Twenty-three Eastern Catholic Churches are in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Six are headed by a patriarch: the Coptic, Syriac, Melkite Greek, Maronite, Chaldean, and Armenian Catholic Churches. Four more are headed by a major archbishop, an office that carries substantially the powers of a patriarch under a different title.
These ten Churches are not dioceses of the Latin Church with unusual ceremonies. Each governs itself through its own synod of bishops (a legally very different animal to Latin conceptions and practice of synods), elects its own head, and legislates its own particular law.
That self-governance is not a courtesy extended by Rome. It is a right recognized in the universal Church’s own legislation for the Eastern Churches, the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated in 1990.
Self-governance, however, had a gap in it. Canon 1060 §1, n. 1 reserves to the Roman Pontiff alone the right to judge a patriarch. A synod could disagree with its patriarch, and could say so, but it could not act. What that gap cost is not a matter of speculation. The new legislation records that numerous Eastern prelates had asked for a remedy.
That legal reservation put the pope in a bind whenever a relationship between a patriarch and his brother bishops genuinely broke down. He faced two unattractive options. He could intervene directly in the internal affairs of a Church that possesses the power to govern itself, which damages the very autonomy the code safeguards. Or he could leave the situation to fester, which damages the synodal life of that Church just as surely and rather more slowly.
Neither choice serves the Church well, and both had been exercised at various points in recent decades.
Pope Leo XIV has now supplied a third path. By the motu proprio Mutua concordia, issued on 29 August 2026, he amended canons 106 and 126 of the Eastern code to empower a synod of bishops, the highest governing body of a patriarchal Church, to remove its own patriarch from office in an orderly fashion. A motu proprio is legislation the pope issues on his own initiative rather than in response to a petition. This one was promulgated in L’Osservatore Romano and took immediate legal effect.
Although the two amended canons speak of patriarchs, the decree applies by legal analogy to the four major archiepiscopal Churches as well: the Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara, Ukrainian Greek Catholic, and Romanian Greek Catholic. Their synods now possess the same authority over their major archbishops, and everything that follows should be read as describing both offices.
The timing has not gone unremarked. Two of these Churches have recently passed through crises at the top.
In the Syro-Malabar Church, a protracted liturgical dispute compounded by allegations of a real estate scandal left the governance of Cardinal George Alencherry effectively paralyzed before his resignation in 2024.
Meanwhile, in the Chaldean Church, a division within the synod culminated in a group of bishops boycotting a meeting in 2024, after which Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako sought Rome’s backing against them; his own resignation followed this year. Both crises reached Rome because the code left them nowhere else to go.
The mechanics matter, because the procedure is designed to work even when the patriarch himself is unwilling. Ordinarily a synod meets only when the patriarch convokes it, which in a case of conflict would hand him a veto over his own removal. The amended canon 106 closes that door.
If the patriarch fails to discharge the duty of convocation that the canon lays upon him, the synod may be lawfully convoked by the bishop most senior in episcopal ordination among those entitled to a deliberative vote — that is, among the bishops whose votes actually decide matters, rather than merely advise. Should that bishop in turn fail to act, the faculty passes to the next in seniority who is available.
The synod’s first step is not removal but a request. Having recognized a grave cause as such, it asks the patriarch to resign. If he declines, the senior bishop with a deliberative vote sees to the election of a new president to preside over the proceedings, since the patriarch can hardly chair the deliberation of his own case. The new president then puts the question of removal to a secret ballot, which succeeds only if at least two-thirds of the members entitled to a deliberative vote support it. Throughout, the patriarch retains the right to defend himself before the synod.
If the movement to remove passes, the president then informs the Roman Pontiff as soon as possible, and it belongs to the pope to grant assent to the removal. Only with that assent does the patriarchal see become vacant, after which the synod may proceed to elect a successor.
The requirement of papal assent may look at first like Rome retaining the last word after all, and in a formal sense it does.
But the legislation states plainly what the assent is for. The pope reserved to himself the granting of assent alone, so that the fathers of the synod might be assured of full freedom in expressing their own decision, with every undue pressure, whether internal or external, removed.
That sentence repays attention.
A synod of bishops does not deliberate in a vacuum. It can face pressure from a hostile or manipulative local government or civil authority — and several of these Churches live under states with a keen interest in who leads them. It can face pressure from within, from a faction of bishops with its own designs. The assent stands between a patriarch and a removal engineered by anyone other than the synod acting freely. It is a safeguard on the liberty of the synod rather than a check on its competence.
Not everyone reads it that way. Some Eastern clergy and canonists have voiced the contrary worry: that a mechanism formally lodged in the synod hands Rome a quieter way to accomplish what it once had to do openly, and that a two-thirds vote for a legally undefined grave cause amounts in practice to a motion of no-confidence. The concern deserves an answer rather than a dismissal.
The answer is that the cause must be grave and the synod must recognize it as such, that the patriarch is guaranteed a full defense, and that the threshold is one no faction can reach alone. Whether those provisions prove sufficient will be settled by the first synod that has occasion to use them, and not before.
What becomes of a patriarch who has left office is left to the synod, whose task it is to assess the application of canon 62, the canon governing a former patriarch’s title, his residence, and his support.
Taken as a whole, Mutua concordia reflects two commitments held together. The first is the pope’s concern, in virtue of his Petrine ministry, for the well-being of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The second is his respect for the power of Churches in full communion with the See of Rome to resolve their own problems.
The instinctive way to address a crisis in a distant Church is to reach in and settle it. Pope Leo has done something harder and more useful: he has given each Church the means to settle it itself, and reserved to himself only the role of ensuring that the settlement is genuinely its own.
Chorbishop John D. Faris is research professor of Eastern canon law at The Catholic University of America and judicial vicar of the Eparchy of Saint Maron of Brooklyn.