[RESOURCE] Autocephaly and Schism by Tutor

Ok let me answer the autocephaly question.

Autocephaly means "Self headedness" as a word, and it's a reference to the status of a church as a distinct liturgical and hierarchical structure. In the west the term is "Sui iuris", which means the exact same thing(as a term, i dont know what it means in latin).  It's not merely another "layer" of authority but rather a recognition of a rite and liturgy and group as a group that manages itself in it's own affairs.  As in, it determines the nature and means of it's own liturgy and norms. The Catholic Church has 24 authcephalous churches plus Ordinariates.

Often a rite is lead by a patriarch but can also be a major archbishop, it's up to these individual groups to decide how they organize themselves within their own groups.

These are not different kinds of holy orders btw. They are all bishops. But it's a matter of organization and tradition.

Now, how people organize like this is something that has changed a lot over the centuries. Early on in the Church, you had a very flat organizational structure, every individual parish or  diocese (depending on how you view it) was more or less it's own thing, and if they needed marching orders, to sent letters to the Pope. But then metropolitans formed as the predominate way to organize churches. This was in fact one of the subjects at the first ecumenical council, the forming of metropolitans as a norm.

This is when we started seeing the rise of what we think of now as "particular churches", but their jurisdiction was defined by what many at the time viewed as apostolic. Hence the importance of the apostolic sees (Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem).

Constantinople is actually not an apostolic see, it's a legend they made up after the Pope slapped them down. But it was the capital of the roman empire so it gained enormous clout, and the founding of Constantinople is what set the stage for basically all drama between the 4th and 16th century.

Let's fast forward to the way orthos use the term "autocephalous" now. This actually was not used until the 19th century and the political drama that started here. It begain with the independence of Greece which declared itself autonomous from Constantinople. At the start of the 19th century there were effectively two "mega churches" in the east: the greeks and the russians. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, both churches took efforts to break up the other ones into smaller churches. This is also why you suddenly see all the different autonomous churches in the east suddenly just show up within the last 200 years. It was mostly political fall out. This divide in the two big groups actually started earlier with the fall of Constantinople. Russia viewed itself as more pure and not influenced by the west, in fact I remember reading in one source that the Russians thought the fall of Constantinople came from the greeks reconciling with the latins.

This drama persist because the russian church is enormous and extremely wealthy compared to the smaller struggling greek churches. A little known fact is that without russian financial assistance, the greek church would just stop existing. This is in part some of the key evidence that supported a prediction I made which I suspect will come true in the coming decades about the return of Constantinople to Rome. but that's another discussion.

Who is autocephalous and how they got that way is also a hot bed issue. People don't like to hear this but the Eastern Orthodox churches are downwind from politics, and their beliefs come from them regardless of their rationalizations. The current schism is actually from the autocephaly granted to Ukraine, and the dispute over who gets to actually do that. Traditionally they respected this as a power of the Ecumenical Patriarch (by "traditionally" I mean since 1800). But Ukraine is politically extremely important to Russia, so now this can't stand. Hence the schism.