THE GREAT COUNCIL - AUTOCEPHALY AND AUTONOMY

May 15, 2015 Length: 14:11
ancientfaith 

Fr. Steven helps us sort through the terms autocephaly and autonomy and identifies some unresolved issues to be addressed by a Great and Holy Council of the Orthodox Church.

My dear friends, I wonder if I’ve mentioned the names of these churches—Russia, Romania, Georgia, Greece, Bulgaria—would you, aside from their obvious Orthodox profession of faith, be able to connect the dots that each of these has in common in a certain area, speaking solely in terms of religious connotations? Guess it yet? Well, let’s suppose that I threw in the Orthodox Church of America, the OCA, as a sweetener. There yet? I supposed that some of you might have guessed “autocephaly,” that curious word that has evolved over the centuries, yet strangely not defined in the canonical legislation of the Church, as the missing link in our little game. And you would be right, except for the fact that all but the American Church have been universally recognized as being in possession of this much-sought-after and yet elusive appellation that has become so touted and controversial in recent years.

But what I was really getting at is something a little more esoteric in my admittedly lackluster and non-specific attempt at throwing out a clue. All of these churches—again, except the American one—had proclaimed their autocephaly before actually being granted it by any rational and authoritative Church body. They all struck out on their own in the hope, and, indeed, with ample historical precedence, that recognition would follow some time in the future.

Autocephaly, or “self-headed,” refers to the status of a particular church whose top bishop does not have to report to any other authority. In other words, for all practical purposes, this church can set policy for itself and effectually do what it wants in terms of its own self-governance. This does not mean that it can against or in contra-indication to the important tenets of the faith. The other churches would, hopefully, condemn such actions and call for that church to repent. And one would hope that it would also not set policies that should actually have the approval of all the churches, though this has, in fact, happened many times, to the ultimate grief of the Church at large.

Autonomy, on the other hand, is another form of more limited self-governance, except that the mother church has the right to confirm the bishops, in some cases to pick from among a select slate of candidates, and usually produce holy chrism for the daughter church as well. It should be noted that autonomy can take many forms, as defined by the mother church, and two churches in this country, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the self-ruled Antiochian Orthodox Church, enjoy a certain degree of independence. Worldwide at the present time, there are only two universally recognized autonomous churches—Finland and Mount Sinai—with at least six others vying for this status and receiving only partial acknowledgment.

As mentioned earlier, the history of the granting of autocephaly is a checkered one, littered with the stench of politics and ecclesiastical shenanigans, and all too often hyper-ventilated nationalism. Of course, in the early years of the Church, the designation often applied to those bishops not subject to the local metropolitan or patriarchal authority for some reason or the other, and instead to a local synod or council. The bishops of Britain were like this before the coming of St. Augustine of Canterbury. In some cases, a church protested subjugation to a particular see, like the Church of Cyprus did when its status was confirmed by the Third Ecumenical Council in 431 as one of ancient provenance, over the objections of Antioch.

More recently, the Church of Bulgaria proclaimed its independent status in 1872, motivated by the need for nationalistic independence in the sight of the Ottoman Empire, and, with its help, achieved this distinction to the chagrin of the patriarchate of Constantinople, who promptly labeled its followers heretics and schismatics—of which they were neither—and decried the fact that the surrender of Orthodoxy to ethnic nationalism could ever be a factor in Church organization. Later this would be defined as phyletism, of which we have spoken before, the organization of Church life around ethnic and nationalistic principles. It would not be until the last year of World War II when Constantinople would confirm the autocephalous status. As for phyletism, set in stone in 1872 at a large pan-Orthodox council in Constantinople, well, it has become, for all intents and purposes, the defining characteristic, sadly, of churches found in the—and I hate to even use the word—Diaspora.

So what has this aberration done for those of us outside patriarchal territories? Essentially, it has infused a plethora of practices and theological presuppositions into the concrete realities of everyday Church life and regulations, creating havoc, misunderstandings, and a host of conflicting presentations of the faith to the world at large. In 2006, Fr. Josiah Trenham of the Antiochian Archdiocese, compiled a list of obvious discrepancies. Time prevents an in-depth discussion of these at this point, though we will get to some of them in the future, but I think it worth mentioning his well-considered and illuminatingly irritating list. Here are some excerpts:

Some Orthodox jurisdictions receive persons from Latin and certain Protestant bodies into holy Orthodoxy by baptism and chrismation, some by chrismation alone, and some merely by confession of faith.
Some Orthodox jurisdictions receive Latin clergy converting to holy Orthodoxy merely by vesting, while others ordain.
Some Orthodox jurisdictions recognize all marriages performed outside holy Orthodoxy as being real marriages, though certainly not sacramental, whether performed for an Orthodox or a non-Orthodox, while others recognize no marriages performed outside holy Orthodoxy, whether performed for an Orthodox or a non-Orthodox.
Some Orthodox jurisdictions bury a person who was cremated with all funeral rites in the church temple. Others permit only trisagion prayers of mercy in the funeral home. Some forbid any prayers anywhere for a person who was cremated.
Some Orthodox jurisdictions recognize civil divorce as complete and sufficient for ecclesiastical purposes, while others do not recognize civil divorce at all, and insist on Church tribunals; while yet others deal with divorce in other ways.
Some Orthodox jurisdictions ignore bans of excommunication pronounced by hierarchs of other Orthodox jurisdictions.

I could name at least ten others fairly easily, and keep in mind that these sorts of divergences have existed now and before in the Church worldwide, but we are talking about here in the United States alone. So you begin to see the fruit of phyletism and its interrelated connection to autocephaly. A church in a single geographical area, in order to be consistent and effective, must be united in policies and strictures emanating from a single, cohesive ecclesiastical authority, and this is the primary need for the concept of autocephaly, even if its establishment is often for other, more mundane and even superficial reasons.

But much of the contemporary hot wind about this topic began in 1970, when the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America—again, the Metropolia, or now OCA—received the coveted title from the Moscow patriarchate, a church that was at that time hideously enmeshed in the ravages and compromises of atheistic Communism. Only a few churches recognized the new Orthodox Church in America, though none doubted the canonicity of its bishops, but the flavor left in most mouths at the time was one of self-aggrandizement, born out of a need to regularize an extremely difficult and painful ecclesiastical status, cloaked in the promise of a unified and common Orthodox Church ecclesiastical organism in the United States. It failed, as history has now testified, and even among those in the OCA, there are great divisions about whether this non-recognized autocephaly should be maintained, especially as how Moscow itself has a political stake in the game, since they granted it to begin with.

But we should not come down too harshly on the OCA. What they did, as we have seen, has a long and cherished history, and that very history, as I said, has shown that if a church breaks away or establishes its own independence, eventually it is accepted and all is right with the world. The problem with the OCA’s action is that they didn’t then and don’t now have the majority numbers, and in every other case of autocephaly that we know of, the people were overwhelmingly in favor of it. It is doubtful that they will ever be recognized as independent among all of the hierarchs of the Orthodox world in their current guise, and, in fact, they were as independent before autocephaly, even in their irregular state, as they are now, while a church like the once fiercely independent Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is actually less independent after its union with the patriarchate of Moscow. Well, history does throw us some surprises.

The issue of American autocephaly actually goes beyond the membership of the OCA, and we will return to it in a later podcast. The other factors brewing in the current controversy involve those churches far across the pond from us, and one only needs to mention the names of Ukraine, Macedonia, Estonia, Belarus, and even France to see that there are conflicts aplenty stirring in the Orthodox world, and there are likely to be even more in the near future.

Therefore, the question of the establishment of autocephaly is a crucial one, yet one more example of something from the Church’s past that now needs a contemporary approach based on the fact that the Church at large cannot act independently in such matters and still present a unanimity and Spirit-inspired manifestation of her work and decisions to the world. And while some might say that the Church really doesn’t need to worry about what the world thinks, it is precisely from this source that the future members of the Church will come from—hopefully—and that God’s rational, created human beings must indeed be presented with rational and unswervingly sensible solutions that reek of holiness and not chaos. A swept house is always preferred to a cluttered one.

From all that we hear at the moment, agreement has already been established that the creation of autocephalous churches will be the prerogative of all the existing autocephalous churches. Each must agree, or the autocephaly won’t happen, and likewise the revocation of such cannot take place without the same procedure. I hope I will be forgiven for thinking that this seems like a perfect road to an interminable stalemate, if any church has the right to veto this procedure, and perhaps this will not be the case that each church can participate in the process. This schema, though agreed upon in general, most likely faced some issues of particulars when the discussions begin, yet the overriding question about how and when autocephaly is established is a vital one if we are to avoid the current free-for-all that serves as contemporary Orthodox Church polity, an ecclesiastical traffic jam if there ever was one. May God lead us to a reasoned and workable structure, reflective of and in accordance with his will.

Next time, we will break with our council discussions and turn our attention to another pressing need: Orthodox unity in America. Until then, a hearty “Christ is risen!” to all as we wind down this blessed season of grace. And may God bless each and every one of you.