Synaxis Synaxis of the Fathers of the Six Ecumenical Councils

HONEST NOTE ON THE AMBIGUITY OF THE ORIGINAL TITLE: the card's short title "Holy Fathers" is inherently ambiguous and could in theory refer to the movable pre-Nativity "Sunday of the Holy Fathers" (commemorating the Old Testament ancestors of Christ according to the flesh). However, for this card the category already present in the database, "synaxis/council of saints," is a structurally closer match to the "Synaxis of the Fathers of the Six Ecumenical Councils" — a movable feast dedicated specifically to the Church Councils — which is what determined the choice of this identification; final certainty about the original data compiler's intent is not absolute.

The Synaxis of the Fathers of the Six Ecumenical Councils is a movable feast, kept on the Sunday nearest July 16/29. It gathers the memory of about 630 hierarchs — participants in the First Council of Nicaea (325), the First Council of Constantinople (381), the Council of Ephesus (431), the Council of Chalcedon (451), the Second Council of Constantinople (553), and the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681). The feast celebrates the dogmatic definitions established by these Councils (the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, of the two natures of Christ) and commemorates the conciliar condemnation of the era's major heresies — Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism.

The feast is movable, kept on the Sunday nearest July 16/29.