Bartholomew's Reading and Moscow's Objection

Since the 1990s, and especially since granting the Tomos of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew I has acted on an understanding of Constantinople's historic primacy that includes a real, exercisable right: the authority to grant autocephaly to a church requesting it and to hear appeals from clergy or churches in dispute with their own hierarchy anywhere in the Orthodox world, powers Constantinople argues flow directly from its ancient ranking as first see.

The Moscow Patriarchate has publicly and repeatedly rejected this expansive reading, describing it in official statements as amounting to a Constantinopolitan version of the very papacy Orthodoxy has always defined itself against, and insisting that genuine Orthodox ecclesiology permits autocephaly to be granted only with the consent of the church whose territory is affected, confirmed by agreement among the whole communion of autocephalous churches, not decided by Constantinople alone. Other Orthodox churches have not uniformly sided with either patriarchate, leaving the underlying question, how much practical authority a primacy of honor actually carries, without any body positioned to resolve it, since Orthodoxy has no equivalent of a pope who could issue a binding ruling on the dispute even in principle.