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Organization of the Eastern Orthodox Church

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Through Rome and Constantinople

Each constituent church is self-governing; its highest-ranking bishop (known variously as a patriarch, metropolitan or archbishop) serves as the primate and reports to no higher authority. Each regional church is composed of constituent eparchies (or dioceses) ruled by bishops. Some autocephalous churches have given an eparchy or group of eparchies with varying degrees of autonomy (meaning they have limited self-government). Such autonomous churches maintain varying levels of dependence on their mother church, usually defined in a tomos or another document of autonomy. In many cases, autonomous churches are almost completely self-governing, with the mother church retaining only the right to appoint the highest-ranking bishop (often an archbishop or metropolitan) of the autonomous church.

Normal governance is enacted through a synod of bishops within each church.

Church governance

The Eastern Orthodox Church is decentralised, having no central authority, earthly head or a single bishop in a leadership role. Thus, the Eastern Orthodox use a synodical system canonically, which is significantly different from the hierarchical organisation of the Roman Catholic Church that follows the doctrine of papal supremacy. References to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as a sole authoritative leader are an erroneous interpretation of his title "first among equals". His title is of honor rather than full, supreme, immediate, and universal authority and in fact the Ecumenical Patriarch has no direct authority over churches other than his own eparchy in the city of Constantinople, while Patriarchate of Constantinople itself is governed in synodical manner. The Ecumenical Patriarch's unique role is sometimes referred to as being the "spiritual leader" of the Eastern Orthodox Church, although even this is disputed.

The autocephalous churches are normally in full communion with each other, so any priest of any of those churches may lawfully minister to any member of any of them, and no member of any is excluded from any form of worship in any of the others, including the reception of the Eucharist. However, there have been varying instances in the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church where communion has been broken between member churches for short periods, particularly over autocephaly issues or disagreements over ecumenism with other Christian denominations.

Following Justinian, the church existed only as a single denomination of five communing churches ruled by five patriarchs: the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, collectively referred to as the Pentarchy. Each of the five patriarchs had jurisdiction over bishops in a specified geographic region which did not overlap with the jurisdiction of another patriarch. This continued until 927, when the Bulgarian Patriarchate became the first newly promoted patriarchate to join the original five.

Historically, the Patriarch of Rome was considered to be the "first in place of honor" among the five patriarchs. Disagreement about the limits of his authority was one of the causes of the Great Schism, conventionally dated to the year 1054, which split the previously unified Church into the Roman Catholic Church in the West, headed by the Pope, and the Orthodox Catholic Church (more commonly known today as the Eastern Orthodox Church), led by the four eastern patriarchs. After the schism, the honorary primacy of the Bishop of Rome shifted to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had previously been accorded second-place rank at the First Council of Constantinople.

In the 5th century, Oriental Orthodoxy separated from Chalcedonian Christianity (and is therefore separate from both the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church), well before the 11th century Great Schism. It should not be confused with Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism.

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