PRIMACY

PRIMACY. Primacy, from the Latin primus (Greek, proteion), is an article of church government. Within every ecclesiastical region or province, and in today’s practice this usually means within each national church, there is a first bishop, a primate, with the responsibility of convoking the local synod of bishops, of coordinating their responsibilities, and maintaining relations with the other local synods of the Orthodox oikoumene (q.v.). Among the local primates of the Orthodox Church, the Archbishop of Constantinople, or Ecumenical Patriarch, has held the primacy of honor following the Western schism and the loss of the Church of Rome (qq.v.). In recent times, though, the precise meaning and extent of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s primacy has been a matter of debate and pressing concern. (See Authority; Church and State.)

Primacy in the Christian world appears to have originated in the relative importance, size, and prominence of the early communities in the great cities of the Roman Empire (q.v.). Rome was the capital, the largest city, and site of the largest Christian church. It thus appears, for these reasons, to have exercised a certain degree of leadership from the earliest times. Very quickly, at least by the 3rd c., the bishops of the communities in the regional or provincial capitals of the Empire took the lead in presiding over local councils, e.g., the councils at Carthage in the time of Cyprian, or the active role of Alexandria in Egypt (qq.v.). By the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, the three largest cities, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch (qq.v.), were recognized as exercising a primacy already in effect over, respectively, Italy, Egypt, and Libya, and the East, i.e., Syria and Palestine. The Council of Constantinople in 381 added the new imperial capital to the list in second place, after Rome, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 added Jerusalem to complete the five of the Byzantine pentarchy (qq.v.).

In each case, save Jerusalem’s, the factor that determined the different councils’ decisions was the size and importance of the city: “. . . because Constantinople is New Rome,” to quote Canon 3 (381). This principle, called “accommodation,” was already clashing in the 4th c. with the rising claims of the Roman Church, in particular the latter’s assertion, beginning with Pope Julius, that leadership in the Church depended upon a local church’s having had apostolic origins-hence the principle of “apostolicity”-and that Rome, as the see of the Apostle Peter, had inherited his pastoral care for the whole Church.