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Bishop Irenaeus of Bach criticized Phanar’s claims for exclusive, almost papal, privileges

Bishop Irenaeus of Bach in an interview with romfea.gr criticized Phanar’s claims for exclusive, almost papal, privileges.

The hierarch spoke about the superiority of the canonical structure of the Orthodox Church over the papacy, whose “system of conciliar interconnection and interpenetration between independent (autocephalous) Churches” is much more authentic in theological or ecclesiological terms than “a monarchical or pyramidal structure in which there are no patriarchs equal to each other and where instead of conciliarity and primacy of honor, the principle of primacy of power prevails, where the pope is at the top of the “pyramid”, and all the rest are below him.”

“Modern Roman Catholic theology is increasingly discovering the expediency and advantages of the principle of catholicity”, while the Orthodox “are increasingly using terminology and rhetoric that irresistibly resembles the terminology and rhetoric of the First Vatican Council (1870): then “I have special rights”, then “I have privileges”, then “I have special powers”. The archpastor points to “the fruits of this way of thinking”: “hostility, struggle for superiority, bickering, conflicts – up to and including a split between individual Local Churches”, noting that all this undermines the trust in the Orthodox Church “among heterodox Christians who expected so much from us in the field of testifying to catholicity, and not only in words, but also in deeds, ”said the hierarch.

According to Bishop Irenaeus, “the system of conciliar unity of sisterly autocephalous Churches is the best possible system, but when it is put into practice by spiritually immature people who have not reached the proper level of church consciousness, then, thanks to them, it becomes in practice the worst possible system.”

“Let each of us work so that it is not the worst, but the best system, which it really is!” the hierarch concluded.

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