An essay in universal history

14. DIVISIONS IN THE GREEK CHURCH

In the immediate post-war period, while the Greek True Orthodox increased in numbers, the divisions among them continued and intensified. Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina and his two fellow bishops, called the “Florinites”, continued to argue that the new calendarists were potentially rather than actually schismatics, while the followers of Bishop Matthew, the “Matthewites”, insisted that they were already outside the Church.

On August 26, 1948, an assembly of the Matthewites decided “that our most Reverend Bishop Matthew of Bresthena should proceed to the consecration of new bishops, insofar as the other pseudo-bishops of the True Orthodox Christians neither understand nor confess Orthodoxy, nor unite with us, nor even agree to make consecrations. We grant him the authority to proceed both to the election of people and to their immediate consecration, in accordance with the divine and sacred canons and the opinions of our canon law experts, and in accordance with the practice of the whole Church of Christ, which has accepted, in case of necessity (as is the case today) such a dispensation, as we have just heard from our Protosynkellos, Protopriest Eugene Tombros, who explained the validity of the consecration of one Bishop by one Bishop in accordance with the law of our Orthodox Church.”¹⁶¹
In September, Bishop Matthew, after warning Metropolitan Chrysostom and Bishop Germanus of what he was about to do, consecrated Spyridon of Trimithun (Cyprus), and then, with Spyridon, Demetrius of Thessalonica, Callistus of Corinth and Andrew of Patras. By this time Bishop Matthew was half-paralyzed, so that his paralyzed right hand had to be lowered onto the head of the ordinand in the altar by Abbess Mariam! Strictly speaking, this consecration was uncanonical, not only because it was carried out by one bishop only, contradicting the First Apostolic Canon, but also because Matthew himself was a vicar-bishop – and vicar bishops can ordain nobody higher than a deacon without the permission of their metropolitan (Canon 10 of Antioch). However, the Matthewites argued that it was permissible by condescension because Bishop Matthew was the only true bishop in Greece at that time. This was rejected by the other Old Calendarist bishops.
On October 29, 1948, Metropolitan Chrysostom abandoned his previous ambiguity on the question of grace and declared unambiguously that the new calendarists had “separated themselves from the Unique Body of Orthodoxy… We consider and believe that the official Church of Greece is schismatic and that the services celebrated by its clergy are deprived of Divine grace.”¹⁶²
This convinced another Old Calendarist Bishop, Germanus of the Cyclades, who had been in prison from January, 1948 to January, 1950, to re-enter communion with Metropolitan Chrysostom.
The Florinites and the Matthewites now had an identical confession. But no union took place because the Matthewites considered that Chrysostom had fallen away from Orthodoxy through his vacillations… “Although Bishop Matthew’s integrity, personal virtue and asceticism were admitted by all,” write the monks of Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, “his course of action only widened the division between the ‘Matthewites’ and ‘Florinites’.
“The ‘Florinites’ and the ‘Matthewites’ made many attempts at reconciliation, but all were unsuccessful. Stavros Karamitsos, a theologian and author of the book, The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, describes as an eye-witness the two instances in which Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina personally attempted to meet with Bishop Matthew. Unfortunately, on both occasions – the first, which had been planned to take place on January 19, 1950, at the Matthewite Convent in Keratea at the invitation of [the Matthewite] Bishop Spirydon of Trimythus, and the second, which actually did take place at the Athens Metochion of the Keratea Convent – the abbess and senior nuns of that convent, at the prompting of the Matthewite protopresbyter Eugene Tombros, intervened and would not allow Metropolitan Chrysostom to speak with Bishop Matthew. On the second occasion, in May of 1950, when Bishop Matthew was on his deathbed and had been unconscious for three days, Metropolitan Chrysostom arrived at Bishop Matthew’s quarters and approached his bedside. Standing at his side, Metropolitan Chrysostom bowed down and quietly asked him, ‘My holy brother, how are you feeling?’ To the astonishment of all present, Bishop Matthew regained consciousness and opened his eyes. When he saw the Metropolitan, he sought to sit up out of deference and began to whisper something faintly. At that very moment, the Abbess Mariam of the Convent of Keratea entered the room with several other sisters and demanded that all the visitors leave. Only a few days later, on May 14[/27], 1950, Bishop Matthew died.”¹⁶³
On May 26, 1950, Metropolitan Chrysostom officially returned to the confession of 1937. Together with Bishop Germanus, he sent the following encyclical both to the State Church and to the Matthewites: “In the year of our Saviour 1935 we proclaimed the Church of the innovating new calendarists to be schismatic. We reiterate this proclamation and in consequence ordain the enforcement of the First Canon of St. Basil the Great that the sacraments celebrated by the new calendarists, in that the latter are schismatics, are deprived of sanctifying grace. Therefore no new calendarist must be received into the bosom of our Most Holy Church or be served without a prior confession by which he condemns the innovation of the new calendarists and proclaims their Church schismatic. As regards those who have been baptized by the innovators, they should be chrismated with Holy Chrism of Orthodox origin, such as is found in abundance with us.
