NEW YORK – Metropolitan Philip, primate of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America, issued an official letter to the hierarchs, clergy and faithful of the Antiochian Archdiocese this past August 7, repeated an earlier edict which forbids members of the Antiochian Archdiocese to be in communion with clergymen who serve a handful of Palestinian and Jordanian Orthodox parishes which now form a new vicariate under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The 15 parishes in question have wanted to be under the Patriarchate of Jerusalem’s jurisdiction, but Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem recently consented that those parishes should come under the ecclesiastical oversight of the Ecumenical Patriarchate through the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, which is the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s eparchy in the United States.
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