1956 Plea from the bishopless G.O.C. to the Official Greek Church to heal the Calendar division

 

March 29, 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 supremely great and beautiful work of shepherding the Autocephalous Greek Church, we duly render to you the respect that is owed. Drawing courage from the rich and very broad education of Your Beatitude, and also from your acknowledged zeal on behalf of the Church, we address ourselves to You, possessed by the intense and unceasing longing that troubled consciences may be brought to peace, that mutual respect may be established, and that a spirit of Christian nobility and propriety may prevail among religiously observant Greeks.

You will know that since 1924 the Greek Orthodox have been divided into two parties, into the New Calendarists and the Old Calendarists. We do not enter either into the essence of the division or into its generative causes, since these are very well known to Your most learned and canonically constituted Beatitude; let it only be permitted to us to emphasize, among the gravest and most dangerous of the consequences, the wounding of ecclesiastical dignity, the banishment of the spirit of Christian love, the terrible and unprecedented persecution of people worshiping according to conscience, independently of its correctness or erroneousness, for freedom of conscience is a sacred principle.

We are more than certain that such consequences will assuredly oppress the soul of an ecclesiastical man who regards the Church not under the myopic lens of the immediate present, but under the broad and boundless prism of the eternity of the Church. Therefore, for Your most discerning Beatitude, the measures for pacification will not be drawn from the antiquated and dust-laden arsenal of violence, but from the clear heavens of Christian understanding and love.

Trusting absolutely in the above, we make an appeal to You, that you be so good as to reconsider the policy hitherto applied by the Autocephalous Greek Church toward the Old Calendarists, 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 willing to receive a delegation from among us, so that it may also verbally set forth to You our dispositions.

With the heartfelt hope that you will prove yourself worthy of the lofty missions of Orthodoxy and will grant calm and peace to thousands of consciences, in the name of Him Who said, “Love one another,” we remain with the appropriate respect.

The Ecclesiastical Committee

President – Archimandrite Akakios Pappas

Secretary – Archimandrite Panteleimon Tsaloupis

 

Greek source: https://krufo-sxoleio.blogspot.com/2025/02/blog-post_17.html