Question: "Why does the Orthodox Church not have a Bishop of Rome?"
There is no official answer to this question that I am aware of, but I think there are two reasons for this. Up until relatively recently, any Orthodox bishop who claimed that title would probably have ended in prison at the hands of the civil authorities in Italy, because they did not have anything like a first amendment guaranteeing freedom of religion. The other reasons is that if any local Church established a diocese in Rome, the canons say that this bishop would be the first in the diptychs, and this would quickly become a very divisive issue in the Church. So if there was to ever be a bishop of Rome in the Orthodox Church, I think there would first have to be pan-Orthodox agreement to establish such a see, and an agreement on how that would be understood in terms of the canons.
