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Moscow, June 13, Interfax - The Pan-Orthodox Council can only be legitimate if all local Churches without exceptions participate in it, the Moscow Patriarchate said. "Some people now say that it's their problem that they have refused, they don't have to participate, but we will go ahead anyway in the composition that will be there and will make decisions and they will become binding for everyone. It doesn't happen that way," Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Synodal Department for External Church Relations, told a briefing in Moscow on Monday. He said that all Churches have to participate in the...

The announced 2016 council of Eastern Orthodox Churches is historical, but expectations should be modestAn Assembly (Synaxis) of the Primates of the local Orthodox Churches, meeting March 6-9, 2014 in Istanbul, has agreed to convene a Pan-Orthodox council. A “Communiqué of the Primates of the Orthodox Churches” released on March 9th stated that “the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church … will be convened and presided by the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople in 2016.” This decision brings to the homestretch a long process of preparation that goes back as far as the 1920s, had an active phase in...