An Explanatory Note: Several years ago, two of our Bishops in Western Europe, during a meeting

of the Holy Synod, asked that someone be assigned to write an apologetic note about the witness of
the Holy Synod in Resistance, addressing in particular its anti-ecumenical stand as perceived in the
religiously-pluralistic societies of the West. His Eminence, Me­tro­politan Cyprian of Oropos and Phyle,
the President of the Holy Synod, assigned this task to Archbishop Chry­sostomos of Etna. The product
of His Eminence’s efforts was the following compelling essay, which was, on account of the subsequent
illness of the Metropolitan and the Holy Synod’s preoccupation with other matters, never submitted
to the Bishops for approval. We asked Archbishop Chrysostomos, recently, if he would allow us, for the
edification of our faithful in the West and in reply to various of our critics, to post it on the English
version of the official website of the Holy Synod. His Eminence reluctantly agreed to allow this, with
the caveat that it must appear with our affirmation that it is a personal state­ment and without any
suggestion of its endorsement or approbation by the Holy Synod (though one cannot imagine anyone
in the Synod objecting to any of His Eminence’s statements). We are thus pleased to present this excel-
lent essay.
† Bishop Auxentios of Photike
Hieromonk Patapios Agiogregorites

WHAT THE HOLY SYNOD IN RESISTANCE INTENDS BY ITS

RESISTANCE TO ECUMENISM AND PAPISM AND HOW IT
VIEWS THESE OBJECTS OF ITS RESISTANCE

A Statement of Clarification by Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna

“...[S]peak forth the words of truth and soberness”

(Acts 26:25)

I. Our resistance to ecumenism is not undertaken in a spirit of bigotry

To the secular scientist, nothing is more dangerous than committing what,

in statistics, is called a Type I error. When a scientist commits such an error,
he wrongly accepts as probable fact an incorrect or false hypothesis. As a con-
sequence of this, other false hypotheses and theories, predicated on this error,
may enter into the body of scientific knowledge. When this happens, the in-
tegrity of that body of knowledge is even further compromised. In this same
way, the Church Fathers were careful to protect the consensio Patrum, or the
common voice of the Fathers with regard to that body of truth believed by the

1
 Orthodox Church in all places, at all times, and by everyone,1 from false teach-
ings and assumptions, or heresy (to use that word properly, and not as a mere
denunciatory epithet), lest they distort the path towards salvation and human
transformation (union with God by Grace, or theosis) which the unique Truth
of Orthodox Christianity entails.
Hence, in rejecting the religious syncretism of the contemporary ecu-
menical movement, which posits that ultimate Truth derives not from a sin-
gle extant criterion, but from the synthesis of many different relative truths
(religious traditions) into a single standard of veracity that will emerge in the
future, we imitate the scientist in his quest for a single body of Truth and a
single criterion for establishing and preserving it. We Orthodox resisters hold
that Christ established a single Church, that it is the repository of Christian
Truth,2 and that its Traditions, the very criteria of Truth, contain, encompass,
and perpetuate everything that the Lord gave us, that the Apostles preached,
and which the Church Fathers have, through the ages, preserved.3 To admit
into the body of theological knowledge anything drawn from another source,
or derived from any other set of traditions, is to adulterate the truth and to cut
ourselves off from that sui generis quality that belongs only and exclusively to
the fullness of truth, and not to its derivatives: that is, Grace.
It is not out of bigotry towards other religions, then, but in fidelity to the
theological and ecclesiological principles which lie at the heart of the Ortho-
dox confession, that we reject the notion of multiple sources of truth, a di-
versity in traditions, and contemporary ecumenism. Like the secular scientist,
we, as spiritual aspirants, wish to preserve an empirical, revealed Truth and to
avoid its admixture with false hypotheses or groundless opinions. Moreover,
we also consider it our sacred duty to resist any attempt to substitute such
“demonic heresies”—to employ once again the vocabulary of the Church Fa-
thers—for the Truth. In this resistance, we do not approach other religions (or
the ecumenical movement, for that matter) as intrinsically evil or diabolical per

