On October 11, the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced that the process of recognizing the independence, or autocephaly, of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had started, rejecting the decision of 1686 by which the Kiev Metropolitanate was handed over to Moscow.
This is the most important event in the Ukrainian ecclesiastical crisis. Only two years after the Pan-Orthodox Assembly in Crete, which was supposed to express Orthodox unity, relations in the Orthodox world are deteriorating. Whatever narrative is used, the rhetoric of the ecclesiastical heads is being tightened, each accusing the other.
After Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asked the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, for a “Tomos”, or decree of autocephaly for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the Ecumenical Patriarch decided to get involved in resolving the issue, sending envoys, known as exarchs, to Ukraine, only days after meeting the Russian Patriarch Kirill in Istanbul.
In response, the Moscow Patriarchate decided to halt joint worship, ignore the Ecumenical Patriarch in prayers in the Russian liturgy and cease participating in inter-collegial bodies.
Part of the Orthodox Church believes that the crisis in the Ukrainian Church is an internal issue of the Russian Orthodox Church because Ukraine remains under its ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and no other Orthodox Church has any right, under the teaching of the Church and its canons, to question a sister church.
Logically, such a position represents Moscow, in the first place, as defending its own territory. On the other hand, Constantinople (Istanbul) presents itself as the Mother Church, which has an obligation to care for Church unity and to actively solve problems and crises in the Orthodox world.
Bartholomew has said that because Russia is “responsible for the current painful situation in Ukraine [and] is unable to solve the problem, the Ecumenical Patriarchate took the initiative to solve the problems in accordance with the authority given by the holy canons and responsibilities of the jurisdiction over the Diocese in Kiev”.
Now we have a polarization of attitudes, with Kirill of Moscow asking the other Orthodox leaders to “do everything in their power” to launch a discussion of this issue of Ukraine. He is looking for a new pan-Orthodox council on the Ukraine issue.
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