What Is Actually Proclaimed Today

Most parishes today hear an abbreviated Synodikon; some jurisdictions have added later material; and a few contemporary versions circulate that anathematize modern movements and living persons. This file sets out what can be verified about current practice, flags what cannot, and applies the Church’s own criteria to the modern additions without adjudicating a live intra-Orthodox dispute.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The General Picture, with Its Uncertainty

The plain fact is that the full received text of the Synodikon — preamble, seven blessings, confession, acclamations, iconoclast anathemas, the eleven chapters against Italos, the anti-Bogomil and twelfth-century Christological chapters, the Palamite block, the roster of ancient heresiarchs, and the long imperial and patriarchal lists — takes a very long time to chant, and is rarely heard entire. What is normally proclaimed at the end of the Sunday of Orthodoxy procession is an abridgement: the champions of Orthodoxy are lauded and those who opposed the Orthodox faith are condemned, in a much shortened form (as reported in the standard descriptive literature on the feast, e.g. OrthodoxWiki, s.v. “Sunday of Orthodoxy,” and the older account in the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Feast of Orthodoxy,” which describes the procession after Orthros or the Liturgy and the deacon’s proclamation of the Synodikon at its conclusion).

Beyond that, generalization becomes unsafe, and this collection will not pretend otherwise. Practice varies by jurisdiction, by diocese, and in fact by parish; service books differ; the text used at a pan-Orthodox Vespers in one city may not be the text used at another. A claim of the form “Orthodox parishes today read X” cannot be verified from the sources available for this collection, and is not made here. What follows is what can be said.

What Can Be Said

The abridged form is the norm rather than the exception. Descriptive accounts of the feast across jurisdictions agree in describing an abbreviated proclamation rather than the full received text.

The proclamation is attached to the procession. In the general pattern, a procession with icons is made after Orthros or after the Divine Liturgy, and the Synodikon is chanted at its conclusion (see The Feast as It Is Kept).

In some places the anathemas are omitted entirely. Where this happens, what is chanted is the acclamatory half — the confession and the “Eternal memory” clauses — without the condemnations.

In the Russian tradition the service has a distinct history and a distinct name. The Russian Chin Pravoslaviya, the “Rite of Orthodoxy,” has its own textual development, and this collection has been unable to verify its history in detail (see Greek, Slavic, and Other Recensions, where the point is flagged). The repository’s hub article notes that in ROCOR the service “is given particular solemnity” (see Great Lent).

The Forward-Looking Clause

The reason modern additions are possible at all is a sentence in the Synodikon itself, drawn from the Tome of Union of 920: “All that was innovated and enacted, or that after this shall be enacted, outside of Church tradition and the teaching and institution of the holy and ever-memorable fathers, Anathema” (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text of the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston; on the 920 provenance, Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, at 122, 126–127).

That clause is read by some as a standing condemnation covering future innovations without the need for new conciliar action — a reading argued explicitly in some contemporary Orthodox writing, which holds that this framework allows the Synodikon to address modern errors “without requiring new councils.” Others read it more narrowly, as a general anathema on innovation whose application to any particular case still requires the Church’s judgment.

The narrower reading is the one that fits the Synodikon’s own history. Every stratum this collection has been able to date entered the text after a council had judged the matter: 869–870, 920, 1082, 1156–57, 1351. The text did not grow by private application of the forward-looking clause; it grew by conciliar decision. That is a historical observation, not a polemical one, and it does not settle how the clause ought to be construed today.

Modern Additions and Their Status

Several twentieth- and twenty-first-century additions are in circulation, and they differ sharply in provenance and reception.

The ROCOR anathema against ecumenism (1983). The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, under Metropolitan Philaret, promulgated in 1983 an anathema against “the heresy of Ecumenism” and against those in communion with it or defending it, and it was appended to the ROCOR use of the Rite of Orthodoxy. Its status was contested from the beginning, including within ROCOR: Metropolitan Vitaly wrote that “time will tell whether or not the other local Churches will adopt our resolution on ecumenism” — an explicit acknowledgment that a synodal act of one Church awaits wider reception; and the act’s scope and application were disputed in subsequent decades (the 1983 anathema and the discussion of its reception as documented in the ROCOR materials collected at orthodoxinfo.com and in the subsequent ROCOR literature). This is exactly the kind of live intra-Orthodox dispute in which METHODOLOGY §4.2 governs: the positions are named, and this collection does not adjudicate between them. For the underlying argument, see The Ecumenism Debate.

