The Orthodox "diaspora", hostage of phyletism

This article examines the canonical situation of the Orthodox diaspora through the lens of phyletism, a heresy condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 1872. Noël Ruffieux adopts a synthetic historical and theological approach to analyze the gradual shift from the territorial Church to the national Church, a shift of which the diaspora constitutes the most acute indicator. The central idea is that the geographical dispersion of Orthodox Christians outside their countries of origin crystallizes and amplifies the ecclesial disorders generated by phyletism in its multiple forms. The article draws notably on the conclusions of the fourth Pre-Conciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference of 2009, which acknowledged the impossibility of an immediate return to the canonical principle of one bishop per place. The contribution of the study lies in its historical and conciliar contextualization of an ecclesiological question that has remained without a satisfactory institutional resolution within contemporary Orthodoxy.