodox churches inside its worldwide total, which makes that total unsuitable for measuring the smaller Eastern Orthodox churches against one another.

7. The Autocephalous Archbishoprics and Metropolias

Five autocephalous churches are headed by an archbishop or a metropolitan rather than a patriarch. Rank of title carries honour and no jurisdictional weight: the Church of Cyprus is as fully self-heading as the Patriarchate of Moscow.

The Church of Cyprus

Cyprus holds the oldest continuous autocephaly in Orthodoxy. Canon 8 of the Council of Ephesus in 431 confirmed that the bishops of Cyprus should perform their own ordinations free from any outside claim, rejecting an attempt by Antioch to bring the island under its authority. Cypriot tradition adds that after the discovery of the relics of Saint Barnabas in the late fifth century the Emperor Zeno granted the archbishop three imperial privileges still exercised today: to sign in red ink, to carry an imperial sceptre in place of a pastoral staff, and to wear a purple mantle. The archbishop is styled Archbishop of New Justiniana and All Cyprus.

The Church of Greece

The Church of Greece became autocephalous by political act before it did so canonically. In 1833 the Bavarian regency governing the newly independent Greek kingdom unilaterally declared the church in Greece independent of Constantinople, on a state-church model borrowed from northern Europe. Constantinople refused to accept the act for seventeen years and then issued a tomos of autocephaly in 1850 that regularised the situation on its own terms. The territorial arrangement remains complex: the dioceses of the so-called New Lands, acquired by Greece in the early twentieth century, remain canonically Constantinopolitan and are administered by the Church of Greece under a 1928 agreement, while Crete and the Dodecanese stay directly under Constantinople. Our guide to the Greek Orthodox Church covers its life and worship in detail.

The Church of Greece has customarily received holy myron from the Ecumenical Patriarchate rather than consecrating its own, one of several ways in which an autocephalous church can retain a link of dependence in practice.

The Polish Orthodox Church

Poland's autocephaly was granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in a tomos of 13 November 1924, after the reconstitution of the Polish state left a large Orthodox population, mostly Belarusian and Ukrainian, outside the reach of a Russian church then under severe Soviet pressure. Moscow rejected that tomos and, after the Second World War and the redrawing of Poland's borders, issued an autocephaly of its own in 1948. The Polish church therefore holds two tomoi from two mother churches, and the coexistence of the documents has never been resolved.

The Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania

Albania is the youngest of the fourteen and has the most nearly complete destruction and rebuilding in its record. An Albanian-language church was organised in the 1920s and received a tomos of autocephaly from Constantinople in 1937. In 1967 the Albanian state declared itself atheist and abolished organised religion entirely, closing every church and mosque in the country and leaving the Orthodox church without a single functioning bishop. Reconstruction began in 1991, when the Ecumenical Patriarchate sent Anastasios Yannoulatos, a Greek bishop and missiologist, first as patriarchal exarch and then as archbishop from 1992. Under him the church rebuilt its parishes, reopened a seminary, and returned to ordinary life.

The Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia

The Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia serves a small Orthodox minority in two countries whose Christian memory runs back to Saints Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. Its modern history includes the martyrdom of Bishop Gorazd, executed by the Nazi occupation in 1942 for sheltering the men who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in the crypt of a Prague cathedral, and canonised by the church in 1987. Moscow granted the church autocephaly in 1951. Constantinople did not accept that grant and issued its own tomos in 1998, which the church accepted while continuing to date its autocephaly from 1951, and a dispute over the two documents has recurred since.

8. The Full List at a Glance

The table below gives the fourteen universally recognised autocephalous churches in the order the Ecumenical Patriarchate keeps them, followed by the three contested cases. Rank refers to position in Constantinople's diptychs. The table scrolls sideways on a narrow screen.

Ranks follow the diptychs kept by the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Moscow Patriarchate places Georgia sixth and appends the Orthodox Church in America to the end of its own list, so the numbers above are not universal inside Orthodoxy.

9. The Contested Autocephalies

Three churches govern themselves as autocephalous while carrying recognition from some of the fourteen and not from others. In every case the sacraments are accepted as valid across Orthodoxy and the argument concerns the standing of the tomos rather than the reality of the church.

