Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople

The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holds a position of honor within Eastern Orthodoxy described as primus inter pares, first among equals, among the presiding bishops of the roughly fifteen self-governing (autocephalous) Orthodox churches worldwide. Unlike the Pope within Roman Catholicism, the Ecumenical Patriarch has no direct jurisdiction over other Orthodox churches such as the Russian, Serbian, Romanian or Greek churches, each of which governs its own affairs through its own synod of bishops; the Patriarch's primacy is one of honor, coordination and certain specific canonical prerogatives, such as granting autocephaly to new churches, rather than command.

The see's prominence dates to the fourth century, when Constantine the Great made Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in 330 CE; church councils in 381 and 451 formally ranked the bishop of the new capital second in honor after Rome, and after the eleventh century Great Schism divided Eastern and Western Christianity, Constantinople became the senior see of Orthodoxy as a whole. The Patriarchate survived the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople under a system granting it civil authority over the empire's Orthodox Christian population, a role radically diminished after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the later, near-total displacement of the city's Greek Orthodox population in the twentieth century.

The Ecumenical Patriarch is elected by the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, a body of metropolitans whose sees today lie mostly outside Turkey, from among its own members; Turkish law additionally requires that the Patriarch hold Turkish citizenship, a requirement that has narrowed the practical pool of eligible candidates to Orthodox clergy of the greatly reduced Greek community still resident in Istanbul.

This numerical weakness sits oddly beside the Patriarchate's continuing symbolic and canonical importance: it retains jurisdiction over Mount Athos, the historic monastic republic in northern Greece, over Orthodox communities in the Americas, Western Europe, Australia and elsewhere outside the territory of other autocephalous churches, and has played a leading role in modern ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, including landmark meetings between Patriarch Athenagoras I and Pope Paul VI in the 1960s that mutually lifted the excommunications the two churches had held against each other since 1054. The Patriarchate's relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox church by membership, has been strained in the twenty-first century by disputes over jurisdiction in Ukraine.