Conform, or Be Removed

Orthodox clergy and monastics who object to ecumenism are counselled to remain and contend from within. Thirty-four years of records show what remaining has actually cost.

Patristic Witness | August 9, 2026

 

 

There is a building in Karyes, the administrative capital of the Holy Mountain, and within eight months it received two visitors.

On the tenth of October 2025 the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine arrived there. He was received at the Representation of the New Esphigmenou Monastery by its abbot, Archimandrite Bartholomew, in the presence of a Metropolitan of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and of the Civil Governor of Mount Athos. In his welcoming remarks the abbot expressed support for the Ukrainian body and called the granting of its Tomos of autocephaly a "bold and prophetic step." He drew a parallel between the war in Ukraine and the situation of his own monastery, whose main buildings, he said, had been held for many years by fundamentalists, and declared a spiritual kinship between the two struggles.

On the twenty-seventh of May 2026 the Archbishop of America arrived at the same building, accompanied by an auxiliary bishop, by the same Civil Governor, and by a group of graduating seniors from the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. According to Orthodox Times he stressed the implementation of law and of ecclesiastical order, referred to the responsibility of the State to uphold legality, noted the longstanding support of the United States for religious freedom and institutional order, and described the prolonged occupation as "a disgrace."

The fundamentalists holding the main buildings are the monks of Esphigmenou, who withheld the commemoration of the Ecumenical Patriarch after the lifting of the anathemas and have been under eviction ever since. The brotherhood in the konaki at Karyes is the one created in 2005 to replace them.

Eight months, one room, two receptions. The men who objected to ecumenism were removed from their monastery. The brotherhood installed in their place spent an afternoon hosting the primate of a body whose recognition is itself among the objections, and called that recognition prophetic. Seven months later a visiting Archbishop stood in the same room and applied the word disgrace to the resistance rather than to the thing resisted.

None of that is hypocrisy. It is coherent, and it is what replacement is for.

Esphigmenou is the most visible case in this file and the least representative one. That brotherhood did not merely withhold the commemoration. It broke communion and joined a Genuine Orthodox jurisdiction, which allows everything done to it to be explained as the ordinary consequence of departure.

What follows is therefore mostly not about Esphigmenou. It concerns a parish priest in Thessaloniki who never left and invoked a canon in his defence. It concerns roughly a hundred monastics who joined nothing and severed nothing and were told to quit their cells. It concerns a Russian brotherhood given a quarter of an hour to pack. It concerns the governing body of the Holy Mountain itself, twice, acting unanimously and in writing. And it concerns an abbot in Bulgaria disciplined six weeks ago for deviating in the opposite direction entirely.

Esphigmenou demonstrates what the machinery is capable of. The others establish whom it is available against.

The question, stated precisely

That ecumenism constitutes a departure from the faith is not a marginal opinion, and it did not originate outside the World Orthodox jurisdictions.

The fullest statement of the case was made by Saint Justin Popović of Ćelije in The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, published at Thessaloniki in 1974. He treats the movement as the common name of the pseudo-Christianity and pseudo-churches of the West, holds that these amount collectively to a succession of heresies, and concludes that "their common evangelical name is pan-heresy." The term is not rhetorical inflation, and his reasoning for it is the part most often omitted. Earlier heresies denied or deformed some particular aspect of the God-man; this one displaces Him altogether and installs European man in His place. The claim is therefore about kind and not degree, which is why he treats ecumenism as an ecclesiological heresy rather than as one doctrinal error among others.

In his memorandum to the Serbian Holy Synod of 13 and 26 November 1974 he set out the practical consequence. He objected to organic participation in the World Council of Churches on the ground that it constitutes that Council as an ecclesial body standing above the churches, within which the Orthodox Church becomes one member among others, and he distinguished theological dialogue conducted in the truth, which he permitted, from common prayer, which he refused.

Saint Philaret of New York had pressed substantially the same case upon the primates of the Orthodox Churches in the Sorrowful Epistles of the preceding years.

Two facts about these two men bear on everything that follows. Each made his objection from within the jurisdiction he was addressing, and neither was ever answered by a council. Both were subsequently canonised by the very bodies to which the objection had been made.

