Political borders and canonical territory do not always overlap. The First World War created a challenging situation in how to apply the canons to territories that were not Orthodox already and in which were many Orthodox immigrants. Many Orthodox Christians from different local Churches and different canonical territories fled to western Europe and the Americas. As a result, bishops and priests followed their flock abroad. Some of the principles and historical writings that were examined from previous chapters outlined how a single bishop governs a single territory without interference from other bishops, or at least with the permission of another bishop. In the Americas, Australia, Oceania and western Europe, the canonical territory was yet to be defined, unlike in the countries of the Middle East, eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia where the culture had been traditionally Orthodox for a long time. The creation of this broad “diaspora” is where the difficult scenario of the principle of canonical territory is applied.
Many Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Russian Orthodox immigrated to France and Germany. The challenge is how to manage and apply the principle of canonical territory to the new churches being built in the same territory, but under different bishops from different jurisdictions outside of western Europe. Although the challenge remains in certain countries, the Church in her wisdom anticipated the problems that would happen by creating laws, canons and establishing principles from at least the 4th c. from epistles, letters, writings, local councils and ecumenical councils, and the Apostolic Constitutions. The collapse of old countries did not always mean that canonical territory would change along with it. The end of the USSR, for example, did not change the canonical territory and jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, which included Ukraine and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. After the Third Yugoslavia (the old Land of the South Slavs) was broken up through the ethnic wars of the 1990s, the Serbian Orthodox Church kept its flock together in separate countries: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Slovenia. According to Metropolitan Hilarion, the issues of modern borders, immigration and canonical territory might be solved by discussing another principle that he calls “cultural canonical territory.” That idea would take into consideration regions or countries where the majority of the people are Orthodox from a particular language or culture, such as Russian. In ancient times, however, Antioch itself, which later became a key Roman province of Syria, had different ethnic and cultural roots that poured in over the centuries from Semitic, Hellenic and Roman peoples. In fact, Antioch became the city en route for moving trade between Europe and Asia. That history of the Antiochian Church could be another model for handling issues of jurisdiction, culture and language in a world that is rapidly changing.