1 Cf. St. Vincent of Lérins, “First Commonitorium,” §2, Patrologia Latina, Vol. L,
col. 640: “In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus
quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (Moreover, in the Catho-
lic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has
been believed everywhere, always, by all).
2 See St. Paul, who calls the Church “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I St. Tim-
othy 3:15); St. John Chrysostomos, who calls the Church “τὸ συνέχον τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὸ
κήρυγμα” (that which ties together the faith and preaching) (“Homily XI on the First
Epistle to St. Timothy,” Patrologia Graeca, Vol. LXII, col. 554); and St. Theophylact of
Ochrid, who affirms that the Church is the “σύστασις (mainstay) τῆς ἀληθείας (of the
truth)” (“Explanation of the First Epistle to St. Timothy, Patrologia Graeca, Vol. CXXV,
col. 49B).
3 “...῝[Η]ν μὲν ὁ Κύριος ἔδωκεν, οἱ δὲ ἀπόστολοι ἐκήρυξαν, καὶ οἱ πατέρες ἐφύλαξαν.”
St. Athanasios the Great, “First Epistle to Serapion,” Patrologia Graeca, Vol. XXVI, cols.
593C-596A.

2
se, but directly address, rather, the demonic consequences of extraneous and false
teachings that impugn the existence of, or lead one away from, the Orthodox
repository of truth.4
To any ecumenists—and especially those living in religiously pluralistic
societies—who may still misunderstand these sacred responsibilities of ours
before the Orthodox Church to constitute a condemnation of other confes-
sions and religions, let us underscore what we have said above with the words
of a contemporary Greek Saint, Nectarios of Aegina. With singular eloquence,
this holy personage explains that, in defending the pristine body of Truth con-
tained within Orthodoxy, we have in no manner abandoned love and the hope
for Christian unity. It is love which transforms our preservative actions and
deeds into an open call to those of all religions to join us therein and, ulti-
mately, to embrace the fullness of truth which we so sedulously guard:
Dogmatic differences, reduced to an issue of faith, leave the matter of love free
and unchallenged; dogma does not set itself against love.... Christian love is
constant, and for this reason the deformed faith of the heterodox cannot change
our feeling of love towards them.... Issues of faith must in no way diminish the
feeling of love.5
The Orthodox in resistance see it as their Evangelical duty to expose re-
ligious syncretism (ecumenism and the ecumenical movement) as something
that, with whatever misguided goodness of intention, leads one away from the
conviction that there is a true Church and an established path to spiritual per-
fection. At the same time, as we have seen, the ethos and spirit of the Gospel
also draw us into a love of our fellow man, such that our defense of the Truth
and our resistance to religious syncretism springs from an all-embracing con-
cern for the spiritual estate of all mankind, the salvation of every man and
woman, and the abhorrence of any sort of religious bigotry, intolerance, or
fanaticism, whether among our Orthodox brethren or those of other religions.

II. The true path towards unity begins in and with the Church

The goal of uniting Christianity, which we consider a sacred and desired

one, is accomplished, as we see and interpret the teachings of the Orthodox
Church and the witness of the Church Fathers, not by dialogue and by com-
promise (that is, by overlooking the theological differences between various

4 Ecumenists, reacting to such Patristic language, have at times reproached us Old

Calendarist resisters with shocking invective. A recent publication of the World Coun-
cil of Churches, the Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: 2002), for exam-
ple, portrays us as virtual recidivists, “fundamentalists,” and “uncanonical,” citing one
critical assessment of ecumenism out of context and leaving the reader with the clearly
unfair impression that we are unbridled religious bigots. I am, much to my chagrin,
personally charaterized as some sort of fundamentalist hothead.
5 St. Nectarios of Pentapolis, Mathema Poimantikes (Athens: 1972), p. 192.

3
 confessions and religions); it is fully realized only in the unity of Faith. So
it is that Christ—to use a Scriptural passage so often abused and misused by
the ecumenical movement—expressed His desire, during His earthly mission,
that all Christians “may be one,”6 avoiding the “scandal” of “division,” as St.
John Chrysostomos tells us, in his hermeneutical comments on these words of
the Lord, by adhering to the faith of the Apostles;7 avoiding the “scandal” of
“teachers” who are “divided” and not “of the same mind,” as St. Theophylact of
Ochrid interprets this same passage;8 and living in unity “not in order that we
may believe,” as St. Augustine affirms, “but because we have believed.”9
There is, in the sacred Patristic tradition of the Orthodox Church, not a
single word about finding ultimate Truth in dialogue (though dialogue and
the search for mutual understanding are salutary things when undertaken in
the proper context) or in joint prayer and common worship between the Or-
thodox and heterodox. Indeed, there are canonical proscriptions against such
activities. Rather, “because we have believed” and are “of the same mind,” we
are one in our Orthodox confession, constantly, sincerely, and fervently calling
others into the communion of the Church. As the late Father John Roma-
nides, Professor of Theology at the University of Thessaloniki, says of Christ’s
entreaty for unity among men (with a tone of irony directed at the syncretis-
tic “ecclesiology” of the modern ecumenical movement), it “is certainly not
a prayer for the union of churches,”10 but for our unity and oneness in the
transformative powers of the Orthodox Faith and our “glorification” by Grace,
which Grace, as we have said, is a unique quality of Christianity in its fullness.
It is in the “one body” of the Orthodox Church—in the “one faith” and the
“one Baptism”—that Christ calls us to oneness: a unity to which we, in turn,
invite all men and women, freely and openly.11 So we teach and so our Fathers
have called us to teach.