The Orthodox Church in America

Orthodoxy in North America began with the Russian mission to Alaska in 1794 and grew into a diocese of the Russian church covering the whole continent, which for a time gathered immigrant communities of many nationalities under one bishop. The Russian revolution cut its funding and its links, other mother churches sent their own bishops to their own emigrants, and by the middle of the twentieth century a dozen overlapping jurisdictions were operating in the same cities. In 1970 the Moscow Patriarchate granted the Russian-descended body a tomos of autocephaly under the name Orthodox Church in America, intending it to become the nucleus of a single local church for the continent.

That did not happen. Moscow, Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia list the OCA among the autocephalous churches. Constantinople and several others regard the OCA as canonical and its orders and Eucharist as valid while declining the autocephaly, arguing that Moscow had no competence to erect a self-heading church outside its own territory and that the diaspora falls to the first throne. The OCA sits in the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America alongside the Greek, Antiochian, Serbian, Romanian and other jurisdictions. Our guide to Orthodox churches in America maps the jurisdictions and explains which one a newcomer is likely to walk into.

The Archbishopric of Ohrid

The Orthodox church in what is now North Macedonia declared autocephaly unilaterally in 1967, separating from the Serbian Patriarchate, and spent fifty-five years out of communion with the rest of Orthodoxy. Its sacraments were not recognised, its clergy could not concelebrate, and a parallel Serbian structure operated in the same territory. In May 2022 the Ecumenical Patriarchate accepted the church into communion under the name Archbishopric of Ohrid, leaving the questions of its name and its administrative status to be settled with Belgrade. The Serbian Patriarchate restored communion the same month and granted a tomos of autocephaly on 5 June 2022.

Recognition has been spreading since, and the name remains contested because the Church of Greece and others resist the use of the word Macedonian in an ecclesiastical title. The case is the clearest recent example of a long schism ending, and it is worth holding beside the Ukrainian case, where the same mechanism produced the opposite result.

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine

Ukraine is the live dispute, and it has its own section next.

10. The 2019 Ukrainian Tomos and the Moscow Rupture

The Ukrainian question broke Orthodox communion at the top in 2018 and has not been repaired. The sequence of events is not in dispute; the reading of them is. Both cases are stated here as each side states it.

The document of 1686

In 1686 the Ecumenical Patriarch Dionysius IV issued a letter concerning the metropolitanate of Kyiv and the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow to consecrate its metropolitan. Moscow reads that act as a permanent transfer of the Kyiv metropolitanate into its jurisdiction, which would make Ukraine Russian canonical territory for more than three centuries and would make any Constantinopolitan action there an intrusion into another church's house. Constantinople reads the same letter as granting a temporary and conditional permission under the political duress of the period, revocable by the throne that granted it, and in October 2018 it formally revoked it.

What happened in 2018 and 2019

On 11 October 2018 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced its intention to proceed with autocephaly for Ukraine, lifted the censures on the hierarchs of two Ukrainian bodies it had previously regarded as schismatic, and revoked the 1686 letter. The Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate responded on 15 October 2018 by severing eucharistic communion with Constantinople, which means that Russian Orthodox Christians are instructed not to receive communion in churches of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and that concelebration between the two has stopped. A unification council met in Kyiv on 15 December 2018 and elected Metropolitan Epifaniy Dumenko as primate of a new body, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Patriarch Bartholomew signed the tomos of autocephaly at the Phanar on 5 January 2019 and formally presented it to Epifaniy at the Liturgy the following day.

Who recognises the new church

Four churches have recognised the Orthodox Church of Ukraine: the Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Church of Greece, the Church of Cyprus, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate that granted the tomos. Moscow responded to each recognition by ceasing to commemorate the primate concerned rather than by breaking with the whole church in question, and by establishing a Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa in December 2021 inside the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, receiving clergy who left Alexandria over the Ukrainian question. Other churches have declined to take a position, several have called for a pan-Orthodox council to settle the matter, and no such council has met.

Getting the Ukrainian names right

Several bodies with similar names operate in Ukraine, and confusing them produces nonsense. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine is the body that received the 2019 tomos from Constantinople. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church was until recently under the Moscow Patriarchate as a self-governing church and declared its independence from Moscow at a council in May 2022, a declaration whose canonical status is unsettled and which no other church has ratified with a tomos. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is a Byzantine-rite church in full communion with Rome and belongs to a different communion entirely; our guide to the 23 Eastern Catholic churches explains that family.

