Primacy of Honor Among Orthodox Churches

Canon 3 of the First Council of Constantinople in 381 ranked the bishop of Constantinople immediately after the bishop of Rome, reasoning that Constantinople was New Rome, the empire's new political capital. Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 confirmed and extended this ranking over the objections of the Roman legates present.

After the eleventh century schism separated the Orthodox East from the Catholic West, Constantinople became, by that same ancient ranking, the first see in honor among all the churches that remained in communion with one another as Orthodox, a position it still formally holds. Orthodox ecclesiology has traditionally insisted, in deliberate contrast to the developing Roman doctrine of papal primacy and infallibility, that this ranking is a primacy of honor and coordination only, never a jurisdiction empowering one bishop to govern, overrule, or bind the others. The general Orthodox principle is conciliarity: no single bishop, however honored his historic see, can act unilaterally for the whole church, and major questions are properly settled by councils of bishops acting together rather than by one primate's decree, a structural difference Orthodox theologians have long pointed to as the central distinction between their own ecclesiology and the Roman Catholic Church's.

Since the 1990s, and especially since granting the Tomos of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew I has acted on an understanding of Constantinople's historic primacy that includes a real, exercisable right: the authority to grant autocephaly to a church requesting it and to hear appeals from clergy or churches in dispute with their own hierarchy anywhere in the Orthodox world, powers Constantinople argues flow directly from its ancient ranking as first see.

The Moscow Patriarchate has publicly and repeatedly rejected this expansive reading, describing it in official statements as amounting to a Constantinopolitan version of the very papacy Orthodoxy has always defined itself against, and insisting that genuine Orthodox ecclesiology permits autocephaly to be granted only with the consent of the church whose territory is affected, confirmed by agreement among the whole communion of autocephalous churches, not decided by Constantinople alone. Other Orthodox churches have not uniformly sided with either patriarchate, leaving the underlying question, how much practical authority a primacy of honor actually carries, without any body positioned to resolve it, since Orthodoxy has no equivalent of a pope who could issue a binding ruling on the dispute even in principle.