There is a charge that Orthodox apologists have leveled at the Catholic Church for a millennium: that the Bishop of Rome claims a unique, universal, binding jurisdictional authority that no single patriarch can legitimately hold, that this claim violates the collegial nature of the apostolic episcopate, and that it represents a monarchical distortion of the Church’s conciliar constitution. The charge is serious, historically grounded, and sincerely held. It has shaped the ecclesiological self-understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy since the eleventh century. It remains the central structural objection to Catholic ecclesiology in Orthodox theological literature today.

In September 2025, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople — the Ecumenical Patriarch, spiritual leader of world Orthodoxy — said the following in a French television interview:

The reader who has followed the Orthodox critique of Roman primacy will immediately recognize the structure of this claim. It is a claim for unique, non-transferable, conciliar-grounded jurisdictional prerogatives belonging exclusively to one see — prerogatives that no other bishop holds, that derive from the Church’s own canonical tradition, and that neither the current holder nor his successors will ever renounce.

That is, in every structural feature that matters, a papal argument.

I. The Crisis That Made the Claim Visible

To understand why Bartholomew made this statement — and why it carries the weight it does — the Ukraine autocephaly crisis must be understood as its context.

In 2018 and 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew granted autocephaly to the newly unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine, revoking what he argued was a never-canonically-valid 1686 transfer of jurisdiction over Kyiv to the Moscow Patriarchate. He justified the action on the grounds that Constantinople, as the Ecumenical Patriarchate, holds ancient prerogatives including the right to receive appeals, resolve jurisdictional disputes, and grant autocephaly — prerogatives grounded in Canons 9, 17, and 28 of the Council of Chalcedon.

Moscow declared the act uncanonical, illegitimate, and an invasion of its territory. It broke communion with Constantinople — the most serious rupture between the two sees in the modern era. The Orthodox world split. Several churches recognized the new Ukrainian church; others refused. No pan-Orthodox body existed to adjudicate. The schism hardened and has not healed.

The “first without equals” statement of September 2025 was not an offhand remark and it was not a new position. In September 2018 — weeks before the schism formally opened — Bartholomew convened a Synaxis of Constantinople’s bishops and publicly claimed the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s unique appellate rights over the universal Church, grounding them in Canons 9, 17, and 28 of Chalcedon. It was that 2018 Synaxis address that prompted the immediate formal accusations of Eastern Papism from Patriarch Kirill and his collaborators. The 2025 statement was the deliberate, considered restatement — seven years into the schism, after Moscow’s repeated formal condemnations, after Bartholomew had already declared he would not revoke the Tomos — of a jurisdictional claim he has held and defended consistently since before the schism began. It is a sustained doctrinal position, not a moment of passion. Made in full knowledge of the charge it would invite, and made anyway.

II. Moscow’s Response — and Why It Cannot Be Dismissed

The charge that Patriarch Bartholomew’s ecclesiology constitutes “Eastern Papism” is not a fringe accusation. It was made formally, at synodal level, by Patriarch Kirill and his senior collaborators, and it has been developed in sustained theological literature by Moscow-aligned canonists since 2018.

The most explicit statement came from Aleksandr Shchipkov — First Deputy Chairman of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate for Relations with Society and Media, Professor of Philosophy at Moscow State University — speaking in an official interview with RIA Novosti in September 2018, weeks before the schism formally opened:

At a major conference titled “World Orthodoxy: Primacy and Communion in the Light of the Orthodox Magisterium,” Metropolitan Hilarion of Budapest — Patriarch Kirill’s principal theological collaborator — gave the opening address under the title “Constantinople’s Claims to Power as a Threat to the Unity of the Church,” and the assembled bishops formally took up the accusations of “neo-papism” directed at Bartholomew. The conference’s synodal conclusions stated that the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s claimed primacy “grants him rights and privileges that go far beyond the limits of the rights of any other Primate of the Local Orthodox Church.”³

This is Orthodox patriarch formally accusing Orthodox patriarch of the heresy Orthodoxy has attributed to Rome. That fact alone is extraordinary. But it becomes genuinely decisive when placed alongside Bartholomew’s own words — because his response to the accusation was not a theological rebuttal. It was a non-answer that confirmed the structure of the claim.

III. Constantinople’s Defense — and Its Fatal Weakness

Patriarch Bartholomew rejected the Eastern Papism charge directly: “Should we call papism the fact that I shoulder the responsibilities of my ministry? I cannot deny the responsibilities inherited to me by my predecessors.”⁴

Read that carefully. He does not deny that his claimed prerogatives are structurally analogous to Roman primacy. He does not offer a canonical argument distinguishing his jurisdictional claims from papal ones in any theologically meaningful way. He asserts that exercising his inherited prerogatives cannot, by definition, constitute papism — because they are his inherited prerogatives.

That is a circular argument. It assumes the conclusion: my authority is legitimate, therefore exercising it is not papism. But the charge of Eastern Papism is precisely a challenge to whether those prerogatives are legitimate in the first place. To defend their legitimacy by invoking their existence is to argue in a circle.

Bartholomew adds a qualifier: his primacy is “a primacy of service, not of power.” This distinction, sincerely offered, is refuted by the act that made it necessary to offer. Granting autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine over the explicit, formal, sustained objection of the Moscow Patriarchate — the second-largest Orthodox church in the world — is not a pastoral act of service. It is a jurisdictional act of binding authority. Whatever Bartholomew’s intentions, the Ukraine action is the definition of an exercise of power: a unilateral decision that binds other churches, overrides their objections, and cannot be appealed to any higher Orthodox tribunal. Service does not look like that. Power does.

