Daily Journal:

The claims of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople seem quite legitimate. However, the history of this see indicates that in post-Byzantine times the patriarchs were dependent only on the Turkish authorities and were never a subject of international law. These claims can be given the status of realism only by emphasizing the analogy between the sees of Old and New Rome.

In the 19th century, during the heyday of Russian Byzantine studies, researcher N. Suvorov coined the expression “Byzantine pope,” which was supposed to highlight the analogy between the Pope’s claims to world supremacy and the alleged claims of Byzantine primates to similar prerogatives. This question lies not so much in the field of canon law as in the field of ideological models. It was raised already in the 7th century, when Pope Gregory Dvoeslov wrote to the Patriarch of Constantinople, asking him to renounce the title “ecumenical”, to which Patriarch John the Faster pointed out the extra-legal status of the term “ikomenikos” (ecumenical). This term is honorary and political: it expressed the special position of the Great Church in the Roman Empire.

Since then, the title has been firmly assigned to the patriarch of the Second Rome. When the Turks in the 15th century. took Constantinople, the entire system of a single Church as a single patriarchate began to burst at the seams, until in the 16th century. The Moscow Metropolis did not “fall off”, becoming the autocephalous Russian Church, and then, in the 18th-19th centuries, it was followed by other national metropolitanates. The Patriarchate in Constantinople-Istanbul has simply become the “Greek Church”. The system of a single Orthodox Church no longer exists legally (I am not taking into account the complex concept of “sacramental” or spiritual unity here), therefore, it does not and cannot have a single head. Orthodoxy today is a discordant choir of jurisdictions varying in number and political significance (in the Russian tradition the word “consent” is more common). Some are more important and magnificent, others are more modest. And Patriarch Bartholomew, it seems, wants to acquire a “more pompous” status, which would allow him to be more active both within Turkey and in the Greek diaspora.

The fact that he is supported by the Greek Foreign Minister herself shows that the Greeks are ready to rely on patriarchy in the struggle for a warm place within the Western world (in the form of the European Union), to which the Greek Republic belongs.