Official texts adopted by the Council

This article brings together the eight documents officially adopted by the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church. It is an integral publication of conciliar texts, without interpretive commentary. The collection includes the Encyclical of the Council, setting forth in developed form its doctrinal and pastoral conclusions, as well as a synthetic Message intended for a broader audience. Six thematic decisions complete this corpus, addressing respectively the practice of fasting, ecumenical relations with other Christians, the procedure for proclaiming ecclesiastical autonomy, the situation of the Orthodox diaspora, the sacrament of marriage and its canonical impediments, and the mission of the Church in the contemporary world. These texts constitute a primary source of the first order for the study of contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology and represent a major historical contribution, being the first documents adopted by a pan-Orthodox council in more than a millennium.