New Rome and a Primacy Without a Papacy

Canon 3 of the First Council of Constantinople in 381 ranked the bishop of Constantinople immediately after the bishop of Rome, reasoning that Constantinople was New Rome, the empire's new political capital. Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 confirmed and extended this ranking over the objections of the Roman legates present.

After the eleventh century schism separated the Orthodox East from the Catholic West, Constantinople became, by that same ancient ranking, the first see in honor among all the churches that remained in communion with one another as Orthodox, a position it still formally holds. Orthodox ecclesiology has traditionally insisted, in deliberate contrast to the developing Roman doctrine of papal primacy and infallibility, that this ranking is a primacy of honor and coordination only, never a jurisdiction empowering one bishop to govern, overrule, or bind the others. The general Orthodox principle is conciliarity: no single bishop, however honored his historic see, can act unilaterally for the whole church, and major questions are properly settled by councils of bishops acting together rather than by one primate's decree, a structural difference Orthodox theologians have long pointed to as the central distinction between their own ecclesiology and the Roman Catholic Church's.