Only one bishop does have jurisdiction over the Church in any particular place. Whether I am in a Coptic church in Egypt, Mexico, Bolivia, or Fiji, I am under the authority of the Coptic Orthodox bishop of that particular territory, by virtue of being a baptized member of the Coptic Orthodox Church (but see below; it’s not so much the ethnic/jurisdictional identity of the bishop that matters, so much that he is a canonically ordained bishop serving within our communion; if I were to move some place else without any Coptic Church, I would be obliged to attend liturgy in another OO church and be under the authority of whoever the local OO bishop is). I hope you are not interpreting the “one bishop for one land” idea to mean that there should only be one literal bishop per
country (in the sense of “geopolitical unit”). In some places this is how it works out (e.g., I believe that the authority of HG Bishop Suriel of Melbourne extends over all of Oceania, not just Melbourne, so Fiji, for instance, would have one bishop for the entire country), but elsewhere (e.g., Australia proper, which also has HG Bishop David overseeing Sydney and its affiliated regions) this is not manageable due to the size of the territory over which the Church extends. I believe that the spirit of the rule in question is to prevent phyletism or other kinds of ethnic division in what is supposed to be one Church, whereby I could move to Armenia or some place like that and because I am a “Copt” and not an Armenian move to set up a Coptic hierarchy so as to not have to commune with people who aren’t Copts, even though we’re all the same Church (Copts and Armenians). This is the original context in which the condemnation of the current situation came to a head in the modern day, as far as understand it, though it had nothing to do with anyone in my communion. The story goes that Bulgarians (EO) in Constantinople set up their own Bulgarian diocese so as to have an ethnic patriarch only for Bulgarians, to keep themselves separate from the preexisting Greek communities. This is not appropriate, and although I have a feeling that the OO approach to such issues might be a little more messy than the EO (though maybe not in practice, since the EO also have these cross-jurisdictional issues in North America; it is recognized as not ideal nor canonical, but the reality of subsequent waves of immigration into a land that is already a big jumbled mess of many ethnicities), it is resolved similarly to the extent that it is resolved ever: Everyone who is OO goes to the church that is already here/wherever they are. So, for instance, here in Albuquerque, the Coptic Church is the only game in town for
all non-Chalcedonian Orthodox, and we regularly commune Ethiopians as a result (I don’t know of any Orthodox Syriacs or Armenians in the area, but if they were here they’d come to St. Pishoy COC, too).
So, yes, only one bishop per territory is at least the goal, even if historical circumstance makes that hard to achieve. We are under HG Bishop Youssef here in the southern U.S., who is only one bishop (I’ve met the man in person; he is not several people).