III. We are not Anti-Roman Catholic in our opposition to Papism and Vatican
policies

That our opposition to Papism and Vatican policies is not born of backwa-
ter anti-Catholic bigotry is evident in what we have said about religious tolera-
6 St. John 17:21.
7 St. John Chrysostomos, “Homily LXXXII on the Gospel of St. John,” §2, Patrolo-
gia Graeca, Vol. LIX, col. 444.
8 St. Theophylact of Ochrid, “Commentary on the Gospel of St. John,” Patrologia
Graeca, Vol. CXXIV, co. 237C.
9 St. Augustine, “Tractate CX on the Gospel of St. John,” §2, Patrologia Latina, Vol.
XXXV, col. 1920.
10 Father John S. Romanides, “Orthodox and Vatican Agreement: Balamand, Leba-
non, June 1993,” Theologia, Vol. VI, No. 4 (1993).
11 Ephesians 4:4-5.

4
tion. Moreover, we have a common heritage with Rome—and, by extension,
later with its Protestant scions—in the early Church. The Orthodox Church,
to quote one encyclopedic source, “stands in historical continuity with the
communities created by the apostles of Jesus.”12 As members of “Christen-
dom’s oldest church,”13 in the words of another standard source book, we Or-
thodox resisters are acutely aware of our roots in the undivided Church, in a
Christianity which knew no Papacy and which knew no Vatican, and of our
responsibility, as the continuators of that Church, to preserve the principles
and traditions handed down to us as the only paths to Christian unity.
A. Papism. It follows, therefore, that what we have said about the
threats of ecumenism to the integrity of the Faith which we guard and pre-
serve also applies to the Papacy, which introduced into the body of Christian
doctrine, from an Orthodox perspective, the false claim that Christ built his
Church on the person of St. Peter, and not on his confession of Christ’s Divinity,
as well as the many heresies which this innovation spawned (Papal infallibil-
ity, the Immaculate Conception, etc.), thus cutting itself off from the Ortho-
dox Church. As the late Czech Protestant theologian and veteran ecumenist,
Joseph Hromádka, avers,
[i]n the judgment of Eastern Christians, ...the Roman Catholic Church...sepa-
rated herself—way back in ancient times—from the one Apostolic Church. It
was the Bishops of Rome that had set themselves against the mystical fellow-
ship of faith, and followed their particular interests and designs.14
It would behoove the Orthodox ecumenists, in their dialogues with the Vati-
can, to be open and honest and to acknowledge anti-Papism, not only as a
fundamental element of Orthodox ecclesiology, but as one of the chief psycho-
logical motives behind the tragic schism be­tween the Orthodox and Roman
Catholic Churches. It is inarguably, after all, the primary source of the theo-
logical differences separating Rome from Orthodoxy.
It is also inarguably the case that the “interests and designs” of the Papacy,
and especially with the rise of the Papal Monarchy in the Middle Ages, brought
much suffering on the Orthodox world (the Fourth Crusade and the conquest
of Constantinople by Latin Crusaders in 1204, which Sir Steven Runciman
describes as “one of the most ghastly and tragic incidents in history,”15 being
but one instance that we might cite). While, much to his credit, the late Pope
John Paul II apologized for these and other assaults and outrages against the
12 Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia (1983 edition), s.v. “Orthodox Church.”
13 Christendom and Christianity Today, Vol. III in The World’s Great Religions (New
York: Time, Inc., 1963), p. 266.
14 Joseph L. Hromádka, “Eastern Orthodoxy,” in The Great Religions of the Modern
World, ed. Edward J. Jurji (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 286-
287.
15 Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern
Churches During the XIth and XIIth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 149.

