Fr. Nikitas Pantokratorinos: The Ecumenical Patriarchate is not a corporation

By Hieromonk Nikitas Pantokratorinos

The recently published article by Metropolitan Luke of Zaporizhzhia, entitled “How Corporate Logic Replaced the Spirit of the Church,” seeks to present the Ecumenical Patriarchate as an institution that undermines synodality, violates the Holy Canons, turns ecclesiastical service into an exercise of power under the cloak of primacy, and arbitrarily seeks to impose its own will on the local Orthodox Churches. The “primacy” of Constantinople, the Council of Crete, the autocephaly of Ukraine, and the dialogue with Rome are all presented as aspects of a supposedly unified course toward absolutism and ecclesiological distortion. This line of argument, however, has a serious weakness: it invokes canonical order while overlooking the historical and canonical tradition on which the position and responsibilities of the Ecumenical Throne are founded. The Church cannot be built on selective interpretations of the Holy Canons, nor can synodality be used as an argument for challenging every initiative of the First Throne of Orthodoxy.

Here an important question arises: where does legitimate theological disagreement end, and where does the distortion of…