The long-awaited Great and Holy Council of Orthodoxy closed its deliberations in Crete on June 26. Given the tensions surrounding its convocation, perhaps the most significant thing about the synod is that it happened at all. Now that the finalised texts are published, what impact can we foresee on worldwide Orthodoxy and on relations with the Catholic Church?
First, the result appears as a qualified success for the embattled Patriarch of Constantinople. Bartholomew II needed to be able to show that he could gather a representative meeting of the historically factious churches. Isolated in Turkey, a country whose resurgent Muslim identity threatens his very presence, the danger for him is that his “primacy of honour” would appear as anachronistic as the name Constantinople itself.