A great many Orthodox Christians who hold that judgement nevertheless remain within the World Orthodox jurisdictions, and are counselled to do so. The counsel is serious, it is given by serious men, and it deserves to be examined seriously rather than caricatured. In its strongest form it runs as follows. The Church is not purified by departure. Withdrawal removes the objector and leaves the error in possession. The confessor's place is inside, where his witness is felt, and where he retains the standing to be heard. Where conscience forbids the commemoration of a bishop, the canons themselves provide a remedy short of rupture. And history vindicates this: the men the Church honours as confessors against innovation did not leave. They stayed and they contended, and in time they were proved right.

This publication takes no position here on the theological merits of that counsel, and readers should understand at the outset what is and is not being argued.

It is not argued that departure is obligatory, nor that those who remain lack sincerity, nor that any particular case has been rightly decided. It is not argued that a resister is right merely because he is punished, which would be a poor argument that proves too much and would equally vindicate every disciplined cleric of every persuasion.

What is examined here is narrower and entirely factual. The counsel to remain and resist contains an empirical premise about how institutions behave. It assumes that resistance from within is a position a man can occupy, and that occupying it keeps open a route by which his objection may eventually be heard and answered. That premise is testable. There is now a documentary record spanning thirty-four years, several jurisdictions and four court systems, and the record can be read.

What made the confessors succeed

The historical argument for remaining is the strongest card its defenders hold, and it is worth playing at full strength before it is examined.

Saint Maximus the Confessor did not depart. He contended against the imperial and patriarchal monothelitism of his day from within the body of the Church, was tried, condemned, mutilated and exiled, and died in exile. Saint Mark of Ephesus travelled to Ferrara and Florence as a member of the Greek delegation, remained within it throughout, and alone among the Greek bishops refused to sign the decree of union proclaimed on the sixth of July 1439. He did not leave the delegation. He outlasted it.

Both were vindicated. The Sixth Ecumenical Council condemned the heresy Saint Maximus had resisted. The union of Florence collapsed, was nullified by the synodal acts under Gennadios Scholarios, and was formally annulled by the Synod of Constantinople of 1484, attended by representatives of Alexandria and Jerusalem, which declared the Florentine definitions alien and its decrees void.

The defenders of remaining are entitled to say that this is precisely their case, and that a man who had departed in 1439 could not have done what Saint Mark did.

The examination begins by asking what mechanism actually produced those vindications.

In each instance the doctrinal question was eventually placed before a council, examined on its substance, and decided. Saint Maximus was not vindicated because he endured, and Saint Mark was not vindicated because he was stubborn. They were vindicated because a forum existed which took up the question they had raised and answered it. Their resistance was not the remedy. Their resistance was the input to a conciliar process which was the remedy.

That observation converts the whole dispute into a single answerable question. Resistance from within is efficacious where a forum exists to receive it. So the counsel to remain stands or falls on whether such a forum is available now.

The remainder of this article addresses that question, and only that question.

The terms of residence on the Holy Mountain

The Athonite case is the one where the mechanism can be read most exactly, because it is written down in civil law.

Under Article 105, paragraphs 4 and 5, of the Greek Constitution, read with the Legislative Decree of 10 and 16 September 1926, persons falling under the statutory terms "heterodox" and "schismatic" are forbidden not merely to visit the Holy Mountain but to settle there. Where the Holy Community finds such a person resident, it issues a decision of expulsion, and the Civil Governor executes it, with police available to him.

The provision has been uncontroversial for a century, because everyone assumes they know whom the words describe.

The legislation does not define them. According to the standard legal digest of the Athonite constitutional regime, their interpretation is treated as a matter of the internal law of the Orthodox Church, and in case of doubt the question is referred to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In 2005 the Greek Council of State closed the door behind that arrangement, holding in decision 736 of that year that the classification of a monk under those terms is "not subject to review" and cannot be examined under the regulation.

The consequence is structural rather than rhetorical. The party whose conduct is the subject of the protest is the party empowered to classify the protester. The classification, once made, is insulated from judicial examination. The State does not weigh it; the State enforces it. The monks of Esphigmenou pursued civil remedies to the highest court in Athens and were turned away at every level.

This is not an arrangement in which a resister loses his case. It is an arrangement in which the question of whether the classification is theologically correct is never a justiciable question at all. Whatever forum received Saint Mark's objection in the fifteenth century, it has no counterpart here. What the regime offers is conformity, and what it holds in reserve against the alternative is removal.