The counter-accusation is revealing. Bartholomew’s argument against Moscow is that without the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a unifying authority, Orthodoxy degenerates into ethnic nationalism and ecclesial fragmentation. That is — almost word for word — the Catholic argument for why the Church needs the Petrine office. A single primatial see, holding authority that transcends the interests of particular nations and local churches, is the only structural guarantee of genuine universal unity. Remove it, and you get fragmentation. Bartholomew is not only claiming papal-style authority for himself; he is deploying the Catholic argument for why such authority is necessary.

IV. The Canonical Basis — and Why It Is Weaker Than Rome’s

Bartholomew grounds his prerogatives in Canons 9, 17, and 28 of the Council of Chalcedon (451), which he reads as establishing Constantinople as a supreme appellate court with jurisdictional oversight across the universal Church. The canonical argument has been developed at length by Phanar-aligned theologians, most systematically by Metropolitan John Zizioulas and the canonist Miodrag Petrovic.

The argument is not without patristic and canonical basis. But it faces a structural problem that Rome’s primacy claim does not share, and that Catholic apologists are entitled to name plainly: the canonical grounding for Constantinople’s prerogatives is explicitly political in its rationale. Canon 28 states that Constantinople deserves honor “because it is the city of the Emperor and the Senate.” The primacy is derived from the city’s status as the imperial capital — New Rome.

Pope Leo I rejected Canon 28 at Chalcedon precisely on this ground: ecclesiastical rank cannot be derived from political geography. He was right — and subsequent history vindicated him twice over. Constantinople lost its status as imperial capital in 1453 when the Ottomans conquered the city. On the logic of Canon 28 itself, the canonical basis for Constantinopolitan primacy evaporated with the Byzantine Empire. The EP has held his office for five centuries from a city in which he has no civil status, no cathedral church, and a congregation of a few thousand faithful.

Rome’s primacy claim, whatever its theological merits, rests on the Petrine commission — a theological argument about Christ’s own constitution of the Church that does not depend on political geography, imperial patronage, or historical circumstance. It can survive the fall of empires. Constantinople’s canonical claim, on the logic of the canon that grounds it, arguably cannot.

A Constantinople-aligned theologian will respond — Zizioulas has made this argument — that Canon 28’s rationale was political but its effect was theological: the Church received it as establishing a genuine ecclesial primacy, and reception transcends original rationale. This is a serious point. But it proves too much. If ecclesial reception can transform a politically-motivated canon into a binding theological norm, then Rome can deploy the identical argument about the Petrine texts, whose “original rationale” Orthodoxy also contests on various historical grounds. The reception argument is a sword that cuts both ways — and when it does, it leaves Constantinople’s canonical claim no stronger than Rome’s, while Rome’s theological grounding remains the more durable of the two.

V. The Circularity Problem — and What It Proves

The structural mechanism that should resolve this dispute — a binding pan-Orthodox council — has already failed on this question. The 2016 Holy and Great Council of Crete was boycotted by Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Antioch. Half of world Orthodoxy rejected its authority. The council intended to demonstrate Orthodox unity instead dramatized its fractures. The full structural analysis of why Orthodox conciliarism cannot generate prospective binding authority is developed in Exhibit One of this series. What matters here is the specific consequence of that failure for the “first without equals” dispute.

When the conciliar mechanism failed, Patriarch Bartholomew did not defer, seek consensus, or wait for the structural problem to resolve itself. He acted unilaterally — granting autocephaly to Ukraine without pan-Orthodox conciliar agreement, on the basis of prerogatives he claims are his alone. He thereby demonstrated in practice precisely what his words claimed in theory: that when Orthodox conciliarism cannot produce a binding resolution, the Ecumenical Patriarch will act as a de facto pope. The “first without equals” claim is not merely a theological position. It is a description of how Bartholomew actually governs.

VI. What the Orthodox Are Actually Arguing About

Stand back from the specific dispute and observe what this controversy reveals at its deepest level.

Both Constantinople and Moscow agree that the Church requires some form of primatial authority — a see that can speak for the whole, convene councils, receive appeals, and maintain unity when local churches disagree. They disagree only about who holds it. Constantinople claims it belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarch. Moscow claims it belongs to the conciliar consensus of all patriarchs — which, practically speaking, means no one can act without Moscow’s consent.

Neither position is the traditional Orthodox answer. The traditional Orthodox answer was that primatial authority belonged to the five ancient patriarchates in collegial concert — the pentarchy. When Rome departed from that concert in 1054, the system lost its load-bearing structure and has been improvising ever since.

What the Ukraine crisis exposed — and what the “first without equals” exchange crystallized — is that Orthodoxy does not have a settled answer to the question of final jurisdictional authority. It has two competing answers, each borrowed from a Latin ecclesiology Orthodoxy officially rejects: Constantinople arguing like a pope, Moscow arguing like a conciliarist. The irony is structural and unavoidable. The void left by Rome’s departure in 1054 has not been filled by a coherent Orthodox alternative. It has been filled, incompletely and contentiously, by precisely the kinds of claims Orthodoxy attributes to Rome as its chief error.