“We take this opportunity to address a last appeal to all the True Orthodox Christians, calling on them in a paternal manner to come into union with us, which would further our sacred struggle for patristic piety and would satisfy our fervent desire.
“In calling on you, we remove the scandals which have been created by us through our fault, and to that end recall and retract everything written and said by us since 1937, whether in announcements, clarifications, publications or encyclicals, which was contrary and opposed to the Principles of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ and the sacred struggle for Orthodoxy conducted by us, as proclaimed in the encyclical published by the Holy Synod in 1935, without any addition or subtraction, and including the scientific definition ‘Potentiality and Actuality’.”¹⁶⁴
This humble and thoroughly Orthodox statement persuaded a large number of Matthewites to rejoin Metropolitan Chrysostom. However, it did not satisfy the Matthewite hardliners. What disappointed them was that Chrysostom did not confess that he had been a schismatic since 1935 and turn to the Matthewites to be readmitted into the Church, but rather called on them to be reunited with him. In any case, they did not want to be subject to a hierarch who refused to act as the head of an autocephalous Church and consecrate bishops, thereby threatening the survival of the Church. However, Chrysostom was not a schismatic. He had not returned to the new calendarists, nor had he been tried or defrocked by any canonical Synod. And he still retained the support of the majority of the bishops and clergy, 850 parishes and about a million laypeople.¹⁶⁵ Although he had wavered on the question of grace, this was neither heresy nor schism, and certainly not automatic apostasy. For, as Metropolitan Macarius (Nevsky) of Moscow, who was himself unlawfully removed from his see in 1917, said: “The Holy Church cannot allow an incorrect attitude towards its first-hierarchs, she cannot remove them from their sees without a trial and an investigation.”¹⁶⁶ Contrary to Matthewite teaching, not every division in the Church constitutes a full-blown schism leading to the loss of sacramental grace of one of the parties. The Apostle Paul speaks of “quarrels” and “differences of opinion” within the one Church of the Corinthians (I Corinthians 1.10-14, 11.19); and St. John Chrysostom says that these quarrels took place “not because of difference in faith, but from disagreement in spirit out of human vanity”.¹⁶⁷
Again, Protopriest Michael Pomazansky writes: “The unity of the Church is not violated because of temporary divisions of a non-dogmatic nature. Differences between Churches arise frequently out of insufficient or incorrect information. Also, sometimes a temporary breaking of communion is caused by the personal errors of individual hierarchs who stand at the head of one or another local Church; or it is caused by their violation of the canons of the Church, of by the violation of the submission of one territorial ecclesiastical group to another in accordance with anciently established tradition. Moreover, life shows us the possibility of disturbances within a local Church which hinder the normal communion of other Churches with the given local Church until the outward manifestation and triumph of the defenders of authentic Orthodox truth. Finally, the bond between Churches can sometimes be violated for a long time by political conditions, as has often happened in history. In such cases, the division touches only outward relations, but does not touch or violate inward spiritual unity.”¹⁶⁸
The extreme Matthewite position leads to the following reductio ad absurdum. Let us suppose that Chrysostom was automatically defrocked in 1937 for calling schismatics Orthodox. It follows that all the bishops in the history of the Orthodox Church who transgressed in the same way were also automatically defrocked. Therefore Metropolitan Dorotheus and the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate were also automatically defrocked in 1920 for embracing the western heretics. Moreover, all those who remained in communion with Dorotheus were also automatically defrocked. But that included the Eastern Patriarchs, the Patriarchs of Russia and Serbia and in general the whole of the Orthodox Church! But then we must conclude, in accordance with strict Matthewite reasoning, that the Church of Christ ceased to exist in 1920! But, of course, the Matthewites do not draw this logical conclusion from their own premises. Therefore their reasoning must be considered to be inconsistent.
