“We renounce, censure and condemn racism, that is racial discrimination, ethnic feuds, hatreds and dissensions within the Church of Christ, as contrary to the teaching of the Gospel and the holy canons of our blessed fathers which ‘support the holy Church and the entire Christian world, embellish it and lead it to divine godliness'” – Holy and Great Pan-Orthodox Synod, Constantinople,1872.
Phyletism (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos “nation” and φυλετισμός phyletismos “tribalism”) is the name of an ecclesiological (sic) heresy which says that the Church can be territoriality organized on an ethnic, racial, or cultural basis so that within a given geographic territory, there can exist several Church jurisdictions, directing their pastoral care only to the members of specific ethnic groups.
A Church Council in 1872 officially defined and condemned this heresy. It reacted to a proposition made by Bulgarians of the Patriarchate of Constantinople who wanted to establish a church jurisdiction, sanctioned by the Turkish government, on the territory of the Patriarchate: The formation in the same place of a particular [local] Church based on race which only receives faithful of that same ethnic group and is run by pastors of only of the same ethnic group, as the adherents of Phyletism claim, is an event without precedent.*
*Excerpt from Maxime de Sardes, Le Patriarcat œcuménique dans l’Église orthodoxe, Paris, Éditions Beauchesne, 1975, p. 378.
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