11. The Autonomous and Self-Governing Churches

Below the autocephalous churches sits a second tier of bodies that run their own affairs under a mother church. Their number is not fixed, partly because different mother churches use the terms differently.

Under the Ecumenical Patriarchate

The Orthodox Church of Finland received autonomy in 1923, after Finnish independence separated its parishes from the Russian church, and it is unusual in following the Gregorian calendar for the fixed feasts and for Pascha alike, which puts its Easter on the Western date and out of step with the rest of Orthodoxy. The Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church received a tomos of autonomy in 1923 as well; it was suppressed under Soviet rule and its structures revived in 1996, an act that produced a brief break in communion between Constantinople and Moscow and left two Orthodox jurisdictions operating in Estonia, one under Constantinople and one under Moscow.

The Church of Crete is semi-autonomous, with its own synod under the presidency of the Archbishop of Crete and its metropolitans elected by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic republic of twenty ruling monasteries with its own charter and civil administration, under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch. Neither is a candidate for autocephaly and both are counted among the Orthodox bodies with a distinct standing. Readers drawn to Eastern monasticism may also want our guide to the monasteries of Meteora in Greece.

Under the Moscow Patriarchate

The Japanese Orthodox Church, founded by the Russian missionary Nicholas Kasatkin in the nineteenth century, received autonomy from Moscow in 1970 on the same day as the American tomos, and Constantinople does not recognise that autonomy either. The Chinese Autonomous Orthodox Church was granted autonomy by Moscow in 1957; its life was largely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and its structures remain very limited, with pastoral care in practice provided from Moscow. Our guide to Christianity in China gives the wider setting.

Moscow also designates several bodies as self-governing churches with wide internal autonomy: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Moldovan Orthodox Church, the Latvian Orthodox Church, and the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, in schism from Moscow from the 1920s, was reconciled in 2007 and now holds a self-governing status inside the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Baltic cases

The Baltic states show how quickly civil politics can enter these questions. In 2022 the Latvian parliament passed legislation declaring the Latvian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow, an act of civil law whose canonical effect is contested and for which no other Orthodox church has issued a tomos. In Lithuania a group of clergy who had been removed by the Moscow-linked diocese appealed to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which received them and moved to establish its own presence in the country, a step Moscow rejects as an intrusion into its territory. Estonia continues to carry two parallel jurisdictions. None of the three has produced a settled canonical outcome.

The Church of Sinai

One body with a distinct standing in Orthodoxy consists of a single monastery. The Archbishopric of Sinai is the Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai together with its dependencies. Its abbot is also its archbishop, elected by the monastic brotherhood and consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Most lists count Sinai as autonomous under Jerusalem, and some Orthodox writers describe it as autocephalous on the strength of its ancient privileges. The monastery has been inhabited without interruption since the sixth century, and its library preserves biblical and patristic manuscripts from the early Christian centuries.

12. Ethnophyletism and the Diaspora Problem

Autocephaly creates a standing temptation, and Orthodoxy has a name for the sin it produces. Ethnophyletism, or phyletism, is the subordination of the church to ethnic or national identity, so that the church becomes the religious department of a nation. The Council of Constantinople of 1872 condemned it by name in the course of the Bulgarian dispute, and the condemnation has been reasserted many times since, including by Orthodox theologians in recent years against the political theology sometimes described as the Russian world.

The canonical principle that ethnophyletism violates is simple and ancient: one bishop in one city. Canon 8 of the First Council of Nicaea forbids two bishops in the same city, on the reasoning that the local church is one and its unity is visible in its bishop. Applied strictly, that principle means the Orthodox faithful of Chicago or Sydney or London should have one bishop between them.

What actually happens in the diaspora

Mass emigration from Orthodox countries over the last century produced the opposite. Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Antiochian, Bulgarian, Georgian and Ukrainian communities each brought their own clergy and each stayed attached to their mother church, and every major western city now has several Orthodox bishops of different jurisdictions with overlapping territory. Each mother church defends the arrangement as pastoral care of its own emigrants in their own language. Orthodox canonists on all sides agree that the situation is canonically irregular.

