Election And The Patriarchate's Modern Position

The Ecumenical Patriarch is elected by the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, a body of metropolitans whose sees today lie mostly outside Turkey, from among its own members; Turkish law additionally requires that the Patriarch hold Turkish citizenship, a requirement that has narrowed the practical pool of eligible candidates to Orthodox clergy of the greatly reduced Greek community still resident in Istanbul.

This numerical weakness sits oddly beside the Patriarchate's continuing symbolic and canonical importance: it retains jurisdiction over Mount Athos, the historic monastic republic in northern Greece, over Orthodox communities in the Americas, Western Europe, Australia and elsewhere outside the territory of other autocephalous churches, and has played a leading role in modern ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, including landmark meetings between Patriarch Athenagoras I and Pope Paul VI in the 1960s that mutually lifted the excommunications the two churches had held against each other since 1054. The Patriarchate's relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest Orthodox church by membership, has been strained in the twenty-first century by disputes over jurisdiction in Ukraine.