The Untold Truth Of The Eastern Orthodox Church

The Orthodox faith is so poorly understood in the West that, until at least the late 1970s, certain branches of the U.S. military labeled Orthodox chaplains and servicemen as "Protestant" for administrative purposes, per The Washington Post. However, while Protestants generally regard themselves as having left the Catholic Church in order to correct its excesses or errors, Orthodox Christians see their church as the true church founded by Jesus — and regard the Catholic Church as having left them (via the Orthodox Church in America).

While Orthodox Christians think of their church as the true church, the Orthodox Church lacks the centralized hierarchy of Roman Catholicism. It's organized into a handful of "autocephalus" (self-governing) churches that are defined roughly by geographic or political region: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, America, and the Ukraine. There are also quite a few autonomous churches in places like Finland, Australia, and Japan.

In recent years, the Orthodox and Catholic churches have made moves toward getting back together. In 1965, for instance, the two churches officially lifted the mutual excommunication of 1054 (via National Geographic). But for anything to really move beyond that, one or both of the two churches would have to drastically shift their theology on things like the authority of the Pope, the existence of purgatory, and the use of statues in worship. It took nearly 1,000 years to lift the excommunication, though, so it might take another 1,000 years to make any more progress in that direction.

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