Messages from the hierarchs on the occasion of the 10th Orthodox Congress of Western Europe

This article brings together messages addressed by several Orthodox hierarchs on the occasion of the Tenth Orthodox Congress of Western Europe. It consists of a collection of official texts of a pastoral and ecclesiological nature, delivered or transmitted by bishops representing different jurisdictions present in Western Europe. The central idea running through these messages is the necessity of transcending ethnic and jurisdictional divisions in order to build a local Orthodox Church, rooted in Tradition and capable of bearing witness at the heart of Western modernity. On the theological level, these texts illustrate the tension between the canonical principle of territoriality and the diasporic reality of Orthodoxy in Europe, while emphasizing the missionary and ecumenical vocation of Orthodox communities in the West, called to embody the universality of the Apostolic Tradition within a context of religious and cultural pluralism.