The episcopal assemblies

The fourth pre-conciliar pan-Orthodox conference at Chambesy in June 2009 adopted a provisional remedy: episcopal assemblies in each region of the diaspora, gathering all the canonical Orthodox bishops of that region under the presidency of the senior hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, to coordinate pastoral work and to prepare a canonical solution. The assemblies exist and meet. They have no jurisdiction over their members, and no canonical solution has yet emerged.

13. What Autocephaly Is Not

Several bodies get swept into lists of Orthodox churches that do not belong there, and the confusions are worth clearing.

Oriental Orthodox churches are a separate communion

The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara churches form the Oriental Orthodox communion, which accepts three ecumenical councils and parted from the rest over the Christological language of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. They are self-governing bodies with their own patriarchs and catholicoi, and they are not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox churches listed here, notwithstanding the substantial convergence achieved in modern joint statements. Counting an Oriental Orthodox church among the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches is a category error, and our guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches sets the two families side by side.

Old Calendarist and other breakaway groups

When most Orthodox churches adopted the revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts in the 1920s, groups in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and elsewhere refused and separated, and the resulting Old Calendarist bodies have themselves divided repeatedly. They are outside communion with the fourteen churches and are not counted among them. Note that several churches in full communion, including Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Georgia and the monasteries of Athos, also keep the old calendar while remaining fully inside the communion, so calendar and communion are separate questions.

Eastern Catholic churches are Catholic

The Byzantine-rite churches in full communion with Rome, such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, use the same liturgy and the same vestments as their Orthodox neighbours and belong to the Catholic communion. There are twenty-three of them, each self-governing in the Catholic sense of sui iuris, which is the nearest Catholic analogue to autocephaly and stops short of it: a patriarch elected in one of these churches requests ecclesiastical communion from the pope after his election, and a major archbishop's election has to be confirmed by the pope before he can be enthroned. Our guide to the 23 Eastern Catholic churches covers them.

Autocephaly is not a denomination count

Fourteen autocephalous churches do not make fourteen denominations. They hold one faith, one baptism and one Eucharist, and an Orthodox Christian moving from Bucharest to Belgrade simply attends the local church. The comparison with Protestant denominational division, which our guide to Christian denominations works through, does not hold, because denominations differ in doctrine while autocephalous churches differ in government alone.

14. How Catholics Read Autocephaly

The Catholic Church regards the Orthodox churches as true particular churches possessing valid sacraments, and it holds that communion with the Bishop of Rome belongs to the structure the Lord gave his church. Both halves of that sentence are Catholic teaching, and holding them together is what makes the Catholic view of autocephaly something other than simple rejection.

What Rome affirms

The Second Vatican Council decree Unitatis Redintegratio 15 states that the Eastern churches possess true sacraments, above all the priesthood and the Eucharist, held through apostolic succession, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 says that with the Orthodox churches the communion is so profound that it lacks little to attain the fullness that permits a common celebration of the Eucharist. The council also affirmed the right of the Eastern churches to govern themselves according to their own disciplines, and the decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum defends the patriarchal institution and the ancient rights that go with it.

Where the difference lies

Catholic teaching holds that the pope has full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church, and that he is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful (CCC 882). An autocephalous church by definition admits no such jurisdiction. That is the difference, and it is a real one, treated at length in our guide to the papacy and in our guide to Eastern Orthodox beliefs, which works through the four questions that keep the two churches from a common altar.

The dialogue on primacy

The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church has spent years on exactly this. The Ravenna document of 2007 agreed that primacy exists at the local, regional and universal levels and that the bishop of Rome is the first among the patriarchs, while stating plainly that the two sides disagree on what that universal primacy entails. The Chieti document of 2016 examined synodality and primacy in the first millennium and set out what the two traditions can agree the first millennium actually shows. In Ut Unum Sint 95, John Paul II asked church leaders and theologians to help him find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is open to a new situation. That invitation stands.

What a Catholic should take from the list

Read the list and the reason for Catholic interest becomes concrete. Orthodoxy has held apostolic faith and valid sacraments across fourteen self-governing churches for centuries with no universal court of appeal, which shows that conciliar government can carry enormous weight. It has also produced a rupture at the top since 2018 that no mechanism inside Orthodoxy has been able to close, which shows what a communion lacks when the last appeal has no address. Neither observation settles the argument. Both belong in an honest account, and our guide to ecumenism covers the wider work of Christian reunion.

15. Related Topics