*
In June, 1950 the new calendarist Archbishop of Athens Spyridon Vlachos wrote to the Greek government that the Old Calendar movement was a form of pan-Slavism more dangerous to the nation even than communism! This was followed by a fierce persecution of the Old Calendarists, both Florinites and Matthewites. This community in persecution is a powerful argument that both factions communed of the True Body and Blood of Christ. And there were prominent Old Calendarists who refused to take sides. Thus on being asked which faction he belonged to, Hieromonk Jerome of Aegina replied: “I am with all the factions!”¹⁶⁹
The renewal of persecution against the True Church was clearly imminent in 1949, when, “the State Church elected Archbishop Spyridon to the primacy; he was to prove the fiercest persecutor yet of the Old Calendarists. Immediately after his election, he required his Bishops to submit details about Old Calendar clergy, parishes, and monasteries in their dioceses. The theological schools were forbidden in the future to accept Old Calendarist students (this order is still in effect, though heretics of various persuasions are not debarred). Finally, on January 3, 1951, at the request of the Holy Synod of the State Church, a decree was issued by the Council of Ministers as follows: ‘… It is decided that: 1) Old Calendarist clergy who do not have canonical ordination by canonical Bishops of our Orthodox Church, and who wear clerical dress, should be deprived thereof; 2) monks and nuns following the Old Calendar should be arrested and confined to monasteries, and those who bear the monastic dress uncanonically should be deprived thereof and prosecuted; 3) the Churches which have been illegally seized by the Old Calendarists should be returned to the official Church, as also the monasteries they possess illegally and capriciously; 4) the execution of the above be entrusted to the Ministries of Public Order, Justice, Religion, and Education.’
“The above plan was put into immediate effect. In a short while, the basement of the Archdiocese in Athens and other towns was filled with the clerical robes of the True Orthodox clergy who were taken there, shaved, often beaten, and then cast out into the street in civil dress; many Priests underwent this process a number of times, while others were arrested and sent into exile. One aged Priest, Father Plato, was beaten to death by the police in Patras, and then hastily buried in a field to cover up the crime. All the Churches in Athens were sealed and their vessels taken, and a few Churches in other parts of Greece were even demolished. Soon no True Orthodox Priest could circulate undisguised, and even monks and nuns were not immune to these profane attacks.
“The first victim was Bishop Germanus of the Cyclades, who died in the greatest grief when under house arrest on March 24, 1951, and was buried by the Faithful¹⁷⁰; by the personal order of Archbishop Spyridon, they were not permitted to take the body to a Church, and no Priest was allowed to assist; even so, many were arrested at the cemetery. Soon the orphanage of the TOC was seized by the State Church. There is no space here, unfortunately, to describe all the heroic struggles of the Old Calendarists at this time, the demonstrations attended by thousands in the squares of Athens, the catacomb Church services and so forth, which are the glory of our Church.