Enforcement tracks vulnerability, not offence

The Skete of the Prophet Elias, founded in 1759 as a dependency of the Pantokrator Monastery, was Russian for most of its history. By the 1980s its brotherhood had dwindled to a handful of fathers faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and they did not commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch. They seized nothing and attacked no one. They kept the buildings in repair, kept the services, and were legally registered, their names entered in the Monachologion of their ruling monastery.

The fullest account is the report compiled in 1992 by the Karyes representative of the Saint Panteleimon Monastery, Priest-monk Nikolay (Generalov), for the Patriarch of Moscow and the Russian Synod, published in Pravoslavnaya Rus the following year and reassessed in the scholarly literature since. According to that report the fathers had been warned informally that they would be "expelled from Athos if they persisted" in withholding the commemoration. Warned informally: not charged, not summoned, not answered.

There was no official notice of the exarchal visit. The Holy Community received a telegram indicating an arrival on the twelfth of May. On the evening of the fourth, the Protos received a telephone call from the Phanar informing him that the exarchate would arrive the following day. Accounts from those who knew the community describe a quarter of an hour to gather belongings, a boat, and Ouranopolis.

Within the year the skete was reoccupied by a Greek brotherhood under a new dikaios, and the Athonite institutional histories record 1992 as the beginning of a period of "sound administration and spiritual flourishing" at the Prophet Elias.

The decisive detail in the Generalov report is that at the moment of the expulsion a very large share of the Athonite community was also withholding the commemoration. The removal was not the enforcement of an intolerable rule, since the same conduct was being tolerated across the peninsula in the same year. It was the enforcement of a rule against those positioned to be reached by it.

This matters for the argument in a specific way. If enforcement tracked the gravity of the offence, the man who remains might reasonably calculate his risk by measuring his own conduct. It does not, and he cannot. What determines outcome is not what he does but what can be done to him.

What the machinery is capable of

The Esphigmenou record is the longest continuous demonstration available of what an institution does with resistance that will not move, and its order is its meaning.

After the lifting of the anathemas the brotherhood withheld the commemoration of the Ecumenical Patriarch and of his successors. For three decades matters rested here. In 2002 the Ecumenical Patriarchate applied the word to them, attaching the classification that cannot be reviewed, and in 2005 the Patriarch called for their removal and established the replacement brotherhood at Karyes. From that point the monastery had two brotherhoods: the one living in it and the one recognised.

On the twenty-ninth of July 2013 court bailiffs arrived at the Esphigmenou administrative offices in Karyes to execute an eviction and were met with three Molotov cocktails and an explosive device. This was a grave act, it was rightly prosecuted, and the file would look materially different without it. The following year Greek police cleared an apartment in central Thessaloniki used as a hostel by the brotherhood, following a court ruling, with riot police cordoning off the surrounding blocks.

In January 2017 the Abbot and one monk were sentenced in absentia to twenty years, with six others receiving ten years and four months as accessories. Counsel for the defence told the court that the dispute was one of religious dogma and should not "under any circumstances" be settled there. In fifty-four years that is the only occasion on which the doctrinal question was formally put before any tribunal. The tribunal declined the invitation and proceeded to sentence.

In April 2019 monks living in the monastery buildings were convicted of fraud against the Greek State and given six months, suspended for three years. The mechanism repays attention. Athonite monks are exempt from value added tax; these monks are not officially considered Athonites, by reason of the word applied to them in 2002; their claim of the exemption was therefore fraud. The classification does not merely end a man's residence. It reaches backward and reconstitutes his ordinary daily existence as a criminal offence. Days later an appeals court reduced the 2013 sentences to seventeen years and to nine years and five months.

On the seventeenth of June 2020 the Thessaloniki Court of Appeals ordered the brotherhood to surrender all occupied properties on and off the Holy Mountain to the replacement brotherhood. On the eighth of July the Supreme Court rejected the appeal and the matter became final. On the twenty-third, police forced the monks out of the dependencies at Ierissos and Nea Roda. In 2021 the sentences were reduced again, to five and a half years and to two years and nine months. In July 2024 Greek police submitted a document to the Holy Epistasia requesting authorisation for a large-scale operation, with significant forces and vehicles, against the monks remaining.

