Ionifa, V. (2014) Towards the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church. Fribourg: Institute for Ecumenical Studies University of Fribourg. - 214 p.

A meeting of the heads of local Orthodox churches, held in Istanbul in March 2014, made a fundamental decision to convene a pan-Orthodox council ("Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church"), which is expected to be held in 2016. This is a unique event, because after the Great Schism of 1054, that is, the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches, world Orthodoxy did not know a single general church council.

At the same time, it is difficult to call the decision to hold such a council unexpected, since its preparation has been underway for almost a century. The Pan-Orthodox Council, according to its organizers, should be a demonstration to the whole world of the unity of the Orthodox Church, and therefore it is not supposed to consider controversial issues. The task of the council is to approve pre-agreed positions, the development of which took place during the so-called pre-council process. And we can say that this process reflected, as in a mirror, the main contradictions in inter-Orthodox relations in the XX-beginning of the XXI century.

The book by Archpriest Viorel Ionita, a well - known Romanian theologian and long-time participant in the pre-conciliar process, is devoted to the history of the formation of the agenda of the Pan-Orthodox Council and the adoption of coordinated decisions on issues on this agenda. Vper-

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The first book was published in Romanian in 2013, but a year later the Institute for Ecumenical Studies of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) released an English-language edition aimed at a wider audience. It is symbolic that the English-language edition was published two months after the landmark decision to convene the Pan-Orthodox Council, and thus V. Ionitsa's book covers almost the entire process of its preparation. Such a fast translation into English is undoubtedly due to the relevance of the material collected in it. The book consists of two equal parts. The first part is a chronologically constructed description of the main stages and events of the pre-conciliar process (pan-Orthodox pre-conciliar meetings, conferences and congresses), which covers the period from 1923 to 2009. At the same time, the author also includes in the pre-conciliar process those events that are not recognized as pan-Orthodox by all autocephalous churches, but which, without a doubt, are important milestones on the way to a Pan-Orthodox Council. These included the Pan-Orthodox Congress in Constantinople (1923), the Meeting of the Inter-Orthodox Preparatory Commission on Mount Athos (1930), and the Meeting of Heads and Representatives of Autocephalous Local Churches in Moscow (1948). The author strives to present the facts objectively, remaining within the framework of academic discourse and avoiding "church-political" bias, that is, apologizing for any particular position (Constantinople, Moscow, etc.), which is an undoubted merit of this work.

At the same time, the description of "contentious" meetings in the pre - council process is only a small part of the historical section (pp. 4-37). Most of it is devoted to the actual pre-conciliar preparatory work, which began at the First Pan-Orthodox Conference on Rhodes in 1961. In separate chapters, the author consistently reviews all relevant events: four Pan-Orthodox conferences on Fr. Rhodes (1961, 1963, 1964, 1968) and four Pan-Orthodox Pre-Conciliar Meetings in Chambesy (1971, 1976, 1982, 2009). The description of each event is based on the general scheme: the format of the meeting, key figures, and decisions made.

In particular, the author covers the work of those meetings in which he was a participant, and in general, the participation of Romanian church delegations is described in more detail than all the others. This has its pros and cons. The advantage of the book is information about the position

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The main drawback is that the Romanian Orthodox Church is participating in the pre - conciliar process, and the disadvantage is that the positions of other participants are essentially ignored against the background of reports about the position of the Romanian side.

Another drawback is that the book ignores the Meeting of the Primates of the Autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches that took place in Istanbul in 2008. Formally, it stands apart from the official pre - conciliar process, but it was there (as it follows from the documents cited in the book-p.188) that the decision was made to convene the Fourth Pan-Orthodox Pre-Conciliar Conference in Chambesy. This omission is all the more strange because the format of the Istanbul conference in 2008 is similar to that of the Moscow conference in 1948 (which is covered in the book), and in addition, the first Istanbul meeting was followed by the second Meeting of the Primates of the Orthodox Churches in 2014, at which it was decided to convene a Pan-Orthodox Council. These developments should be taken into account in the preparation of subsequent editions of the work under consideration.

The second part of the book is essentially a reference section, as it contains all the official resolutions and documents of the Pan-Orthodox conferences discussed in the historical section. This is by far the most valuable part of the book, since the relevant texts are being introduced into scientific use for the first time as a single corpus. At the end of the reference section, information is provided on the composition of the delegations of autocephalous local churches to all the events described above, which took place within the framework of the so-called pre-conciliar process.

Despite the importance (and even uniqueness) of fr. Viorel Ionica, it should be noted a significant drawback of his book. From such a historical description, it is natural to expect not only factual information, but also an analysis of the problems that arose during the pre-council process. Even the reader who is not familiar with the specifics of modern inter-Orthodox relations cannot fail to notice that the fairly regular Pan-Orthodox meetings in Chambesy are suddenly interrupted at some point - for 27 years (from 1982 to 2009). During this period, only one of the four remaining outstanding issues on the agenda of the future council 4 ("Orthodox diaspora"). it was brought to the adoption of the agreed text. At the same time, this is the agreed

4. For more information about the council's agenda, see in the article by A. Shishkov in this issue of the journal.

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The decision turned out to be an interim one: the first paragraph of the document adopted at the Fourth Pan-Orthodox Pre-Conciliar Conference (2009) states that "the problem of the Orthodox diaspora should be dealt with as soon as possible."..

The author of this book simply ignores the dramatic and ultimately deadlocked discussion about the right of the Patriarch of Constantinople to govern the Orthodox diaspora, which took place at a meeting of the Inter-Orthodox Preparatory Commission in 1990, as well as the fact that as a result this issue was removed from the agenda of pre-council meetings, which only "froze" the problem itself. Later, for nineteen years, the participants in the pre-council process dealt with the less controversial and, in fact, secondary issue of organizing permanent meetings (assemblies, committees) of Orthodox bishops of different church jurisdictions in different regions of the Diaspora. It should be noted that other controversial issues on the council's agenda, such as "autocephaly and ways to proclaim it" and "diptychs", were not resolved during the pre-council process.

The failure of the inter-Orthodox pre-council discussion on the Diaspora, autocephaly and diptychs indicates a crisis in the modern system of inter-Orthodox relations. In our opinion, the key role in this crisis is played by the claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to special rights and privileges on the scale of the entire Orthodox Church, related to its primacy recorded in the diptychs (the list of autocephalous Orthodox churches compiled according to the principle of "primacy of honor", in which the Patriarch of Constantinople takes the first place as primus inter pares - " first among equals"). But the question of the primacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople in inter-Orthodox relations is also ignored by the author, which makes his work not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of scientific objectivity.

At the same time, despite these shortcomings, Archpriest Viorel Ionica's book is an important contribution to the study of modern inter-Orthodox relations and will undoubtedly be in demand not only by specialists, but also by a wider range of readers interested in issues related to the long-awaited Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church.

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