“The eighty-one-year-old Metropolitan Chrysostom was arrested in February, 1951, and after repeated attempts to change his views, was exiled to the Monastery of St. John in Lesbos, situated on a remote 2,500-foot crag, where he was to remain for over a year. The monks of the monastery behaved sympathetically, but conditions were very hard for an infirm, elderly man. The Metropolitan, however, constantly expressed his joy at being found worthy to suffer for his Faith, and his satisfaction at the resistance and perseverance of the Faithful in the face of persecution. We have a precious proof of his holiness from this bitter time: the police officer whose duty it was to guard him, looked into the Bishop’s cell one evening and, to his amazement, saw him standing in prayer with his hands raised, surrounded by a blinding heavenly light. The guard fell at his feet to ask forgiveness and subsequently became one of his most faithful spiritual children.¹⁷¹
“Passion Week of 1952 saw fearful scenes of impiety perpetrated on the TOC, but it was rapidly becoming clear to all that the persecution was producing merely public disorder and complaint, and was achieving nothing in the way of ‘re-uniting’ the Faithful to the State Church; indeed, rather the opposite. Finally, in June, 1952, through the intervention of the new Prime Minister, Plastiras, Metropolitan Chrysostom and the other Bishops were released. Slowly the pressure was relaxed, much aided by the constant protests of Patriarch Christopher of Alexandria, a supporter of the Old Calendarists from the beginning, and eventually two Churches were permitted to function in the city of Athens…. However, it was not until 1954 that the violent measures finally came to an end and the Churches could be safely re-opened.”¹⁷²
It is perhaps no accident that the persecutions against the True Orthodox in Greece took place when the Greek civil war and the great political turmoil of the previous decade had come to an end. Freed from external enemies, the State Church could now return to “the enemy within”. Even some former communist hierarchs were re-employed in the struggle against the True Orthodox, such as Metropolitan Anthony of Elia, who joined the party in 1944 was deposed in 1946, but returned to his see after the amnesty of 1952.¹⁷³
By 1949, however, the communist threat had receded and Greece was firmly back within the sphere of western influence. The time was ripe for the State Church to go forward to full union with the western heretics – but only if its rear could be secured from snipers of the True Orthodox Church. Hence the significance of the election of the persecutor Archbishop Spyridon, who was entrusted with removing this, the main obstacle to the further development of Ecumenism in the western world.
In this period, unfortunately, Metropolitan Chrysostom again wavered in relation to the new calendarists. On December 11, 1950 he declared in the newspaper Vradini (Evening) that the Old Calendarists were “a living artery through which clean Orthodox blood flowed into the heart of the Church”, and that the Old Calendarists had condemned the State Church as schismatic only because the State Church had done the same to them (in 1926). And in the same month he declared in the official organ of the Church, I Foni Orthodoxias (The Voice of Orthodoxy): “In spite of the cruel persecution that the innovating Church has organized against us, we avoided, at the beginning out of respect for the significance of the Church, to pronounce her schismatic in an ecclesiastical encyclical, at the same time that she declared us to be schismatics in court, condemning our bishops of Megara and Diauleia, in order to justify their decision to depose them. But when we saw that the ruling Synod had decided, contrary to all the holy canons and the age-old practice of the Church, to consider the sacraments of us, the true Orthodox, to be invalid, then we, too, in defence issued this encyclical, so as to calm the troubled conscience of our flock, and not for the sake of acquiring the property of the monastery in Keratea…”¹⁷⁴
In March, 1951 the Greek Minister of Internal Affairs Bakopoulos issued the following statement concerning the negotiations between Metropolitan Chrysostom and the newcalendarist Archbishop Spirydon: “The negotiations… are going well and have reached the point that the former Bishop of Florina has completely recognized his error… The official Church has exceeded all limits in the concessions it has made. In time it would have rehabilitated the Old Calendar bishops, and ordained their priests… and recognized the sacraments accomplished by them as valid, and churches would have been offered for those who would want to celebrate according to the old calendar. Both the former Bishop of Florina and the other bishops (Germanos of the Cyclades, Christopher of Megara and Polycarp of Diauleia) agreed with all this, and, according to our information, their representatives, distinguished lawyers, had to formulate a corresponding act… Unfortunately, at the last moment irresponsible activists from the lay estate interfered… and influenced the weak character of the former Bishop of Florina, who rejected all that he had said earlier…”¹⁷⁵