Bailiffs, riot police, a tax fraud conviction, sentences in the double digits, a Supreme Court, and a visiting Archbishop with a word about the duty of the State to enforce. In fifty-four years, no conciliar answer, no synodal examination, no refutation, and no hearing.

Whom it is available against

The obvious reply is that Esphigmenou is not a test of the counsel at all. That brotherhood did more than withhold the commemoration; it broke communion outright and joined a Genuine Orthodox jurisdiction. Whatever its case proves, it proves nothing about the man who stays.

The reply is fair, and it directs the examination to the men who stayed.

On the fifth of March 2017, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, one of the most respected anti-ecumenist theologians in Greece, a Professor Emeritus of the Theological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, announced from the ambo of his own church that he was withdrawing the commemoration of his ruling Metropolitan on account of the Cretan Council. He rested his action explicitly on Canon 15 of the First-Second Council of 861, presided over by Saint Photios the Great, which provides that where a bishop preaches a heresy already condemned by the fathers or by a council, the priests under him may withdraw the commemoration and are to incur no canonical penalty for doing so.

He was suspended from his priestly duties the following day. He and a second Thessaloniki priest who had taken the same step were summoned before a spiritual court, facing the possibility of being defrocked.

This is the cleanest instance in the record, because everything the counsel recommends was done correctly. The canonical remedy short of rupture was invoked by name, in the proper form, by a man qualified beyond argument to invoke it, from his own ambo, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy. The canon states in terms that no penalty is to follow.

The penalty followed within a day, and it did not come from a body examining whether the canon applied. It came by administrative act.

The monastic version of the same season took the same course. In July 2016 more than sixty Athonite hieromonks and monks, led by a disciple of Saint Paisios the Athonite, submitted an open letter to the Sacred Community setting out twelve points of divergence between the Cretan texts and Orthodox Tradition and calling for the Council to be condemned, failing which they would be obliged to withhold the commemoration. That November the Sacred Community produced a document concluding that the Cretan texts required revision and faulting them for a one-sidedness arising from the neglect of the theological tradition, while holding in the same document that withholding the commemoration was "unjustified for now."

The body examined the texts, found the confession defective, and ruled the corresponding action premature. For now is not a theological category. It is a scheduling category, and it is what an institution says when it has conceded the substance and does not intend to act on it.

By early 2017 more than fifty cells and kalyves had withheld the commemoration, involving roughly one hundred monastics. These men had broken communion with no one and joined nothing. They had done exactly what the counsel prescribes, in the manner most carefully engineered to avoid giving the administration the word it needed.

They were notified that they must leave their cells. Many declined to go.

The distinction between withholding the commemoration and breaking communion is a distinction the resisters maintain with great care. It is not a distinction the administration is obliged to maintain, and the record indicates it does not. A position calibrated over years to remain inside is read by the other party in a single glance at the diptych.

The institutional test

It might still be said that all of this concerns individuals, who have always been vulnerable, and that the corporate institutions of the Holy Mountain retain a real voice and a real veto. Last October tested that proposition directly.

In September 2025 a proposed visit to Athos by the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine came before the Sacred Community on the strength of a letter of recommendation from the Ecumenical Patriarch. The reaction within the Community was strongly negative, given the position of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onuphry at that moment. The Holy Community declined to receive him officially, as would be customary for a primate. Most monasteries did not wish to receive him at all. At one of the great houses the brotherhood stated that they would leave the monastery if he were received there.

The visit proceeded on the tenth of October, lasted four days, and included receptions at six of the twenty ruling monasteries. According to the Athonite fathers who afterwards protested it, Karyes itself was sealed off by security services during the visit, out of concern that monks would come and demonstrate.

The administrative capital of the Holy Mountain was closed to the monks of the Holy Mountain, so that they could not object to something their own governing body had declined to authorise.

A group of monks representing the cells subsequently issued an open letter calling the visit a fall, holding that those who greeted and served with him bore responsibility for bringing a "spiritual contamination" to the place, and calling for them to be cut off from concelebration until they repented. No consequence followed.

The significance is not that the Holy Community was overruled on a question of hospitality. It is that the corporate body which the counsel to remain identifies as the forum of eventual redress was, on this occasion, simply routed around.

