My remembrance of Metropolitan Cyprian

Father Daniele Marletta | June 3, 2013

 

 

On May 17, 2013 (according to the ecclesiastical calendar), Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili fell asleep in the Lord.

I met him fourteen years ago. I was almost twenty-five years old; it was the end of December 1999, and I was to be ordained a deacon. It was his first pastoral visit to Pistoia and also his first ordination in the small church of the Divine Wisdom (our present church, dedicated to the Holy Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century, did not yet exist). I was immediately greatly impressed by him. The following year, together with Fr. Vitaly Stelyan, who was then the parish priest of our church, I went on pilgrimage to the Monastery of Saints Cyprian and Justina and remained there for about a week. In this way it was possible for me to observe more closely this man of whom so much was said both for good and for ill. Subsequently I saw him several times in Pistoia during his pastoral visits.

Whoever personally knew Metropolitan Cyprian, as I did, can only speak well of him. His detractors, however (who in many cases, besides never having known him, did not even take the trouble to read what he wrote), accused him of everything. The interesting thing is that, while some considered him a fanatical fundamentalist, others saw in him above all a dangerous modernist… When it happens that I find myself amid accusations so contradictory, I usually come to think that I am in the right. At times seeking the truth means standing balanced on the edge of a blade, even if some believe that the truth is nothing more than a set of easy little formulas to memorize and on which to settle as on a comfortable armchair. Metropolitan Cyprian did not think this at all: for him the truth was indeed a royal road—a straight and linear path—to be traveled, but one with its pitfalls, its easy deviations, the temptations of the right and of the left.

One thing that struck me greatly was reading, the day after his death, the comment of a Greek New-Calendarist Orthodox priest: “R.I.P. But he was not in communion with the Church.” There—this is something Metropolitan Cyprian would never have done: to take the place of God in deciding who is inside and who is outside the Orthodox Church. In fact, his detractors were divided into two distinct groups: on the one hand, New-Calendarists who accused him of being outside the Church; on the other, Old-Calendarists who opposed him because he did not want to say that the New-Calendarists are outside the Church… A paradox which, like all paradoxes, makes one both smile a little and think a little. What these detractors have in common, beyond their glaring differences, is the nonchalance with which they decide the salvation of others. This, I repeat, Metropolitan Cyprian always refused to do.

I wish to conclude this brief remembrance with the words of Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna (California):

His Eminence, both before and after his debilitating stroke, always had a strange effect on people. When his detractors—those who had condemned him for his return to the Old Calendar, those who had openly defamed and slandered him, and even those who had expressed hatred toward him—found themselves in his presence, they always melted. I saw it several times with my own eyes, and others have recounted similar experiences to me. New-Calendarist bishops, Old-Calendarist priests hostile to his moderate spirit, and many others, upon meeting him face to face, would then suddenly ask his forgiveness (sometimes even bursting into tears). And in response? The Metropolitan would simply become kinder and more childlike. He would smile with such loving care as to make even his worst critics literally fall at his feet. And he would kiss them with inimitable joy.

 

Italian source: https://anastasis.orthodoxia.it/il-mio-ricordo-del-metropolita-cipriano/