One of the conditions of union with the official Church was the commemoration of the newcalendarist Archbishop Spirydon, on which Metropolitan Chrysostom commented: ‘Oldcalendarism in its essence is an invincibly strengthened protest… The only power which could review this protest and bring a final decision for or against the calendar innovation is a Pan-Orthodox Council… Our movement is not being stubborn… Our opinions differ from those of the leadership of the Autocephalous Church of Greece… The second reason for the failure is the strange and imprudent hastiness of the competent people to force any kind of decision on us. Thus they suggested that within three or six days the Old Calendarists should agree to commemorate the new calendarist metropolitan in their churches. We, for brevity’s sake, will omit all the other reasons which the making of this suggestion made unacceptable, and ask the Greek people: how is it possible for an Old Calendarist to change his psychological presuppositions so quickly as to consider as his president the metropolitan whom to this day he has considered to be his real enemy and persecutor, and from whom he has suffered much? We, at any rate, have not found this magic wand…”¹⁷⁶
Metropolitan Chrysostom’s inconsistencies could not fail to undermine the determination of his fellow bishops; and although Bishop Germanos of the Cyclades died as a confessor on March 24, 1951, the other three bishops resigned from their pastoral duties on November 6, 1952, “until a final resolution of the calendar question by a Pan-Orthodox Council”.¹⁷⁷ This decision elicited demonstrations in the streets by the Florinites, which led Metropolitan Chrysostom to withdraw his resignation. However, Bishops Christopher and Polycarp remained as simple lay members of the True Orthodox Church until February, 1954, when they returned to the State Church and were received in their existing rank.¹⁷⁸
“As a result of this, Chrysostom of Florina remained alone as the head of the larger group of the True Orthodox Church until his death. Several candidates for the episcopacy were presented to him. Bishop Nikolaj (Velimirovich) of the Serbian Church, who was then residing in the United States, offered to help him consecrate new bishops. However, Chrysostom declined the suggestion¹⁷⁹. In answer to the pleas of his flock for bishops, he directed that they come to terms with the bishops Matthew had consecrated and have them somehow regularized according to the canons.”¹⁸⁰
“The death of the Metropolitan, which occurred on the Feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God, September 7, 1955 (old style), again permits us to glimpse his sanctity behind the veil of great modesty and privacy which he always maintained in his contacts even with his closest assistants. The Bishop, foreseeing his death, summoned his confessor, the Athonite Archimandrite John, on the night before, and made an hour-long general confession. Returning home that evening, he instructed his attendant to spread his bed with new white sheets and coverings. In the morning he was found with his hands crossed on his chest, reposed in the Lord, with no sign of illness. His will reveals that he had no money or possessions to dispose of. The funeral, held in the Church of the Transfiguration at Kypselli, Athens, was attended by tens of thousands who came in grief to venerate the body of their leader, which according to Byzantine tradition was seated in the center of the Church during the funeral; afterwards, the police had to drive back the crowds to permit the body to be taken to the place of burial, the Dormition Convent on Mount Parnes. By a curious coincidence, the bells of all the Churches in Greece were ringing mournfully as he went to his place of rest – the Synod of the State Church having so ordered as a sign of grief at the recent anti-Greek riots in Constantinople. When after six years, as is the custom in Greece, the bones of the Metropolitan were exhumed, the fragrance they produced filled the entire convent for several days, and is still often perceptible.”¹⁸¹
In spite of his inconsistencies Metropolitan Chrysostom never entered into communion with the new calendarists. And there are other proofs of his Orthodoxy. Thus Abbess Euthymia of the Dormition Convent writes: “When we buried the ever-memorable hierarch Chrysostom, since he was buried in our Monastery, the whole place was fragrant and the builders who were building the foundation of the church came down from there and asked our elder: ‘Father, what is this fragrance which we can smell where we’re working?’ And they saw the exhumation and understood. I was the one who washed the bones of his Beatitude, and my hands were fragrant the whole night. And this fragrance was perceptible in our Monastery for forty days.
