Patriarch Bartholomew does not aim to reclaim territory. He has a passionate desire to unite the Orthodox world, which has disintegrated into many “appanage principalities” – this is how the religious observer Ekaterina Shchetkina called the Local Churches in an article on ZN.

“Patriarch Bartholomew has a passionate desire to unite the Orthodox world, which has disintegrated into many“ appanage principalities ”- local churches. They are busy with their“ domestic ”problems, domestic politics, while the proportion of Orthodoxy in the world is decreasing,” Shchetkina notes.

In her opinion, Patriarch Bartholomew feels like a leader who could bring together the Orthodox Church – without specifying the “national coordinates” in order to remind her that she is primarily Orthodox, and only then – Romanian, Ukrainian or Russian. “And try to give Orthodoxy a road to the future. To return to the church a living feeling of conciliarity, almost forgotten, narrowed down to the formal pronunciation of this word in the Creed and to the ritual enumeration of the names of the primates according to the diptych,” the author noted.