Historical procedures for granting autonomy and autocephaly are not strictly standardized in canonical law and often rely on local traditions, agreements, and specific historical-political circumstances. This leads to a diversity of practices – from unilateral tomoses (decrees) of autocephaly issued by the mother church to decisions supported by a broader pan-Orthodox consensus. At the pan-Orthodox level, the question of how new autocephalous and autonomous churches are proclaimed has been under discussion since the Pan-Orthodox preparatory commissions of the 20th–21st centuries. Preparatory documents envisage the need for a pan-Orthodox agreement, with autocephaly to be granted through a tomos signed by the mother church and confirmed by all local Orthodox churches. Nevertheless, the absence of a universally accepted mechanism and disagreements among individual patriarchates prevent the full institutionalization of a common model, as evidenced by the decisions of the Holy and Great Council in Crete (2016), where the topic was not included on the agenda due to a lack of consensus. As a result, the practice remains pluralistic, and the question of canonical procedures continues to be one of the key points of debate in contemporary pan-Orthodox interaction.
Ivan Yovchev (Thu,) studied this question.