Saint Paisios Stopped Commemorating

He walled off from an Ecumenical Patriarch and held to it for years. In 1991 an Athonite elder asked why that counsel was no longer given, and the synod everyone was waiting for answered in 2016.

Patristic Witness | August 4, 2026

 

 

Saint Paisios the Athonite ceased commemorating Patriarch Athenagoras. Not in theory, and not for a week. Together with most of the Holy Mountain and several metropolitans he stopped, and he held to it for years, until the Patriarch died. He is reported to have pressed his own monastery to do the same. He did it in anguish, praying that God would take days from his own life and give them to the Patriarch for repentance.

That fact is left out of nearly every argument in which his name is used, and it is left out by both sides. Those who tell inquirers that walling off is schism by its nature owe an account of what he was doing in those years. Those who circulate his name as a byword for compromise have not read him either.

Nor was he any friend of ecumenism. On 23 January 1969 he wrote from the Holy Mountain to Father Haralambos Vasilopoulos about the movements toward unification and the dealings between the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope. He said the Patriarch had given his love to another modern woman, the Papist Church, because the modest Orthodox Mother had made no impression on him. That is not the language of a man at ease.

So when a dispute broke out on the same mountain a generation later, the instrument was not what divided the two men in it. Both had used it.

By 1991 the Elder Sabbas had already ceased. He had stopped commemorating after the acts of December 1987, when the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope of Rome appeared together, and his soul, as one account has it, could not bear to be found in such a church. He did not stop at the Phanar. He separated from the fathers of the nineteen monasteries who continued to follow it, which on the Holy Mountain means that a man may not go to church in any of them, nor in their cells or dependencies. He kept to his own cell at Kapsala. Whatever else may be said of that, it was not a cheap position, and he had held it for four years before he ever put pen to paper.

Then Father Nicodemos came up to the Cell of Saint Nicholas and told him he was outside the Church, because he no longer commemorated Patriarch Demetrios. On 13 August 1991 the Elder wrote back.

He did not hedge. The counsels his visitor had brought could not be received as pleasing to God, being wholly contrary to Orthodox teaching. Where the Truth is betrayed the thing is not economy, not concession, not indulgence. In his own words, since the Truth is betrayed it should be called iniquity rather than economy. To the saying that the Patriarch was misled by the hierarchs around him into doing what he did not want, and to the warning that whoever ceased commemoration would be found outside the Church, he applied the words of Saint John Chrysostom on speech that is foolishness and the tales of children.

Then he named the source of it. Such counsels, he wrote, are the fruit of a new theology, and that theology is the one the Phanar used in the encyclical of 1920, when it addressed heretics as fellow heirs of the grace of God.

The counsels were those of Elder Paisios, and the Elder Sabbas named him and refused him. He was one monk in a cell, and he was refusing the most beloved man on the mountain.

The refusal is hard reading, and this publication does not soften it. But notice what it is not. It is not a charge that Saint Paisios was indifferent to ecumenism, which would be false, nor that cessation of commemoration was foreign to him, which would be absurd. Cessation is not a zealot novelty unknown to the beloved saints of living memory. It was used by the most beloved Athonite of the twentieth century, against an Ecumenical Patriarch, on this exact question.

The disagreement was never whether. It was when, and what may follow.

Take the case for patience at its strongest, since it was made by a holy man and deserves no less. In that letter of 1969 Saint Paisios wrote against those who cease commemoration, break away, erect their own churches, and go on insulting the Patriarch meanwhile, and he called that course senseless. He warned that if separation followed every occasional deviation of patriarchs, the Orthodox would outdo the Protestants in fragmentation. He had watched companies of monks declare themselves churches because a chapel happened to stand in their kalyve, and he called it a second wound, the first having been given by the unionists. And he wrote the sentence that has been quoted at those who wall off ever since: "It is easy for one to separate but difficult to return."

That is an argument about the form of resistance, not a denial that resistance is owed. And the distinction it draws is real, so let it be conceded here rather than extracted later. Saint Paisios ceased commemoration and he did nothing further. He joined no separate synod, constituted no hierarchy, and remained in communion with the Patriarchate and the Church of Greece to the end of his life. He did not impose his cessation on others, nor number as heretics those who continued to commemorate. He is not a witness for those who went further, and he is not enlisted as one here.

What his position rests on is a prediction: that the deviation is the act of a man, that the Church will right herself, that a synod will settle the matter in due course, and that those who waited will be vindicated.

