Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna: On Elder Porphyrios and New Calendarist Elders in General

From a 2010 circular email

 

 

Just a note about the Elder [Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia]. Many of these Elders in the New Calendar Church, who live in and maintain the consistent witness of Holy Tradition, have, in my humble view, helped to hold off the precipitous course towards spiritual ruination that we see in contemporary Orthodoxy. They are the answer to the Old Calendarist extremists, who arrogantly and wrongly think that they are the only competent authorities, urbi et orbi, in the Church, and who have condemned the New Calendarists and ecumenists as lacking Grace. The holy men and women who still hold forth in world Orthodoxy fly in the face of such blasphemous arrogance.

At the same time, the outrages of the modernists and ecumenists, which grow daily, even to the point of defiling and reviling Holy Tradition, in some cases, and of condemning, slandering, and relegating us moderate resisters and Old Calendarists to a place outside the Church (while they embrace heterodox and attempt to change tradition in order to accommodate them in Orthodoxy and thus increase their own numbers). No one can deny this deadly course of world Orthodoxy, which is not unlike the course that led to the historical divisions in Christianity that the ecumenists today treat, not with a return and adherence to Holy Tradition, but by the compromise of ecumenism! This fact has not been at all lost, I think, on many of these Elders.

Elders, who live the charismatic Truth of Orthodoxy, are not necessarily Saints and Church Fathers. Their opinions and views are not always normative. While they may act in the individual lives of those whom they form with spiritual authority, not all of their statements are authoritative. They also assuredly DO NOT take the place of the Patristic witness. They can become part of it when they express it, but their individual ministrations, even if they apply in particular cases, do not constitute an infallible voice. (This deviation is often called “Gerontakrateia,” or rule by the Elders.) This does not diminish the importance and witness of Elders; rather, it puts it in context.

With regard to the course of Orthodoxy, many of these Elders in the New Calendar Church (and, of course, we have them in the Old Calendar movement as well) find themselves conflicted, hesitating to resist because of the immense cost to them and to their faithful (and one must greatly respect them for this). They are pricked in conscience about “world” Orthodoxy, knowing that the prophetic always takes precedence over order in the Church. Yet some of them have criticized the extremist Old Calendarists for their position (and very rightly so, I sincerely think) for their ecclesiological deviations from moderation. Yet others, however, because they are not infallible, have committed the very sin of the Old Calendarist extremists by condemning us moderates quite unfairly and quite injudiciously, making no distinction between us and the extremists who attack them and who, as they forget, also attack us as being outside the Church.

Elder Porphyrios, from what I have heard, also had some rather harsh things to say about the extremist Old Calendarists. Yet, some years ago, not long before he went to Mt. Athos, a pious New Calendarist scholar in this country asked him about our Synod. Father Porphyrios asked this professor a frequently-asked question about us: “If they disagree with the Old Calendarist fanatics, why are they not with us?” This pious professor, without endorsing or condemning us, quite intelligently explained our position, adding, on his own: “Given what the ‘official’ Church has done to them and the slander that I hear, it is no wonder that they are not with us. We recognize the Orthodoxy of the Russian Bishops who provided them with their Hierarchy, but then condemn them as outside the Church. And, in fact, they often ask me, ‘Why are you not with us?” (I am paraphrasing from memory, since this was many years ago.)

Father Porphyrios’ answer, which was apparently spontaneous and quite to the point, was: “Maybe they are correct. Perhaps we are one.” From this, I knew that he was the genuine thing, despite the exploitation of his less flattering statements about Old Calendarists by those who wish at any price to preserve the perquisites of officialdom or escape the slander and disgrace that resistance entails (as we can readily attest!). When I read, in his biography… the last words attributed to him [“that we may be one”], I was especially moved. If what I was told by this scholar (a man whose repute is simply beyond question) was accurate, then Father Porphyrios was a genuine Elder.