Cutting the head off from the rest of the body

Dear Ms Pepinster,

Your correspondent in the news item, Orthodox head visits Lambeth Palace (7 November, 2015), refers to His Holiness Bartholomew I Patriarch of Constantinople as ‘the head of the Orthodox Christian Church’.

This is both inaccurate and misleading.

St John Chrysostom, his predecessor, teaches that the Church needs no head on Earth as the Head is not separated from the Body, otherwise it would die.

Sadly, your correspondent has misunderstood the collegial nature of leadership within and among the Orthodox Churches, possibly imagining that we all long for a Pope after the model of Rome when nothing further could be from the truth.

Patrick Hampshire, Camborne