Hierarchia Ecclesiastica Orientalis: Series Episcoporum Ecclesiarum Christianarum Orientalium III: Supplementum (review)

Various attempts have been made over the years to bring a sense of order to the complex and sometimes chaotic histories of the eastern churches. One aspect of this effort has been to publish lists of bishops of individual dioceses to show the historical continuity of the church in a particular place. The French Dominican theologian and historian Michel Le Quien (1661–1733) was the first to do this in a systematic way in his Oriens christianus in quatuor patriarchatus digestus, in quo exhibentur Ecclesiae patriarchae caeterique praesules totius Orientis, published posthumously in three volumes in Paris in 1740. Taking an exclusively topographical approach, Le Quien produced exhaustive lists with biographical notes of bishops of dioceses within the territory of the four ancient eastern Patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) as well as dioceses in outlying areas reaching out into Africa and into Asia as far as India. Le Quien's opus remained the standard work in the field for centuries. But as it grew more and more outdated, there were increasing calls for a new Oriens Christianus; the eastern Church specialist Adrian Fortescue called for such an effort in 1907.

Eighty-one more years would pass before an updated and revised edition of Le Quien's work would appear, under the direction of the prolific church historian Giorgio Fedalto of the University of Padua. His two-volume Hierarchia Ecclesiastica Orientalis drew on the vast historical research in the area that took place after Le Quien's death, correcting, improving, and updating the eighteenth-century work. The present volume is a supplement to the 1988 edition. It incorporates the results of the most recent research and updates the entries as needed up to the year 2000. For the first time, the supplement also includes an appendix that covers the many dioceses of eastern churches that have been established in other parts of the world in the modern era, mostly in Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia.

In his introduction, Fedalto presents this supplement as part of a difficult work in progress, still to be perfected, with gaps to be filled and corrections to be made. A number of these might be noted, some minor typos and spelling errors, but others are more serious. For example, some dioceses are misidentified as Greek Catholic when in fact they are Latin, such as Vitebsk, Belarus; and Scutari, Albania. The footnote on page 10 giving my classification of churches omits the Oriental Orthodox. The list of Orthodox archbishops of Athens on page 172 mistakenly adds an Archbishop Seraphim after Christodoulos, who took office in 1998 and lived until 2008. The list of bishops of the Apostolic Exarchate for Greece and Turkey (p.173) mistakenly includes Latin Archbishop Foscolos of Athens (it should be Gad, 1958–75; Printesis, 1975–2008). The list of Catholic archbishops of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (p. 232), leaves out Paulos Cardinal Tzadua, 1977–98. The text of the note on page 430 labeled Old Believers is really about the noncanonical Orthodox groups in Ukraine. The Slovak Catholic and Ukrainian Catholic eparchies of Toronto (p. 440) are conflated into a single jurisdiction. The list of Armenian archbishops of Los Angeles (Catholicossate of Cilicia, p. 449) is confused (it should be Yeprem Tabakian, 1977–85; Datev Sarkissian, 1985–95; and Moushegh Mardirossian, 1995 to the present). The list of Greek Orthodox archbishops of America (New York, p. 450) is also confused (it should be Iakovos, 1959–96; Spyridon 1996–99; and Demetrios, from 1999).

Any attempt to classify the eastern churches has its weaknesses. The more common approach today is to consider the churches according to communions, grouping the eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches together, as well as the Eastern Catholics and the Assyrian Church of the East. Using this structure in a work like Fedalto's would allow the researcher to see more clearly the historical development of a single church in various...