Author: Alex. Nemoianu
December 18, 2009
About the American Autocephaly- an historical perspective
In Orthodoxy, Autocephaly is the status of a Church whose Senior Bishop does not report to any higher-level Bishop. The original Orthodox Churches of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem were followed by those of Cyprus and Georgia, and for the most part, Orthodoxy stayed this way until the second millennium. Newer autocephalous Churches then started being formed, and they all recognized a basic Orthodox tenet, that these Churches have to be local, an expression of the fact that the Church is the Body of Christ, the totality of the faithful.
It was also a recognition that the Body of Christ is not a “theocracy”, that some people muse about, but the totality of the clerics and faithful, “the people of God”, the guarantors of Faith, united by the bond of love; a bond that is contrary to any form of “theocracy”. (In fact the dictionaries define “theocracy” as being a “form of government in which authority is exercised by clergy”. Such “theocracies” are Iran and the state of Vatican and, in the past, Tibet. The Body of Christ is anything but “a form of government” and in the Church, authority was never exercised by the clergy alone, but by the clergy and faithful – the entire people of God.)
The first such “newer” church body was the Bulgarian Patriarchate whose autocephaly was recognized by the See of Constantinople in the Xth century. This opened the historical process of establishing local, autocephalous bodies all over the world: in Russia, in Romania, in Serbia, in Poland, in the Czech lands and finally in the New World.
It is a historical fact that the movements for autocephaly, be they in Russia, Romania, Balkans or wherever, were always bitterly and fiercely opposed by the See of Constantinople, and the canonical jurisdictions under its control. Up to a point, that reactionary attitude has an explanation. These reasons were and are essentially political and personal. The See of Constantinople, who still claims to be a sort of Orthodox “Vatican”(?!), cannot accept the fact that it was reduced to a tiny Greek enclave in Turkey. It is a distorted self image and an almost pitiful attempt to act as the descendant of the Byzantine Empire; an Empire which ceased to exist more than five hundred years ago. At the same time we witness a typical case of “anachronism”, the projection in the past of a contemporary concept and ideology, i.e Greek nationalism. The case of Romania is used to illustrate and prove the aforementioned.
The Romanian Synod proclaimed the autocephaly of the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1872. Only in 1885 did the See of Constantinople recognize this autocephaly, but the Romanian Patriarchate was recognized only in 1925. It is far from being an ancient body. Even so, in order to continue to play a role in the fantasy game of Constantinople, the Primate of the Romanian Church, to this day, has to carry the title of “locum tenens of the Archbishop of Caesarea in Capadocia”. That title is pretty much the equivalent of being called “locum tenens of the President of Atlantis”.
In such a context the effort to create an autocephalous canonical body in the New World is huge but necessary. In wisdom and in a responsible manner in 1970, the autocephalous Orthodox Church of America came into existence. In the same year the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America, “Vatra”, irreversibly joined this autocephalous body. The Orthodox Church of America, that is its autocephaly, was and is recognized by the Orthodox Churches of: Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. This autocephaly is not recognized, but nor is it opposed, by the Churches of: Antioch, Serbia, Romania and Albania. The autocephaly is opposed by the See of Constantinople and by the Greek jurisdictions of Greece, Cyprus and Jerusalem. As such, the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of America is recognized by approximately 80% of the Orthodox faithful in the world, and recognized or not opposed by approximately 90% of them. If this is not an overwhelming majority, what is?
In this context it is obvious that the movement toward autocephaly in North America was natural and historic. What happened a few centuries ago in the Old World was happening in 1970 in the New World. The arguments used against the autocephalous movements in the past are also used today, almost verbatim, in a rather sad and unconvincing form of ecclesiological mannerism. It is embarrassing that those “arguments”, used against autocephaly in the New World, are exclusively ethnocentric and based on phyletism. Those “arguments” were unable to stop the movements for autocephaly in the Old World and they will be unable to stop the same movement here, in the New World.
Alexandru Nemoianu