Only the bishops from northern Greece belonging to the Greek
autocephalous church and no other church can be referred to as Macedonian.
Unless the Bulgarian Orthodox Church wants t be treated as schismatic again, they must not meddle in the life of another
autocephalous church (the Serbian Orthodox Church), says Bishop Irinej of Backa in his interview with Serbian newspaper Pecat.
The polls that demonstrate that more and more orthodox Ukrainians would like to have, as it is in most of the orthodox countries, the only one local Ukrainian
autocephalous church, were also taken into account, the President said.
The canonical norm, which is not always followed but which in any case entails the same absence of a recognition of primacy at the universal level, is this: the priest commemorates only the bishop under whose omophorion he directly serves; the bishop, wherever he serves the liturgy, commemorates the metropolitan; the metropolitan commemorates the patriarch; and the patriarch commemorates--and this is the aspect of most interest for us--every other Orthodox patriarch or head of an
autocephalous church.
The patriarch or head of the
autocephalous Church distributes the holy chrism to the metropolitans, who in turn distribute it to the bishops, who subsequently distribute it to their priests.
Finally, in a move that served both the communist regime's interests and the Orthodox Church's local and inter-Orthodox purposes, it was during the Communist regime that the Church had been able to proclaim, though with some difficulty, the first official canonisations in its history as an
autocephalous Church.
An
autocephalous church is one that enjoys total canonical and administrative independence and elects its own prelates and bishops.
Strong as Greek Catholicism was, despite being forced underground after World War II, Jepsen discusses how the end of Communism has not seen Orthodoxy, especially in the form of the Ukrainian
Autocephalous Church, disappear from the region.
The Orthodox
Autocephalous Church of Albania (referred to as Orthodox) and the Roman Catholic Church are the other large denominations.
There is only one
autocephalous church in America, which Kourvetaris correctly identifies in his appendix as the Orthodox Church in America, granted autocephaly by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1970.
Membership is difficult to estimate, but according to government statistics the Moscow patriarchate has 9,000 parishes, while the Kiev patriarchate has 3,000 and the
autocephalous church 1,000.
His task then became one of reestablishing the Orthodox
Autocephalous Church of Albania.
