Pan-Orthodox Holy and Great Council
The convening of the "Holy and Great Council" of Orthodox churches was meant to promote unity among the world's 300 million Orthodox believers. The council was planned as the first meeting of all Orthodox leaders since the Second Council of Nicea in 787, when the last of the seven ecumenical councils recognized by the heads of both the Eastern and Western Christian church was held in Nicaea (present-day Iznik in northwestern Turkey). In preparation for 55 years, and the first such meeting in 1,200 years, the event turned into a showcase of religious disagreement. The world’s largest Orthodox church and three other Orthodox churches boycotted the gathering.
Bartholomew I, the Istanbul-based ecumenical patriarch considered the "first among equals" of the heads of the independent, or autocephalous, Orthodox churches, and regarded as the spiritual leader of Orthodox believers, had been the driving force behind the initiative to hold the council. But some leaders in the Russian Orthodox Church viewed Bartholomew as a rival and considered his push to organize the council as an attempt to diminish or usurp their authority.
The council would be presided as established by the Ecumenical Patriarch, while the Primates of the other Orthodox churches would be seated to his right and to his left. Each Church would send a delegation consisting of its Primate and 24 bishops.
The Church of Bulgaria was the first to drop out, citing the seating plan, a lack of “particularly important” topics on the agenda, and the handling of documents. The Church of Antioch, the Damascus-based patriarchate, refused to attend because of an ongoing dispute with the Jerusalem Patriarchate over the jurisdiction of the Muslim Gulf state of Qatar. Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II of All Georgia said the Church of Georgia would not attend over the council's rejection of a Georgia-proposed document. The Bulgarian, Georgian, and Antioch churches may have been influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church.
The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, said in a message to the council that he would not attend since he considered the Crete gathering a preparatory session for a synod that will unite all the churches "without exception" at a later date. Russian Orthodox clergy have been deeply suspicious of Bartholomew’s actions, voicing concern that the council could pave the way to closer ties with the Vatican, Protestants, and others. Such ideas are anathema to a part of Russia’s conservative clergy, some of whom regard Russia’s Orthodox Church as the new Rome -- the true successor to the Byzantine Christian church after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
The patriarchal and synodical encyclical of Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III in 1902, through which the Primates of the Orthodox Autocephalous Churches were called to collaborate to face the problems concerning the Orthodox Church at that time was the spark which initiated the preparation of a great panorthodox council. The Ecumenical Patriarch Photios II convened the meeting of an inter-Orthodox preparatory committee in 1930 at the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, during which they established an initial list of 17 topics, which were raised to be addressed, including inter-Orthodox relations, the relations of the Orthodox Church with other Churches and Christian confessions, the question of the calendar and various questions of disciplinary order. This council was necessary following the significant changes that the Orthodox Church had witnessed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by the emergence of new autocephalous Churches, and the challenges the new century threw at the Church, already shaken by the First World War.
It was Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras that revived the idea of convening a council after the Second World War, by two patriarchal letters addressed to the Primates of the Patriarchal and Autocephalous Orthodox Churches in 1951 and 1952. However, it was not until 1961 that the first panorthodox conference was able to meet in Rhodes and officially and definitively launched the process of the preparation of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church. The conference approved a long list of topics to be addressed by the council and were classified according to the following eight categories: 1) Faith and dogma; 2) Divine Worship; 3) Administration of the Church; 4) Relations between the Orthodox Churches; 5) Relations of the Orthodox Churches with the rest of the Christian world; 6) Orthodoxy and the World; 7) theological topics (including the question of the economy versus akribeia, the relationship of the Orthodox Church with other religions, euthanasia and cremation); 8) Social issues (such as the family, youth, discrimination).
This list, considered too ambitious, was restricted to ten subjects by the First pre-conciliar panorthodox conference of Chambésy in 1976, which preferred to focus on three main areas: inter-Orthodox relations, the relations of the Orthodox Church with the rest of Christian world and the witness of the Orthodox Church in the contemporary world. Therefore, ten subjects appeared on the agenda of the Holy and Great Council: 1) The issue of the calendar; 2) The impediments to marriage; 3) The adaptation of the rules of fasting to contemporary conditions; 4) The relations of the Orthodox Church with other Churches and Christian confessions; 5) The relations of the Orthodox Church to the ecumenical movement; 6) The relations of the Orthodox Church in the world; 7) The issue of the Orthodox diaspora; 8) Autocephaly and the manner of its proclamation; 9) Autonomy and the manner of its proclamation; 10) The diptychs of the Orthodox Church.
The First panorthodox pre-conciliar conference of Chambésy in 1976 also established a process for the preparation of the Holy and Great Council. A secretariat for the preparation of the Holy and Great Council was established at the Orthodox Centre of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Chambésy. It was to receive proposals for each Patriarchal or Autocephalous Orthodox Church in relation to each of the ten established themes and to produce a report to be subsequently examined by an inter-Orthodox preparatory committee convened by the Ecumenical Patriarch who was to meet as many times as necessary until a consensus would be reached between the various Patriarchal and Autocephalous Orthodox Churches on the subject.
The text reflected the consensus reached and was then sent by the secretariat to the Holy Synod of each local Orthodox Church to be ratified, or to be commentated on again. The final comments of each Church were to be sent to the secretariat, which took them into account for the final text, which was to be discussed and adopted unanimously by a panorthodox pre-conciliar Conference convened by the Ecumenical Patriarch. This consisted the last step for the development of texts on different topics and the Council to be discussed and adopted by the Council.
In this spirit, the Second panorthodox pre-conciliar conference of Chambésy in 1982 adopted the text on the issue of the impediments to marriage, of the adaptation of the rules of fasting to contemporary conditions, of the question of the calendar (mainly about the common date of Easter (Pascha), following a conference of Orthodox astronomers and canonists previously gathered at Chambésy). The Third panorthodox pre-conciliar conference of Chambésy in 1986 adopted the text on “the contribution of the Orthodox Church to the realization of peace, justice, liberty, fraternity and love among peoples, and the elimination of racial discrimination and other forms of discrimination,” the relationship of the Orthodox Church to the ecumenical movement, the relationship of the Orthodox Church with the Christian world, and adopted bylaws of the preparatory pre-conciliar conferences and the inter-Orthodox preparatory committees where all the decisions should be taken by consensus, except for procedural matters to be taken by two-thirds of the heads of delegations present.
The Fourth Panorthodox pre-conciliar conference of Chambésy in 2009 adopted the final text on the Orthodox diaspora, which ratified the Orthodox Episcopal Assemblies in twelve regions: 1) North and Central America, 2) South America, 3) Australia – New Zealand – Oceania, 4) Great Britain – Ireland, 5) France, 6) Belgium – Netherlands – Luxembourg, 7) Austria, 8) Italy and Malta, 9) Switzerland 10) Germany 11) Scandinavia, 12) Spain and Portugal. The region of North and Central America was later divided between Canada and the USA during the Synaxis of the Primates of the Orthodox Church in 2014, while Mexico was attached to the South American region and renamed “Latin American.” This panorthodox pre-conciliar conference also adopted the working procedure of these episcopal assemblies.
When the Synaxis of the Primates of the Orthodox Churches gathered in Constantinople at the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar in March 2014, it was decided to convene a special inter-Orthodox commission to review a few texts of the second and third preconciliar panorthodox conferences of 1982 and 1986. Moreover, this Synaxis of the Primates of the Orthodox Churches adopted the rule that all decisions in the Council’s work will be taken unanimously on the principle of consensus. It had been decided that the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church would be convened by the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople in 2016.
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