The Crisis of Constantinople
A hastily assembled two-day synod concluded in the Belarusian capital of Minsk yesterday—the city chosen as neutral ground for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow—with a declaration from the Russian Orthodox Church of its immediate intention to sunder all bonds with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The split between the churches, which could end a tradition stretching back almost two millennia, has been driven largely by political enmity and is widely viewed as a proxy conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The concern now is that it will feed back into that process, escalating the ongoing military conflict between the two nations.
Constantinople has been the primary seat of the Orthodox Christian patriarchy for more than one thousand and five hundred years. That long era came to an end yesterday when Moscow’s patriarchy announced it would cease recognizing the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople as “first among equals.” Moscow’s decision was set in motion by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granting de facto independence to the Ukrainian church. The Ukrainian church is still pursuing an official “Tomos of autocephaly,” the document that would grant it formal autonomy within the Christian Orthodox hierarchy, but the preliminary steps to the break with the Russian Orthodox church have now been fulfilled.