The same body had reached the same discovery two years earlier, in a matter with no Ukrainian dimension at all. In early January 2024 the abbots and representatives of all twenty ruling monasteries wrote jointly, under their common seal, to the Ecumenical Patriarch concerning the forthcoming visit of the Archbishop of America. Their stated concern was the photographic material published after the baptism of the children of a same-sex couple at the Church of Panagia Faneromeni in Vouliagmeni in the summer of 2022, which in their judgement had created an impression regarding the Church's teaching on marriage contrary to her doctrine. The Sacred Community then resolved unanimously that the customary reception of a visiting hierarch would not be offered, leaving each monastery to act by its own judgement, and it published that decision in an announcement dated 23 January 2024.

Twenty monasteries, unanimous, in writing, addressed to their canonical bishop. It is difficult to conceive of resistance from within expressed in a more orderly, more corporate or more canonically unimpeachable form.

Nothing followed from it. The visit proceeded, four monasteries received him, and in May 2026 he returned to the Holy Mountain, was formally welcomed at the Administration by the Civil Governor, and applied the word disgrace to the brotherhood of Esphigmenou.

That comparison is the finding of this article in miniature. In January 2024 the highest corporate body of the Holy Mountain withheld an honour from a hierarch and suffered no consequence whatever. Since the early 1970s the monks of Esphigmenou have withheld a commemoration and have been answered with bailiffs, prosecutions, a Supreme Court and a standing order of eviction. Both were acts of withholding. What separates them is not the gravity of the thing withheld but the direction in which it was withheld.

A control case

One serious objection remains. Perhaps none of this describes a mechanism. Perhaps it is the Church correcting error, and it presents itself as machinery only to those in error.

That objection is testable, and it was tested six weeks ago in a case with no anti-ecumenist content whatever.

On the twenty-eighth of July, by Order No. 134, the Patriarch of Bulgaria, who is also Metropolitan of Sofia, placed Archimandrite Nikanor Mishkov, abbot of the Tsarnogorski Monastery of Saints Cosmas and Damian near Gigintsi, under argos, a complete prohibition from priestly ministry, for fifteen days from the twenty-ninth. Ecclesiastical Disciplinary Case No. 2 of 2026 was opened before the Sofia Diocesan Court. Articles 95(19) and 139(2) of the Statute were cited for the suspension, the case itself opened under Articles 81 and 95(18) and Article 12 of the rules of procedure. The grounds were conduct incompatible with the priestly office and with the monastic vow of obedience, and conduct held to "undermine the authority of the Church."

The underlying conduct was the opposite of resistance. According to the reporting, the archimandrite had concelebrated with the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in Kyiv on the fourteenth and fifteenth of July, and had earlier, in May 2024, concelebrated with clergy of that body at his own monastery without any decision of the Bulgarian Synod, publicly announcing Eucharistic communion with it. He was disciplined for moving ahead of his Synod rather than behind it.

The two charge sheets are nearly interchangeable. Against those who withhold the commemoration: disobedience, disruption of canonical order, failure to observe the Statutes. Against the archimandrite: disobedience, breach of the vow of obedience, undermining the authority of the Church. Opposite directions, opposite doctrinal content, administrative articles cited in both instances and doctrinal articles in neither.

The instrument does not measure doctrine. It measures compliance, and it is indifferent to the direction of the deviation. What it requires of a man is not that he believe rightly but that he conform, and the sanction it holds against him if he does not is removal from his place.

This is the point at which the counsel to remain encounters its real difficulty. It presumes a doctrinal contest, to be decided in time on the merits of the faith. What the record discloses is a disciplinary proceeding about obedience, in which the merits of the faith are not a category the proceeding recognises. A man cannot prevail in an argument the other party is not conducting.

What the record does not contain

Across fifty-four years of Esphigmenou proceedings, the expulsion at the Prophet Elias in 1992, the suspension of two Thessaloniki priests in 2017, the notices served on the cells that same year, the overriding of the Sacred Community in October 2025, and the Bulgarian case of last month, this publication has been unable to locate a single synodal adjudication of the doctrinal objection raised, a single conciliar finding for or against on the substance of the question at issue, a single judicial examination of whether the classification triggering removal was correctly applied, or a single proceeding of any kind in which a resister's confession of faith was placed before a competent body and answered.

The file contains bailiffs, statutes, cadastral schedules, value added tax, appellate reductions, articles of an administrative code, security services closing a road, a foreign policy remark about religious freedom, and the word disgrace.

