The 2019 Tomos of Autocephaly

On 15 December 2018, a unification council met in Kyiv to merge two previously unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox bodies, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, into a single new structure. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, which had held sole internationally recognized canonical jurisdiction in Ukraine, was invited but declined to participate. The council elected Metropolitan Epiphanius Dumenko as primate of the newly unified church.

Weeks later, on 5 January 2019, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I signed the Tomos of Autocephaly at the Phanar, the Ecumenical Patriarchate's seat in Istanbul, in a formal ceremony granting the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine full ecclesiastical independence. The Tomos set out the terms of the grant, including that the new church would initially receive holy chrism from Constantinople, and it listed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as the newest addition to the diptychs, the formal list of autocephalous churches in communion with one another that Orthodox liturgy commemorates by name, placing it after the previously most recently recognized autocephalous churches.

The Moscow Patriarchate did not wait for the Tomos to be issued before acting. In October 2018, once the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced its intention to proceed toward granting Ukrainian autocephaly, the Russian Orthodox Church broke eucharistic communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate entirely, a rupture that as of this writing remains unresolved. Moscow's core argument is twofold: that only a pan-Orthodox council, not a unilateral act by Constantinople, has the authority to grant autocephaly to a church, and that Ukraine has been canonically Russian ecclesiastical territory since the Kyiv Metropolia's transfer to Moscow's jurisdiction in 1686, making any grant of independence by Constantinople an act of trespass on another church's territory rather than a legitimate exercise of primacy.

The dispute did not stay confined to the two patriarchates directly involved. Other autocephalous Orthodox churches split in their own response, with the Church of Greece, the Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Church of Cyprus each extending some form of recognition to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine at various points, while other autocephalous churches withheld recognition entirely, leaving Ukrainian Orthodox ecclesiastical status one of the least settled jurisdictional questions anywhere in contemporary world Orthodoxy.