“One nun who had been in the Monastery since the age of seven… said that she had not been baptized… When the Bishop of Florina fell asleep, she sat for forty days at his tomb and besought him to enlighten the elder to baptize her. Then in her sleep she saw him sitting on a throne, and he told her that she was unbaptized and that the elder should look at the holy Rudder. And indeed they found that when there are doubts people should be baptized. And there was a consumptive girl who came and took some oil from the lamp of the tomb and smeared her breast with it and was healed.”¹⁸²
Summarising the discords between the bishops in this period, the words of the Athonite Elder Damascene, who shared a cell with Bishop Matthew in the 1920s but joined the “Florinites” in 1982, wrote: “The three ever-memorable Hierarchs Chrysostom of Florina, Germanus of the Cyclades and Matthew of Bresthena struggled for the traditions of the Fathers. But as men wearing flesh and living in the world they fell into error while in this life. However, the three finished their lives in the good Confession and passed away in repentance. And if someone wishes to represent one or other of the three as having been quite without reproach, and that he alone held the truth without any deviation, that man is, in the words of the divine Chrysostom, an erring scoffer, a deceiver and a base flatterer. That is, when he praises everything, both the good and the bad.”¹⁸³
*
In Cyprus, the great majority of the Orthodox had accepted the new calendar in 1924.¹⁸⁴ The centre of resistance to the innovation was the ancient monastery of Stavrovouni, where Hieromonk Cyprian and a few disciples continued to follow the Orthodox Calendar. In 1944, these monks were expelled, scattered round the island and founded some hermitages. But they had no bishops…
In 1946 Bishop Matthew sent five monks to Cyprus, and a little later, the protosynkellos of his Church, Fr. Eugene Tombros. In 1948, as we have seen, he consecrated Bishop Spyridon, a Greek, for the True Orthodox of Cyprus.¹⁸⁵
Galactotrophousa monastery, near Larnaka, was the first monastery of the Cypriot True Orthodox and had been built at the direct command of the Mother of God. Monk Paul of Cyprus tells the story: “When the monastery was being built – in a poor way, like all the monasteries of the True Orthodox Christians, with mud bricks and straw – one of the monk-builders, a pious and very simple man, but ‘a bird of passage’, was thinking of going elsewhere. While he was relaxing under a tree at midday, the All Holy [Mother of God] appeared to him in majesty, as he told the story, and said: ‘Don’t go.’ He said to her: ‘Why are you standing in the sun? Go into the shade.’ But she said to him again: ‘Stay and build a church and cells for me, and I will bring my treasures here and will live here because they are persecuting me from all sides with their new calendar.’ And then she disappeared.”¹⁸⁶
Bishop Spyridon, after only nine months on Cyprus, was imprisoned and sent back to Greece by the British at the instigation of the new calendarists. While in prison, he told Abbot Chrysostom of Galactotrophousa monastery to go with him to Greece, where he would be consecrated bishop in his stead. However, the authorities denied him a visa. But in 1957 Monk Epiphanius arrived in Greece and was consecrated Bishop of Kition – which consecration, however, was not recognised by Bishop Spyridon.¹⁸⁷ This caused a schism in the Cypriot Church, and Abbot Chrysostom, who remained faithful to Bishop Spyridon, was defrocked by the Matthewite Synod in Greece. However, the schism was healed, and Abbot Chrysostom was reinstated, in the 1980s.¹⁸⁸
As regards the new calendarist Church of Cyprus, it was British policy to hinder the consecration of new bishops on Cyprus. After the newcalendarist Archbishop Cyril III died in 1933, and until 1947, the British colonial government did not allow the election of a new first-hierarch. By this time all the metropolitans on the island had been exiled except Leontius of Paphos. In 1950 the new metropolitan became Archbishop Macarius III, who also became the head of the Cypriot government. In September, 1952 there began a struggle for national liberation from the British, and in 1959 independence for the island was achieved, although the British remained in possession of some military bases.
*
In 1949 there flew into Constantinople – on President Truman’s personal plane, “Air Force One” – the second Meletius Metaxakis, the former Archbishop of North and South America Athenagoras. In order to make way for Athenagoras, a Mason of the 33^rd degree, Patriarch Maximus V was forced into retirement by his Synod on grounds of mental illness (although he was completely sane). The real reason for his removal was Maximus was his opposition to ecumenism. When they asked him in 1965 what had been the reason for his deposition, he replied: “It’s not worth commenting on how they deposed me.” ¹⁸⁹ It was not only in the Soviet Union that psychiatry was used to get rid of dissenters…
In 1919 Athenagoras had been appointed secretary of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece by Metaxakis himself.¹⁹⁰
By an extraordinary coincidence Athenagoras was a former spiritual son of Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina, so that the leaders of the opposing sides in the Church struggle in the early 1950s were, like David and Absalom, a holy father and his apostate son. In his enthronement speech Athenagoras went far beyond the bounds of the impious Masonic encyclical of 1920 and proclaimed the dogma of ‘Pan-religion’, or “super-ecumenism”, declaring: “We are in error and sin if we think that the Orthodox Faith came down from heaven and that the other dogmas [i.e. religions] are unworthy. Three hundred million men have chosen Mohammedanism as the way to God and further hundreds of millions are Protestants, Catholics and Buddhists. The aim of every religion is to make man better.”¹⁹¹