Set the prediction beside the file.

Two years after the Kapsala letter, in June 1993, the Joint International Commission met at Balamand in Lebanon with Orthodox delegations present, and produced a text on uniatism. Its thirteenth paragraph states that the profession of the apostolic faith, participation in the same sacraments, the one priesthood offering the one sacrifice, and the apostolic succession of bishops cannot be reckoned the exclusive property of either body. From that it draws the conclusion in five words: "any rebaptism must be avoided." The following paragraph has the two recognising each other as Sister Churches. Elsewhere the document sets aside what it calls the outdated ecclesiology of return, and directs that future priests be instructed in the apostolic succession of the other body and the authenticity of its sacramental life.

Weigh that against what the Church has held. The fourth position of the 2009 Confession states that reception of heretics by baptism is canonical exactitude, and cites Saint Basil, that those who broke away could no longer transmit a grace from which they had themselves fallen. Saint Symeon of Thessalonica, cited in the second position, holds that the popes after the schism are heretics, that they do not have apostolic succession, and that no mystery of theirs is valid. Balamand does not answer Saint Basil or Saint Symeon. It does not mention them. It reverses them in a subordinate clause and moves on.

Thirteen years after Balamand, at Porto Alegre in 2006, the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches issued a text accepted by the Orthodox representatives present, which states that all those baptized into Christ are united in His body. The baptismal unity denied by Saint Basil is thereby made the foundation on which the unity of the Church is to be built.

Ten years after that, in June 2016, the council so long awaited actually met, in Crete. This is the synod the counsel of patience had been pointing to for half a century. It issued a document on relations with the rest of the Christian world. That document accepts the historical name of other non-Orthodox Christian Churches and Confessions. It speaks favourably of the theological documents of the dialogue commission and calls the ecumenical movement's work a praiseworthy step. It affirms membership of the World Council of Churches, and notes in passing that Georgia withdrew in 1997 and Bulgaria in 1998, which establishes beyond argument that withdrawal was possible and that the others chose otherwise.

And then it turns and addresses the men who had been waiting for it. Efforts to break the unity of the Church, it declares, undertaken by individuals or groups "under the pretext of maintaining or allegedly defending true Orthodoxy," are worthy of condemnation.

That is the answer. The synod came. It did not condemn ecumenism. It condemned those who resist it.

Read that sentence again and consider what it does to the counsel of patience. Wait for a council, the faithful were told, and the council will vindicate you. The council convened after fifty years of preparation and pronounced the resisters worthy of condemnation while calling the dialogue praiseworthy. Every man who ceased commemoration in the expectation of eventual synodal vindication now has his answer in writing, from the synod itself.

And it did not stop there. In June of this year, before a Roman Catholic congress at Vilnius, and at the invitation of a Roman Catholic archbishop, the Ecumenical Patriarch called the bodies not in communion with him sister Churches, named the Roman pontiff by the title Bishop of Elder Rome, praised his theological direction, proposed the purification of memory as the sole path forward, and described persistence in separation as a practical denial of the truth that God is revealed as a communion of persons. Guarding the boundary was attributed to distrust of Pentecost. What is preferred, the address said, is the security of dogmatic borders.

That is where the road runs. 1920, the encyclical addressing heretics as kindred of the household. 1948, membership of the World Council of Churches. 1965, the withdrawal of personal sentences that the signatories themselves recorded had never broken communion. 1993, rebaptism excluded and sister Churches affirmed. 2006, baptismal unity conceded. 2016, the historical name of churches granted to the heterodox and condemnation pronounced on those who resist. 2026, separation itself called a denial of the Triune God. Not one of those documents has been retracted. Every one of them was published by the bodies that produced them. There is nothing here that we have alleged and they have denied.

The Elder Sabbas saw the shape of it in 1991 and said why. Against the word of Saint Ignatius that nothing be enacted apart from the bishop, and the word of Saint John Chrysostom that not even the blood of martyrdom washes away schism, he answered that the Saints spoke so in a season of the Church's serenity, and that the same Saints spoke otherwise of a bishop who teaches outside the appointed order, likening him to a wolf in the fleece of a sheep and bidding the faithful flee. He recalled the fathers of the Holy Mountain under Beccos, who ceased commemorating a patriarch no council had deposed and were given the martyr's crown for it. He observed that Saint Maximus the Confessor and Saint Theodore the Studite were called schismatics by the hierarchy of their own day. And he asked the question his letter turns on. Not how many patriarchates remain in communion with the Phanar. Who walks in the footsteps of the Saints and stands with the truth.

