The three great calamities in Orthodoxy during the five-year period 1919–1924

Monk Vlasios the Athonite

Greek source: Ὀρθόδοξος Τύπος, no. 2200/February 16, 2018.

Metropolis of Oropos and Phyle note: We publish this present “difficult” article simply and only because, in general lines, it confesses great truths. Otherwise, it contains certain positions and evaluations with which we disagree.

 

 

A diabolical envy and a tempting hand fell upon the Orthodox Church during those wretched years of the trials of the race of the Greek Orthodox Christians (1919–1924).

The national calamities were not enough: the many losses in living manpower of the Greek Army during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) against the Turks and the Bulgarians, the persecutions and massacres of the Greeks of Asia Minor in the cities of Phocaea, Krini, Aïdinion, and others (1914), the massacres of the Pontians (1920–22), and in general the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922); there came to be added also, in the life of the Greek Orthodox Christians who survived the national tragedies and calamities, the division which arose, through the betrayals of Ecclesiastical Leaders, in the religious-spiritual sphere.

For the first time, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate officially entered into Ecumenism in January 1920 with that famous Encyclical, entitled: “Unto the Churches of Christ Everywhere,” after the same Patriarchate had first received, in the year 1919, the Delegation of the two Protestant churches (Heretical Communities), namely the Anglican of England and the Episcopalian of America, through which it accepted their proposal that representatives of the Orthodox Church be sent to the preparatory “Conference of the Faith and Order Movement,” which subsequently convened in Geneva from August 12-20, 1920.

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The arch-ecumenists, who succeeded in casting the Orthodox into their nets, did not conceal from the beginning their aims and their plans.

One of them, very active, the Archbishop of Uppsala, Nathan Söderblom, wrote in 1919, saying among many things:

“The League of Nations must become a religion. Regardless of Confession, Christianity ought to be united in a community of prayers, teaching, sermons, tendencies… and this union must be manifested in an organization which shall constitute a common mouthpiece of Christianity. What I seek is a kind of ecumenical Council, an ecumenical ecclesiastical Committee, representing the whole of Christianity and so organized as to speak in the name of Christianity.”

The leaders of the Ecumenical Movement—chiefly the Anglicans—both revealed and concealed their purposes and objectives, in order to attract the Orthodox into their “System” and into their Conferences.

We have the following example. While at first they spoke about a “Conference – Faith and Order Movement,” later, in an address, the rector of the University of Oxford, Mr. Charles Gore, sent and appointed by the “Archbishop” of Canterbury, Randall [Davidson], stated in his proclamation on 16 April 1923 in Zurich the following:

“The Conference on Life and Work, without entering into questions of Faith and Order, aims to unite the various churches in common beneficial work…”

Unfortunately, in this “Common Beneficial Work” (which later developed, in 1948, into the “World Council of Churches”), the Orthodox also were caught and are dragged along until today, at times accepting whatever sacred and profane thing the directing Masonic Mind serves.

For it is known to many that the Head of the Anglican Church, formally, institutionally, and honorifically, is the reigning Queen of England, who at the same time again honorifically and institutionally is also the Head of Freemasonry in England.

It is this Freemasonry which corrupted the Anglican Church and ordered the ordinations of women as “bishops and priestesses,” and the “marriage” of homosexuals and lesbians in the churches, and also the “marriage” of dogs and animals, since they believe in reincarnation and transmigration of souls.

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A. This is the first great evil in the Orthodox Church: the issuing of the heretical Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, through which, for the first time, it recognized the heretical offshoots of the West as Churches, with the following eleven articles:

1. The acceptance of a unified calendar for the simultaneous celebration of the great feasts by all the Churches.

2. The exchange of fraternal letters.

3. Friendly communication between their representatives.

4. Communication between the Theological Schools and exchange of their writings and journals.

5. The exchange of students.

6. The convocation of pan-Christian conferences (the later establishment of the World Council of Churches).

7. The dispassionate and more historical examination of the dogmatic differences.

8. Mutual respect of morals and customs.

9. Mutual concession of churches and cemeteries.

10. The regulation of mixed marriages, a matter which the robber Council of Crete (2016) discussed and established to be left to the judgment of each Metropolitan.

11. Mutual support for the strengthening of religious faith, philanthropy, missionary work, and other such matters.

It is worthy of wonder how the highest clergy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate did not discern the hidden traps of entanglement and destruction of Orthodoxy set by its enemies, the Heretics.

But the wonder is resolved by the knowledge of the historical circumstance, that at precisely that time, the Greek Army was in Asia Minor and in Eastern Thrace, and for the sake of the National Interest these betrayals of the Faith were committed, in order that we might have the favor of the Great Powers.

For this reason, the Lord God was angered, and instead of national prosperity, there came a national catastrophe (1922).

All these articles, all eleven of them, entangled, confused, and merged the Orthodox with the heretical communities of Europe and America and compelled them to accept even the customs of the Heretics.

Except for the Churches of Bulgaria and Georgia, the other Orthodox Churches are being drawn into Ecumenism.

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B. The second great calamity in the Orthodox Church was the recognition of the validity of the mysteries of the Anglican “Church,” which took place in 1922 under the Ecumenical Patriarch Meletios II Metaxakis, as well as the recognition of their ordinations, something which caused great enthusiasm among the Protestants.

However, the subsequent attack of Kemal Atatürk and the Asia Minor Catastrophe which followed, as well as the expulsion of Metaxakis by Kemal in 1923, gave rise to the causes for the non-implementation by the Orthodox of this recognition.

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C. The third and greatest evil and calamity in the Orthodox Church (on the basis of the implementation of that Encyclical), which divided and greatly afflicted it, was the senseless and arbitrary change of the Calendar, which was decided in 1923 under Meletios Metaxakis and was carried out in March 1924 by his successor, since Metaxakis had been driven from the Ecumenical Throne by Kemal Atatürk.

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Unfortunately today, most of the Hierarchs, instead of seeing what the roots of the evil are and removing them, wage war against, depose, and excommunicate the anti-ecumenist strugglers, in order to please those who have secularized the Church.

 

Greek online source:

https://www.imoph.org/pdfs/2018/05/15/20180515a-3-deina-Orthodoxias-1919-1924.pdf