Monday, July 21, 2025

Frank Comments on the Supposed Gracelessness of the New Calendarists

I want to be sincere with you; I respect your strictness, but my faith is different. I believe that the Holy Mysteries of the new calendarists are grace‑bearing. And you know, it is very good that I did not sign the 1974 Encyclical. I did not sign, and, of course, I know the hypocrisy of those who did sign. They did not believe in it and would never have dared to [originally] introduce it.

- Metropolitan Petros (Astyfides) of Astoria, during a visit to the Holy Synod of the Matthewites in 1986. Quoted by Archimandrite Kyrikos Kontogiannis (later Matthewite Metropolitan of Mesogaia) in A Brief Sketch of the New Calendarist and Florinite Schisms, 1989, pages 24-25 (in Greek).

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Most heinous, however, among the “Chrysostomites” is their hypocrisy. Thus, [Archbishop Chrysostomos] Kiousis, in a conversation with one Cyprianite bishop, openly said that “if he were not only to occasionally declare the gracelessness of the new calendarists, but to constantly preach this and adhere to an unequivocal practice toward the new-calendarists, then his entire flock would abandon him and he would be left alone.”

- Brief Outline of Ecclesiological and Jurisdictional Disputes in the Greek Old Calendar Church and their Historical Connection with the Fates of Russian Orthodoxy (1924-2000), by S. V. Kryzhanovsky, 2020,  p. 43, footnote 83 (in Russian).

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