This astonishing apostasy from the Orthodox Faith roused hardly a murmur of protest from the autocephalous Orthodox Churches… On February 6, 1952 Patriarch Athenagoras wrote to all the Local Churches, mendaciously trying to convince them that membership of the WCC was not incompatible with Orthodoxy: “In accordance with its constitution, the WCC is trying only to unite the common actions of the churches, so as to develop cooperation in the study of the faith in a Christian spirit, in order to strengthen ecumenical thinking among the members of all the churches, and support a wider spreading of the Gospel, and finally to preserve, raise and regenerate spiritual values for humanity within the limits of general Christian standards… We, the members of the Orthodox Church, must take part in this common-Christian movement because it is our duty to share with our heterodox brothers the wealth of our faith, Divine services and Typicon, and our spiritual and ascetic experience…”¹⁹²
In accordance with this instruction, the Orthodox delegates to the Faith and Order conference in Lund in 1952 declared: “We have come here not in order to condemn the other Churches, but to help them see the truth, in a fraternal way to enlighten their thoughts and explain to them the teaching of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, that is, the Greek Orthodox Church, which has been preserved without change since apostolic times.”¹⁹³
This supposed justification of the ecumenical movement – missionary work among the heterodox – has been repeated many times to the present day. But participation in such ecumenical organizations as the WCC not only has not helped Orthodox missionary work: it has quenched it. A clear proof of this was the statement of all the heads of the Local Orthodox Churches in Constantinople in 1992 renouncing missionary work among Western Christians…
The Orthodox ecumenists seemed to forget that one cannot hold the fire of heresy in one’s bosom and not be burned, and that the Protestants could use the ecumenical movement for their own missionary work among the Orthodox … Thus 1955 the Faith and Order Working Committee of the WCC proposed an Orthodox consultation with the ultimate aim that, as Dr. M. Spinka put it, “at some future time of the hoped-for spiritual ‘Big Thaw’, when these communions have had a chance to think it over in a repentant or chastened mood, they might perhaps join us!”¹⁹⁴ In other words, the Orthodox had to “repent” of their insistence that the Orthodox Church is the Church, in order to become worthy of entering the new pseudo-Church with the Protestants!
Nevertheless, until the late 1950s, the participation of the Orthodox Churches in the ecumenical movement was hesitant and strained. Athenagoras himself, contrary to his later practice, put restrictions on Orthodox participation in his 1952 encyclical: “Orthodox clergy must refrain from joint concelebrations with non-Orthodox, since this is contrary to the canons, and blunts consciousness of the Orthodox confession of faith”.¹⁹⁵
Again, at the Second General Assembly at Evanston (1954) the Orthodox delegates declared: “We are bound to declare our profound conviction that the Holy Orthodox Church alone has preserved in full and intact the Faith once delivered to the saints.”¹⁹⁶
Again, at the Faith and Order conference at Oberlin (1957), which was centred on the theme, “The Unity we Seek”, the Orthodox declared: “’The Unity we Seek’ is for us a given Unity which has never been lost, and, as a Divine gift and an essential mark of Christian existence, could not have been lost… For us, this Unity is embodied in the Orthodox Church.”¹⁹⁷
The Orthodox Churches were restrained especially by the fear that the Western Christians would use the ecumenical movement to achieve by peaceful means what they had failed to achieve by force (for example, in Serbia in 1941). In the case of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the fear of losing the holy places to the Catholics and Protestants played an important role. And so widespread and whole-hearted participation of the Orthodox in the ecumenical movement had to wait until, on the one hand, the KGB masters of the East European Churches decided that their vassals’ participation in the movement was in the interests of world communism, and on the other, the Catholics themselves began to recognize the Orthodox as “equal partners” in the Second Vatican Council (1959-1964).¹⁹⁸
Towards the end of the 1950s Athenagoras began to make feelers towards Rome. Thus on March 17, 1959, at the request of Athenagoras, Archbishop James of North America (a Freemason of the 33^rd degree) met Pope John XXIII, the first such meeting for 350 years. The archbishop said: “Your All-Holiness, my patriarch had entrusted me to inform you that the sixth verse of the first chapter of the Gospel of John speaks about you. He is convinced that the man sent from God is precisely you, and the seventh verse explains the meaning of his embassy – ‘he came for a witness, to witness about the light, that all should believe through him’. And so you were elected for this end, although in your essence you are not the light, but you were raised to the Roman see ‘to witness to the light’.”¹⁹⁹
In April, 1961, Archbishop James began to develop a new theology of ecumenism, declaring: “We have tried to rend the seamless robe of the Lord – and then we cast ‘arguments’ and ‘pseudo-documents’ to prove – that ours is the Christ, and ours is the Church… Living together and praying together without any walls of partition raised, either by racial or religious prejudices, is the only way that can lead surely to unity.”²⁰⁰
What could these “pseudo-documents” and “religious prejudices” have been if not the sacred Canons which forbid the Orthodox from praying together with heretics?
