Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Phyle (+2013): “We Will Turn Over the Keys…”

 

“We hold firmly to the Old Calendar and the Holy Traditions of the Orthodox Church. But we do not consider ourselves another Church, aside from the Mother Church of Greece. When the Mother Church returns to the Calendar of the Fathers and ceases in innovation and ecumenical compromise, our task will have been finished. We will end our resistance within the Church. I promise you, on behalf of our Synod, that we will turn over to the Archbishop of Athens, whoever he may then be, the keys to all of our monasteries, convents, and parishes. I and the other Bishops will retire to our monasteries, our work having been done. But in the meantime, we will continue our missions, which, in Italy especially, are the remnants of rich missionary efforts destroyed by ecumenical concordats that forbid us Orthodox to proselytize, while we see our own Orthodox populations in the Mid-East taken in ever greater numbers each year by the See of Rome. When converts are abandoned by their former Orthodox Prelates at the request of the heterodox, some even finding themselves forced to seek refuge among the vagante Bishops who are to be found throughout Europe and America, we will reach out and help these disenfranchised Orthodox, acting as the conscience of those Orthodox whose hands have been tied by the political machinations of modern ecumenism. We will help such people until the Mother Church is once again well and until other Orthodox Churches, themselves ailing, have been made whole.”

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Volume IV (1987), No. 1, pp. 12-13.