Eastern Church

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Eastern Church

() That portion of the Christian church which prevails in the countries once comprised in the Eastern Roman Empire and the countries converted to Christianity by missionaries from them. Its full official title is The Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Eastern Church. It became estranged from the Western, or Roman, Church over the question of papal supremacy and the doctrine of the filioque, and a separation, begun in the latter part of the 9th century, became final in 1054. The consists of twelve (thirteen if the Bulgarian Church be included) mutually independent churches (including among these the Hellenic Church, or Church of Greece, and the Russian Church), using the vernacular (or some ancient form of it) in divine service and varying in many points of detail, but standing in full communion with each other and united as equals in a great federation. The highest five authorities are the patriarch of Constantinople, or ecumenical patriarch (whose position is not one of supremacy, but of precedence), the patriarch of Alexandria, the patriarch of Jerusalem, the patriarch of Antioch, and the Holy Synod of Russia. The accepts the first seven ecumenical councils (and is hence styled only schismatic, not heretical, by the Roman Catholic Church), has as its creed the Niceno-Constantinopolitan (without the later addition of the filioque, wh