In April, 1963, Archbishop James said: “It would be utterly foolish for the true believer to pretend or to insist that the whole truth has been revealed only to them, and they alone possess it. Such a claim would be both unbiblical and untheological… Christ did not specify the date nor the place that the Church would suddenly take full possession of the truth.”
This statement, which more or less denied that the Church is, as the Apostle Paul said, “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy. 3.15), caused uproar in Greece and on Mount Athos. However, Athenagoras supported James, calling his position “Orthodox”.²⁰¹ “Let the dogmas be placed in the store-room,” he said. “The age of Dogma has passed.”²⁰²
From this time on, the two Masons went steadily ahead making ever more flagrantly anti-Orthodox statements. There was some opposition from more conservative elements in the autocephalous Churches. But the opposition was never large or determined enough to stop them…
At a meeting of the Faith and Order movement in Montreal in 1963, a memorandum on “Councils of Churches in the Purpose of God” declared: “The Council [WCC] has provided a new sense of the fullness of the Church in its unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. These marks of the Church can no longer be simply applied to our divided churches, therefore.” Although this memorandum was not accepted in the end because of Fr. Georges Florovsky’s objections, it showed how the WCC was encroaching on the Orthodox Church’s understanding of herself as the One Church.
Indeed, it could be argued that the Orthodox participants had already abandoned this dogma. For as early as the Toronto, 1950 statement of the WCC’s Central Committee, it had been agreed that an underlying assumption of the WCC was that the member-churches “believe that the Church of Christ is more inclusive than the membership of their own body”.²⁰³
At the Second Pan-Orthodox Conference in Rhodes, in September, 1963, the sending of observers to the Second Vatican Council was discussed. There was much disagreement, and eventually a compromise was reached: every Local Church should make the decision independently.²⁰⁴ It was unanimously agreed that the Orthodox should enter into dialogue with the Catholics, provided it was “on equal terms”. In practice, this meant that the Catholics should abandon their eastern-rite missions in Orthodox territories. The Catholics have never shown much signs of wishing to oblige in this, but they did help to make a dialogue easier by redefining the Orthodox, in Vatican II’s decree on Ecumenism, as “separated brethren” rather than “schismatics”.
By this time the Orthodox had ceased to issue separate statements at ecumenical meetings outlining the ways in which the Orthodox disagreed with the majority Protestant view. “As Father Georges [Florovsky] put it, American Protestants were not alone in seeking within the World Council to stress common elements and to discount the issues that divide. There were also respected Orthodox leaders under the sway of the spirit of adjustment. Certainly on the Russian side there were roots for another approach. As Alexander Schmemann has said of the development of Russian theology in the emigration, in the 1920s and 1930s there had arisen two different approaches to the very phenomenon of the Ecumenical Movement and to the nature of Orthodox participation in it. On the one hand we find theologians who acknowledge the Ecumenical Movement as, in a way, an ontologically new phenomenon in Christian history requiring a deep rethinking and re-examination of Orthodox ecclesiology as shaped during the “non-ecumenical” era. Representative names here are those of Sergius Bulgakov, Leo Zander, Nicholas Zernov, and Pavel Evdokimov. This tendency is opposed by those who, without denying the need for ecumenical dialogue and defending the necessity of Orthodox participation in the Ecumenical Movement, reject the very possibility of any ecclesiastical revision or adjustment and who view the Ecumenical Movement mainly as a possibility for an Orthodox witness to the West. This tendency finds its most articulate expression in the writing of Florovsky.”²⁰⁵