Towards the Council
The council’s own short history of its preparation, from the encyclical of Patriarch Joachim III in 1902 through the conferences at Rhodes and Chambésy to the decision of January 2016 to meet on Crete.
Read the text at holycouncil.org ↗The council’s News Bulletin Number 1, with the opening on 19 June 2016 ↗
The article was written for the council’s site by Archbishop Job of Telmessos, a bishop of the Ecumenical Patriarchate who signed the council’s documents. It traces the preparation through the first pan-Orthodox conference at Rhodes in 1961 and five pre-conciliar conferences at Chambésy between 1976 and 2015, and explains the rule that every text had to be agreed unanimously. It records that the primates, meeting at Chambésy in January 2016, moved the council from Constantinople to the Orthodox Academy of Crete, set the dates 18 to 27 June, and took the questions of autocephaly, of the diptychs and of the calendar off the agenda. It also notes that the church of Antioch did not sign the council’s rules of procedure.
It was written before the meeting and speaks of it in the future tense, from the organisers’ side. It is used for the history of the preparation and for the venue.
Cited in
- June 2016, firm date
- 6 January 2019, firm date