Metropolitan Augoustinos of Florina on the Old Calendar Church

 Metropolitan Augoustinos (Kantiotes) of Florina (+2010) on the G.O.C.

Because I question how the rest of the Hierarchs, even though they so readily speak with heretics, even though they so readily go to the church of the Franks in order to concelebrate, and they so easily flirt with Freemasons and atheists, I am in awe and dumbfounded how they will summon me to set forth a defense because I found myself in your [Old Calendarist] gathering, you who are 100% Orthodox! It is not the first time, but for 20 years I have continuously, with my tongue and pen, defended the rights of your movement... At the hour in which the halls of Jehovah’s Witnesses are open, it is a crime for the Churches of the Old Calendarists to be shut! Shame!... But you, in your five senses, you have a sense, the sixth sense – the Orthodox sense! You believe firmly in the Triune God, you uphold the sacred traditions, you safeguard Orthodoxy as the apple of your eye. If someone asks me, “What is an Old Calendarist?”, I will answer, “An Old Calendarist is a hard walnut. Because he is a hard walnut, the rotted teeth of the heretics cannot break the walnut!” You are the sacred phalanx which struggles on behalf of the defense of Orthodoxy, according to the beautiful phrase of the ever-memorable Archbishop [St.] Chrysostomos of Florina.

- Metropolitan Augoustinos (Kantiotes) of Florina of the official Church of Greece, translated from a 1967 recorded speech and quoted in F.A.Q.s About the G.O.C., by Demetrios Alibertis (Etna: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2023), pp. 52-53.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVRejxfbK9o