Three objections to that finding deserve direct answers.

The first is survivorship. Many who withhold the commemoration are never troubled at all, and the Holy Mountain has long contained fathers of a strict persuasion who are left in peace. This is true, and it is the counsel's best practical argument. It is also the finding of the 1992 case restated. Toleration is real, but toleration is not a right; it is a discretion exercised by the party being resisted, and the record shows it withdrawn without notice, without proceedings, and without correlation to the gravity of the conduct. That a man has not yet been reached is not evidence that he holds a position. It is evidence that he has not yet been reached.

The second is that the Athonite regime is peculiar, a quirk of Greek constitutional law with no application to a parish priest in another country. The Thessaloniki case answers this. That priest held no Athonite residence, was subject to no Legislative Decree of 1926, and was suspended within a day by ordinary diocesan act. The Bulgarian case answers it again, in another country under another statute. The Athonite regime supplies the clearest documentation, not the only instance.

The third is that a Synod may yet take up these questions, and that the absence of adjudication to date proves nothing about what a competent body will eventually determine. What some future body may do is not the subject of this article and nothing here forecloses it. The subject is the sixty years that have already elapsed, during which every objection recorded here was met by administrative process and none by conciliar examination. The counsel to remain is offered to living men who must decide now, and it is fairly assessed against the record now available.

The word

"Our way or the highway" has never been the slogan of those who left. It is the operating practice of the bodies they left, expressed not in encyclicals but in decisions of expulsion, orders of eviction, replacement brotherhoods, spiritual courts, police requests, and a quarter of an hour to gather belongings.

The counsel to remain and resist is not dishonourable and it is not insincere. It is, on the evidence assembled here, founded on a premise that the record does not support. It presumes that resistance from within is a position held. The documents indicate it is a permission granted, revocable at the discretion of the party resisted, terminated by a classification that party alone assigns, unreviewable in the civil courts and unexamined in the ecclesiastical ones. The permission lasts precisely as long as the objection costs nobody anything. What is offered is not a place from which to contend. It is a choice between conformity and removal, and the party setting the terms is the party being objected to.

Saint Mark of Ephesus was answered by a council in 1484. The Sixth Ecumenical Council answered the question for which Saint Maximus was mutilated. The men in this file were answered by bailiffs.

To every cleric, monastic and layman now being counselled to remain and reform from within, one question is put, and it is not a theological question but a question about the record. It is not the case of a man who remained and was left alone, which establishes only that he was tolerable and that his objection was costing nobody anything. It is the case in which resistance from within, once formally charged, produced a hearing on the doctrine and a correction of the error. One case, any jurisdiction, within living memory.

This publication has not found it, and will publish any correction that arrives with a citation.

On Sunday the ninth of August 2026, at the dependency of the Holy Monastery of Saint Panteleimon in Galata, the Ecumenical Patriarch presided from the throne at the Divine Liturgy for the feast of Saint Panteleimon according to the Julian calendar, before a largely Russian-speaking congregation. He spoke of the place of monasticism in the life of the Church. He said that the Holy Mountain stands under the spiritual jurisdiction and care of the Mother Church of Constantinople, described it as a place of prayer in which Greeks, Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians dwell together as brothers in Christ, and called it "a jewel in the mitre of the Ecumenical Patriarch."

That was the day before this article was completed. As it goes to press a final order of the Supreme Court stands against the brotherhood of Esphigmenou, the eviction remains outstanding, the police request of July 2024 has not been withdrawn, and the fathers notified in 2017 to quit their cells have had no further hearing. The Russian brotherhood of the Prophet Elias, whose successors were among those addressed in Galata, was removed from the Holy Mountain in 1992 and has never returned.

The metaphor repays attention, because it is exact rather than decorative. A jewel in a mitre is a possession and an ornament. It does not belong to itself. Whether its coexistence is peaceful depends on what is asked of it, and whether it remains in the setting is not a question the jewel is competent to decide.

In Karyes this May the word disgrace was applied to men who withheld a commemoration, in a room granted to the brotherhood installed to replace them, in the presence of the officer of the State who would carry out their eviction. Canon 15 provides that no penalty shall follow.

Readers may judge for themselves which of the two is the disgrace.

 

Source: https://patristicwitness.com/ArticleDetail?id=6a79fe757db1342d95746b97