5
Orthodox, and while we Orthodox—though never to such a degree as in the
instance cited— have at times also treated Roman Catholic populations within
our dominions improperly, and owe apologies for such lapses, one cannot sim-
ply dismiss as mere bigotry the historical sensitivities of Orthodox Christians
and the rôle of those sensitivities in reinforcing our opposition to Papism.
The Orthodox East has always harbored, furthermore, serious misgivings
about the specifically theological consequences of Papism. The Blessed Archi-
mandrite Justin (Popovič) argues that the Papacy “replace[s] the God-Man [Je-
sus Christ] with an infallible man,” thereby elevating the Bishop of Rome to
a status “greater than [that of ] the holy Apostles, the holy Fathers, and the
Oecumenical Synods.”16 In a similar vein, the well-known Russian writer A.
Khomiakov observes that, for the Orthodox Church, “[t]he grace of faith is
not to be separated from the holiness of life, nor can any single community
or any single pastor be acknowledged to be the custodian of the whole faith
of the Church.”17 Such misgivings have been expressed, too, in the theological
polemics of the Orthodox Church. In reaction to the installation of a Latin Pa-
triarch in Constantinople, after the city’s conquest by the Crusaders, an anony-
mous Byzantine author wrote, “The more we separate ourselves from the Pope,
the closer we draw to the most blessed Peter and to God Himself.”18
When we resisters express our opposition to the Papacy, then, we embrace
a long-established tradition in the Orthodox Church, which views Papism as
antithetical to the structure of the Church established by Christ, a deviation
from the consensus of the Church Fathers, and a source for the introduction
of false doctrine, or heresy, into the body of Christian Truth. This does not
constitute an assault against Roman Catholicism or an expression of religious
bigotry. Indeed, even in its polemical characterizations of the Pope—as the An-
tichrist and the source of evil and discord within the Christian world, to quote
such Orthodox luminaries as St. Kosmas Aitolos and the celebrated contem-
porary Elder, Archimandrite Philotheos (Zervakos)—the Orthodox Church
does not ignore the good intentions and often fine character (notwithstanding
many historical examples to the contrary) of some who have occupied the Pa-
pal See. It focuses, rather, on the anti-Christian spirit of human “infallibility”
and, once more, on the demonic and diabolical consequences that fall upon
the Church when its faithful are called to pay heed to anyone but Christ Him-
self and to recognize any authority outside the unity in Christ which defines
the Orthodox Church.
B. The Vatican. With regard to our resistance to Vatican policy, there are
16 Father Justin Popovic, “The Highest Value and the Last Criterion in Orthodoxy,”
in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, tr. Asterios Gerostergios et al. (Belmont, MA: In-
stitute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994), p. 89.
17 Alexei S. Khomiakov, The Church is One (Seattle, WA: St. Nectarios Press, 1979), p.
21.
18 Cited in Archimandrite Spyridon S. Bilales, Orthodoxia kai Papismos, 2nd ed.
(Athens: Ekdoseis Adelphotetos “Evnike,” 1988), Vol. I, p. 148.