Under that answer lies Canon 15 of the Council held at Constantinople in 861, which permits separation from a bishop who publicly preaches heresy before any conciliar judgment has been passed, and reckons those who so separate worthy of honour rather than liable to censure. The canon does not wait on a council. It requires that the heresy be preached openly and that it be already condemned.

One further item belongs in the record, and it is set down without comment. In January 2015 Elder Paisios was entered among the saints by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. That is the same see whose encyclical of 1920 began this, whose patriarch he had once refused to commemorate, and whose acts the Elder Sabbas would not remain under. The Kapsala letter was republished at the time in answer.

Saint Paisios reposed in 1994, before Porto Alegre, before Crete, before Vilnius. He judged by what he could see, and what he could see was the deviation of a man. He is honoured, and this publication honours him. But holiness is not a warrant for a forecast, and the forecast was that waiting would be vindicated. It was not. It was condemned, by name and in writing, by the very council it had been waiting for.

It will be said, and said immediately, that Saint Paisios never left the Church and those who walled off in the last century did. The first half is true and has been granted above. The second half contains the whole dispute in a single verb. They did not devise a new confession and they did not go anywhere. They held the one they had received while the calendar was altered around them and the ecclesiology followed after it, and they have carried the name of schismatic ever since on that account.

There is also a difference of situation that the objection passes over. One hieromonk on the Holy Mountain may cease commemoration at no structural cost, with a monastery about him and the mysteries at hand, and wait. A body of faithful cannot wait indefinitely, because it must be ordained, chrismated, communed and buried. What was posed in the last century was not the question of one man's commemoration. It was the question of what an entire people does when the change is imposed on it parish by parish. Whether the answer given then was right is a matter to be argued on its own record, and it is not settled by the example of a monk whose situation did not present the question.

What can be settled is the counsel itself. They were told then what the Elder Sabbas was told in 1991 and what inquirers are told to this day: that they had put themselves outside the Church, that the hour had not come, that a synod would settle the matter in due course. The synod met in Crete. It settled the matter.

The Elder Sabbas asked which of the two was following in the footsteps of the Saints, and it is not settled by counting the houses on either side. Saint Mark of Ephesus stood alone at Florence against an emperor, a patriarch and an assembled council, and signed nothing, and the Church has honoured his refusal for six centuries. Saint Maximus was told that every see had entered communion and that he alone dissented, and asked in reply what confession they had entered communion upon. Neither was vindicated by a council in his lifetime. Both were right.

So was the monk at Kapsala. He was told in 1991 that he had put himself outside the Church, and he answered that the question was not how many patriarchates remained in communion with the Phanar but who stood with the truth. Twenty-five years later a council sat in Crete, granted the name of Churches to bodies not in communion, called the dialogue praiseworthy, and pronounced men like him worthy of condemnation for defending true Orthodoxy under a pretext. It answered his question in the only way it could, and it answered in his favour. He did not live to be told he had been reading the file correctly. Neither did Saint Mark. That is generally how it goes.

He was one monk in a cell, refusing the counsel of the most beloved man on the mountain, cut off from every house on it, and he turned out to have seen further than any of them. The faithful are not asked to examine that record. They are asked to stop remembering it.

 

Sources

1. Elder Sabbas of Kapsala, Letter to Father Nicodemos, Cell of Saint Nicholas, Mount Athos, 13 August 1991.

2. Saint Paisios the Athonite, Letter to Father Haralambos Vasilopoulos, the Holy Mountain, 23 January 1969.

3. Hieromonk Isaac, The Life of Elder Paisios of Mount Athos.

4. Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue, "Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion," Balamand, June 1993, paragraphs 13, 14, and 30.

5. World Council of Churches, Ninth Assembly, "Called to be the One Church," Porto Alegre, 2006, paragraphs 8 and 9.

6. Holy and Great Council, "Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World," Crete, June 2016.

7. Ecumenical Patriarchate, Vilnius, 8 June 2026.

8. Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1 January 1920.

9. A Confession of Faith Against Ecumenism, 2009, positions 2 and 4, citing Saint Basil and Saint Symeon of Thessalonica.

10. Canon 15 of the First and Second Council, Constantinople, 861.

 

Source: https://patristicwitness.com/ArticleDetail?id=6a736516edaab9fda22aaf1f