The Holy and Great Council of Crete

The Orthodox churches began preparing for a great council in the 1960s. Agendas were drafted, narrowed and redrafted; contentious items were removed to protect consensus; preparatory conferences met over decades. The rule adopted was that everything would be decided unanimously, each autocephalous church speaking with one voice, and that no document would go forward that any church rejected.

The council opened in Crete in June 2016 with four of the fourteen generally recognised autocephalous churches absent. Antioch stayed away over a jurisdictional dispute with Jerusalem about Qatar. Bulgaria withdrew over the texts and over practical arrangements. Georgia withdrew over the documents on marriage and on relations with other Christians. The Russian Orthodox Church, by a wide margin the largest, declined to attend once the others had, arguing that a council without them would not be pan-Orthodox.

The remaining ten met and adopted six documents and an encyclical, on the mission of the church, the Orthodox diaspora, autonomy, marriage, fasting and relations with the rest of the Christian world. Delegations were capped at twenty-four bishops each, so the council was small by the standards of the ancient ones and very small beside Vatican II.

Whether to proceed without the absent four was itself a decision, taken on the principle that a church which stays away cannot prevent a council from meeting. That principle is not new and it is not universally accepted, and the argument about it began immediately.

Orthodox ecclesiology has no single office that can declare a council authoritative. There is no pope in the Orthodox churches, and the Ecumenical Patriarch holds a primacy of honour rather than of jurisdiction. What makes a council binding, on the classical Orthodox account, is reception: the church as a whole, over time, recognises the council as having spoken the faith, and that recognition cannot be produced on demand or certified in advance.

That is a coherent position and it makes Crete genuinely unsettled rather than merely disputed. The churches that attended regard the documents as decisions of a council of the Orthodox Church. The churches that did not regard the meeting as a gathering of some Orthodox churches whose documents have whatever weight their own synods choose to give them. Both are arguing within the same tradition and neither has an instrument for overruling the other.

Nothing since has resolved it, and the underlying quarrel has hardened. The grant of autocephaly to a church in Ukraine in 2019 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate led Moscow to break communion with Constantinople, which is a considerably graver rupture than a disagreement about a council's standing.

The atlas records the disagreement and does not adjudicate it. Whether Crete was a council in the full sense is a live question inside a living church, being argued by the people whose church it is, and it is theirs to settle. What can be said plainly is what happened, who was there, what was adopted, and what the two positions are.