Russian Orthodox Church accuses Patriarch Bartholomew of trying to introduce papal authority in the Orthodox Church

This was stated in the live show “Church and Peace” by the head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Hilarion, the official website of the Russian Orthodox Church reports.

"We cannot accept such a model of the church structure, where there will be one person who is considered infallible, who will have power over all church councils. We are talking about the fact that the Church is conciliar and Apostolic. By conciliarity, we mean what in worldly language could be called the collective mind of the Church: in every local church, the patriarch is accountable to the Council of bishops, and not the Council of Bishops is accountable to the patriarch," Metropolitan Hilarion said.

"We need to assess the differences very soberly, and we are ready to discuss them in the framework of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue... In my perspective, the policy pursued by Constantinople in this dialogue was not aimed at achieving the reunification of Orthodox and Catholics, but at borrowing the Catholic model and creating the same model in the Orthodox Church, " the DECR chairman stressed . - In other words, so that we have some infallible "dad" who would make individual decisions, and we would all have to obey them. Thank God, this has never happened in our Orthodox Church. And I think this will never happen."

Hilarion believes that "this ugly attempt by Constantinople to introduce papal authority in the Orthodox Church has already led to a split in world Orthodoxy."