1956 Letter of the Ecclesiastical Committee of the G.O.C. to Archbishop Dorotheos (Kottaras) of Athens and All Greece

 

 

29th of March, 1956

To His Beatitude the Archbishop
of Athens and All Greece,
Kyr Kyr
Dorotheos

Your Beatitude,

Praying that the Lord may strengthen you in the exceedingly great and noble work of shepherding the Autocephalous Greek Church, we duly render to you the respect owed to you. Drawing courage from the rich and very broad learning of Your Beatitude, and also from your well-known zeal for the Church, we address ourselves to you, possessed by an intense and unceasing desire that troubled consciences may be pacified, that mutual respect may be firmly established, and that a spirit of Christian nobility and propriety may prevail among religious Greeks.

It will be known to you that, since 1924, the Greek Orthodox have been divided into two groups: the New Calendarists and the Old Calendarists. We do not enter either into the essence of the division or into its originating causes, since these are very well known to Your Beatitude, so highly learned and canonically constituted; let it only be permitted to us to emphasize the gravest and most dangerous of its consequences: the wounding of ecclesiastical prestige, the banishment of the spirit of Christian love, and the terrifying and unprecedented persecution of people worshipping according to conscience, independently of whether that conscience is correct or mistaken, because freedom of conscience is a sacred principle.

We are more than certain that such consequences will surely oppress the soul of an ecclesiastical man who views the Church not through the myopic prism of the immediate present, but through the broad and boundless perspective of the Church’s eternity. For this reason, for Your Beatitude, most richly endowed in understanding, the measures toward pacification will not be drawn from the antiquated and dust-laden arsenal of violence, but from the clear heaven of Christian prudence and love.

Being fully confident on the basis of the above, we make an appeal to you, that you may be graciously disposed and reconsider the policy hitherto applied by the Autocephalous Greek Church toward the Old Calendarists [i.e., that of persecution], and inaugurate a new such policy, inspired by the undeniable reality of the moral superiority of love toward those who think differently.

By the present letter we also request that you be pleased to receive a committee from among us, so that it may also set forth our dispositions to you orally.

With the heartfelt hope that you will prove worthy of the high interests of Orthodoxy and will grant peace and calm to thousands of consciences, in the name of Him who said, “Love one another,” we remain, with due respect,

The Ecclesiastical Committee

President
Archimandrite Akakios Pappas

Secretary
Archimandrite Pant. Tsaloupis