Autocephalous And Autonomous Churches In Orthodoxy

The Orthodox archbishop who heads a church lacking a patriarch sits atop one of two distinct kinds of self governing church, and the difference matters for how the office itself is filled. An autocephalous church, such as Cyprus or Albania, elects and consecrates its own primate entirely through its own synod of bishops, with no external church holding any formal say in the process; autocephaly is the fullest degree of Orthodox self government short of being a patriarchate outright. An autonomous church holds a lesser degree of independence: it manages its own internal affairs and elects its own head, but that election requires confirmation by the mother church from which it originated, and it may still commemorate that mother church's primate liturgically as a mark of the remaining tie.

Which status a given church holds, and whether other Orthodox churches recognize a particular grant of autocephaly or autonomy at all, has at times been contested between churches, since there is no single universally accepted procedure across all of Orthodoxy for granting either status, only long standing custom and the historical record of past grants. Disagreements of this kind are treated within Orthodoxy as unresolved questions of church order that individual churches answer differently, rather than as points any single body currently holds the recognized authority to settle for Orthodoxy as a whole.