Self Headed, and Answerable to No Single See

Autocephaly is the standing an Orthodox church holds when it is fully self-governing, electing its own primate and its own bishops without needing the approval of any other church. The word comes from Byzantine Greek and means, literally, self-headed. An autocephalous church is not a breakaway body; it remains in full communion and shares the same faith and sacraments as every other Orthodox church, and its bishops still take part in the wider councils and consultations of world Orthodoxy. What autocephaly removes is any requirement to answer administratively to an outside authority. Fourteen or fifteen churches hold this standing today, among them the ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem alongside national churches such as Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia, each headed by a patriarch, archbishop or metropolitan depending on its own tradition. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holds a place of honor first among equals in the traditional order of precedence, but this honor is not the same as jurisdiction, and Constantinople cannot overrule the internal decisions of another autocephalous church. Orthodoxy has no single universal primate comparable to the pope of Rome; authority is instead distributed across this communion of self-governing churches, bound together by shared belief rather than by a shared chain of command.