Expanded lists circulated by particular hierarchs and communities. Versions circulate — some from Old Calendarist bodies, some from individual hierarchs of canonical Churches — that extend the anathemas far beyond the received text: to the non-Chalcedonian Churches by name and to their living primates, to Roman Catholicism and to a reigning pope by name, to Luther and Calvin and the Reformation confessions, to Anglicanism, to Judaism and Islam, to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists and Pentecostals, to ecumenical organizations, to evolutionary theory, and to particular jurisdictional disputes of the present decade (representative examples are published annually online by the Romanian-language site Ortodoxia Catholica and comparable outlets; a similar list circulated under the name of Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus has been discussed in the Greek Orthodox press).

Four observations, offered without heat.

They are not the received text. The prefatory note to the standard English translation of the received Synodikon already registers this development, observing that “some of the more zealous contemporary Orthodox even include condemnations of such things as the ‘pan-heresy of Ecumenism’” (editorial note by Archimandrite Ephrem [Lash] to the Louth translation; the same point is made in the note circulated with the Holy Transfiguration Monastery translation).

They anathematize living persons by name. This is a genuine departure from the pattern of the received Synodikon, whose personal condemnations are of the dead, and it collides directly with the patristic caution examined in The Sobriety of the Fathers.

They lack conciliar warrant of the kind every earlier stratum had. Each verifiable earlier addition followed a synodal judgment on the matter. A list composed by a single hierarch or community and inserted into a liturgical text has a different standing, whatever the merits of its content.

They have not been received. No pan-Orthodox act has adopted them, and the Churches that use the Synodikon in its received form have not incorporated them.

This collection therefore reports these versions as what they are: circulating expansions of local or private provenance, not the Synodikon of the Church’s tradition. It does not thereby pronounce on the doctrinal questions they raise, several of which — the status of ecumenical dialogue above all — are genuinely disputed within Orthodoxy and are treated per §4.2 in The Ecumenism Debate.

The Criterion the Tradition Itself Supplies

There is a criterion in the Synodikon’s own history for judging any proposed addition, and it has three parts.

Did a council judge the matter? Every verifiable stratum answers yes.

Is the object a teaching? The Synodikon’s condemnations fall on positions; persons are named as identified with a position, and the text is careful to add the condition of obstinacy after remedies offered (see The Iconoclast Anathemas).

Has the Church received it? Reception by the body of the Church is what converts a synodal act into part of the Church’s confession (see The Reception of Tradition).

Applying that criterion is a work for the Church, not for a reference guide. Stating it is not.

The Question of Abbreviation Itself

A last word on the widespread practice of shortening or omitting. It is easy to read the omission of the anathemas as embarrassment, and sometimes it is. But there are also honest reasons for it: much of the received text condemns errors nobody now holds in the form condemned; the personal rosters name men most hearers cannot identify; and a very long text chanted in full at the end of a procession is a pastoral problem as well as a liturgical one.

What is lost by omission should nevertheless be named. A Synodikon reduced to its acclamations is no longer performing the act described in Reading a Text That Both Blesses and Anathematizes; it has become a commemoration of confessors without the confession that made them confessors. The Church’s own instinct, expressed in the shape of the text, is that the two halves belong together. Whether and how to restore the balance in a given place is a pastoral judgment for a bishop, and this collection has no verdict to offer.

References

Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, with its prefatory note on modern zealot expansions.
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Trans. Andrew Louth, ed. to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), with editorial note on contemporary additions including the “pan-heresy of Ecumenism.”
Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128. (The 920 provenance of the forward-looking clause.)
Nicholas Mystikos. Tome of Union (920). In Nicholas I, Patriarch of Constantinople: Miscellaneous Writings, ed. L. G. Westerink. CFHB 20. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1981. P. 70.
The 1983 anathema against ecumenism of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, with the subsequent ROCOR discussion of its scope and reception (documents collected at orthodoxinfo.com; Metropolitan Vitaly’s statement on awaiting the reception of other local Churches).
OrthodoxWiki, s.v. “Sunday of Orthodoxy”; Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Feast of Orthodoxy” (1911). (Descriptions of the procession and of the abbreviated proclamation; used to locate the practice, not as terminal authorities.)
METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §2.3 (aggregators are not terminal citations), §4.2 (live intra-Orthodox disputes).