Macedonian Church Gets Entangled in 'Name' Dispute

The dispute between Greece and Macedonia over the country's name has now involved Macedonia's main faith group, the Macedonian Orthodox Church, MPC.

A row started on Wednesday following reports that the Church and Prime Minister Zoran Zaev had written to the global leader of Christian Orthodoxy, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, asking it to help the unrecognised Macedonian Church end its ecclesiastical isolation, and agreeing to remove the term "Macedonian" from its name.

"No one in the MPC will give it up, nor has he ever demanded it give up its constitutional name, of the Macedonian Orthodox Church - Archdiocese of Ohrid," Bishop Timotej, the Church spokesperson, told the media on Thursday.

"It is a matter for the Greek [and other] churches to decide how to address us, but we are both the Macedonian Orthodox Church and Archdiocese of Ohrid," Bishop Timotej clarified.

On Wednesday, the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in a press release said it had considered the request of the MPC and the Macedonian Prime Minister for help in solving the Church's status under the name "Archdiocese of Ohrid", and was willing to act.

The Synod said it had decided to act on "the request of the breakaway church in Skopje, supported by a letter from the Prime Minister of FYROM [Macedonia's provisional UN reference], Zoran Zaev, for the Ecumenical Patriarchate to take the initiative to return the Church within the [Orthodox] canonical framework under the name Archdiocese of Ohrid".

The influential Greek Orthodox webpage Romfea added to the confusion by saying that the MPC and Zaev had actually demanded that the adjective "Macedonian" be removed from the MPC's name, so that it could be recognised by the...