Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew invited His Beatitude Metropolitan Epiphanios to deliver to him the Tomos of establishment of its new sister
autocephalous church.
Secondly, he was almost day-to-day with the Council of 1918, when 100 years ago an attempt was made to create a Ukrainian
autocephalous church during the time of the Ukrainian People's Republic.
Before Sunday's council in Kiev, there were three Orthodox Church branches in Ukraine: Now, priests from the Kiev Patriarchate and the
Autocephalous Church become members of the new church - the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
The Russian Orthodox Church and its Patriarch Kirill, however, said they would never recognize the existence of an
autocephalous Church in Ukraine.
We can now appreciate James Burtchaell's insight that in denying the direct authority of the Church over the Catholic university, Land O'Lakes did not reject the pretensions and prerogatives of a church but rather defined the Catholic university itself as an
autocephalous church, invested with its own redemptive powers.
"Only the bishops from northern Greece belonging to the Greek
autocephalous church and no other church can be referred to as Macedonian.
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. (50) At each level except the last, it is the one primate who is commemorated; the pattern then changes so that the commemoration is strictly conciliar at the universal level.
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.
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.