Round table: The message of the Council of Moscow for the Church today

This article presents the exchanges from a round table held at the Saint-Sergius Institute on the occasion of the centenary of the Moscow Council of 1917-1918, bringing together members of the Archdiocese of parishes of Russian tradition in Western Europe. In the form of a moderated debate, the participants examine the relevance of the conciliar message for the contemporary Orthodox Church. The central idea is that the Moscow Council remains a living model of conciliarity — rendered in Slavonic as sobornost', the equivalent of the Greek term katholikè — articulating episcopal governance, clerical-lay participation, and eucharistic theology. The speakers demonstrate that this legacy sheds light on unresolved questions: phyletism, clericalism, the place of the laity, and the relationship between authority and freedom in the Church. The contribution of the round table is to situate the Council not as a closed event but as an operative ecclesiological reference for thinking about institutional reform and the witness of the Orthodox Church in the West.