Thursday, November 20, 2025

The Garden of the Panagia — a crumbling orchard-keeper hut of Orthodoxy

Ioannis Kornarakis

Emeritus Professor of the School of Theology, University of Athens

Greek source: Ιερά Παρακαταθήκη, August 2009.

 

A person in a robe holding a silver staff

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“O God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance, they have defiled Thy holy temple; they have made Jerusalem as it were the hut of an orchard-keeper.” (Psalm 78:1 [LXX])

The incursion of the papal heresy, in November of 2006, into the Ecumenical Patriarchate transformed Mount Athos—or rather its spiritual leadership, the abbots of its twenty Holy Monasteries—into an abandoned and desolate orchard-keeper hut of Orthodoxy!

The people of God, the fullness of the Church, were expecting the immediate and dynamic intervention of the Holy Mountain regarding the events that took place in the Phanar with the Pope’s visit and concelebration, as a self-evident manifestation of Orthodox reaction and witness—just as had occurred in the past under Patriarch Athenagoras, at the lifting of the anathemas, when the entirety of Mount Athos, its spiritual leadership, ceased the commemoration of his name!

But the spiritual leadership of today’s Mount Athos did not do the same!

It did not proclaim the Orthodox witness militantly with the well-known authority of the Athonite voice, as a corrective intervention against the arbitrary and flagrant patriarchal violations of the holy Canons of the Church.

On the contrary, it rewarded these unorthodox patriarchal actions by declaring its reverence for Mr. Bartholomew!

Thus, the guardians of Orthodox Tradition, the gatekeepers of the protection and safeguarding of the authority of the holy Canons of the Church, abandoned their post!

They denied themselves.

They left the vineyard of the Lord unfenced and unprotected and conformed to the present age of Ecumenism, of heterodox Christian syncretism.

They aligned themselves with the New Age minds of clergy and lay theologians, deniers of the truth of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ, the Church of the holy Apostolic and Synodal Canons, of the Patristic Tradition!

This stance of the spiritual leadership of Mount Athos deprives the Orthodox Church today of the guardian and protector of the handed-down truths of her faith and teaching.

Today, Mount Athos has ceased to be a guarantee and support of Orthodoxy, a bastion of the rank of martyrs and confessors of Orthodoxy.

Today, Mount Athos resembles an orchard-keeper’s hut crumbled by ecumenism and heresy, now a monument of Athonite abandonment of the Garden of the Panagia!

This sorrowful fact is taking place today, at an hour and moment of advanced weakening of Orthodoxy by vital and vigilant forces of witness and confession, given that today bishops and archbishops and patriarchs, as well as clergy and lay theologians, arrogantly transfiguring themselves into a kind of ecclesiastical ecumenical council, utter unspeakable sayings of heresy “for the good” of Orthodoxy!

Heretical Christian communities are today recognized as churches; concelebrations with all kinds of heretics and common prayers are baptized as relationships of love; and every Orthodox truth is relegated to the bin of ecumenism, to be reinterpreted according to the new data of postmodernity, which demands the redefinition of everything in theology and, generally, in the life of the Church!

At this critical hour of the ecumenist tempest, the Athonite abbots did not hasten to show themselves as “a divine encampment and God-speaking warriors of the Lord’s host”!

They surrendered to cowardice and the fear of bearing witness, under the… heretical pretext of pious obedience to the person of the Patriarch!

Thus, they transformed their spiritual leadership into a crumbled orchard-keeper hut of the Garden of the Panagia!

They turned their backs on the shelter and protection of the Lady Abbess of Mount Athos.

They made their choice!

They chose to walk alongside the patriarchal ecumenist mindset!

 

Online: https://apotixisi.blogspot.com/2016/05/blog-post_52.html

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The Garden of the Panagia — a crumbling orchard-keeper hut of Orthodoxy

Ioannis Kornarakis Emeritus Professor of the School of Theology, University of Athens Greek source: Ιερά Παρακαταθήκη , August 2009.  ...