6
many who, in this age of ecumenism, would argue that our negative stance
fails to acknowledge the ecumenical outreach of Rome, which has fostered
good relations with the Orthodox Church by recasting the prerogatives of the
Papacy in more conciliar language. To these would-be critics, we would re-
spond with the words of Pope John Paul II, who on May 25, 1995, in his encyc-
lical “Ut Unum Sint” (That They Might Be One), affirmed the rôle of the Pope
as the “visible sign and guarantor” of Christian unity—and this in a document
issued by the Vatican as a statement of its continued commitment to ecumen-
ism and the ecumenical movement!
It is likewise often said that the Vatican, in its ecumenical outreach, has
discarded the claims of Roman Catholicism to an ecclesiastical primacy in
Christianity, approaching the Orthodox, as we see in the aforementioned doc-
ument, “Ut Unum Sint,” as a “Sister Church” or as “one lung” of the “two
lungs of Chris­tianity.”19 Nonetheless, the ecclesiological definitions set forth
in the Second Vatican Council’s decree on the nature of the Church, “Lumen
Gentium” (A Light for the Nations)—upheld and ratified by every Pope in the
four decades since the close of that council—affirm that the Roman Catho-
lic Church is the “one holy catholic and apostolic Church founded by Jesus
Christ” and that “the sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess
to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic” is found concretely and solely “in the
[Roman] Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by
the bishops in communion with him.”
It is with some justification, therefore, that we Orthodox critics of the ecu-
menical movement have accused the Vatican of disingenuousness and hypoc-
risy in its ecumenical overtures. At the same time that we are condemned as
virtual bigots and ecclesiastical exclusivists for upholding the primacy of the
Orthodox Church (and with no mean historical arguments to support our
case), the Vatican at one and the same time supports the ecclesiological syncre-
tism of the ecumenical movement and maintains that the Papacy is the source
of Christian unity and that the Roman Catholic Church is the one Church.
It, along with the World Council of Churches, has also endorsed labels such
as “official” and “uncanonical” in differentiating, respectively, those Orthodox
who support and participate in the ecumenical movement from us Orthodox
resisters: a distinction wholly foreign to the ecclesiological life of the Chris-
tian East, where “officialdom” is considered spiritually deadly to the Faith and
where canonicity rests on adherence to the canonical directives that dictate the
observance of Church traditions and the ascent to holiness.
It is, in the final analysis, obvious to any objective observer, whether he
agrees or disagrees with our position, that the opposition of us Orthodox re-
sisters to Papism and Vatican Policy is based on firm historical precedents and
on theological and ecclesiological principles of long-standing importance, dat-
19 This image, which has been employed widely by Orthodox and Roman Catholic
ecumenists alike, was actually coined by the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-
1949).

7
ing back to the age of an undivided Christianity. We moderate Orthodox re-
sisters, moreover, are by no means motivated by bigotry or prejudice against
Roman Catholicism; instead, it would seem, the characterizations and assess-
ments of our efforts by our detractors in the ecumenical movement and in
the Vatican leave them open to accusations of unfairness and harshness, if not
hypocrisy and holding to a double standard.

IV. Old Calendarism is not a mark of Orthodox troglodytism

It is well known that the Holy Synod in Resistance adheres to the Church
Calendar (the so-called Old Ca­lendar); that is, to the Paschalion (or date of
“Easter,” or in Orthodox nomenclature, “Pascha”) established by the Oecumen-
ical Synod of Nicaea, in 325, and to a festal cycle determined by the Julian
Calendar. This Calendar was everywhere used by the Orthodox Church until
the early twentieth century, when some local Orthodox Churches adopted the
Gregorian Calendar, originally imposed on Western Christians by Pope Gre-
gory XIII in the Papal Bull “Inter Gra­vissimas” (Among the Most Serious—a
title taken from the first words of the initial sentence of the Bull), issued on
February 25, 1582 (Old Style). The Pope, by virtue of “the attribute of sovereign
pontiff,” thus declared that October 4 of the same year would be followed im-
mediately by October 15, omitting the ten days separating the Julian from the
Gregorian Calendar (a separation which is at present one of thirteen days).
With the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by various local Orthodox
Churches—including the Church of Greece, in 1924—the unity of the faithful
in their liturgical celebrations was broken. In addition, among those Churches
which adopted the Western date for Pascha (the Church of Romania briefly
and the Church of Finland permanently), fidelity to the dictates of the Oecu-
menical Synods and Canons, by which the canonicity of any Orthodox body
is established, was set aside as a criterion of the Faith. As a consequence of this
serious rupture with Holy Tradition and the rudimentary definitions of Ortho-
doxy, the Orthodox world was divided into two camps: the Orthodox innova-
tors, who accepted the calendar reform, and the Orthodox resisters (deprecat-
ingly called “Old Calendarists” or “Old Stylists), who rejected the reform and
who hold forth today in several national Churches (those of Greece, Bulgaria,
and Romania).
Here, too, our position has been misrepresented and we have been ac-
cused of promoting separatism and of troglodytic tendencies in adhering to
an antiquated and meaningless calendar—of being triskaidekemerolaters, or
worshippers of the thirteen days that separate the Julian and Gregorian Calen-
dars. Some years ago, a Jesuit ecumenical activist penned an entry for a Roman
Catholic guide to world religions that serves as an egregious example of these
wrongful allegations. His comments are also, interestingly enough, marked by
an apparently deliberate attempt to downplay the importance of the Greek
Old Calendar movement by misrepresenting both its foundational precepts

8
and its statistical profile:
Palaioimerologites (Gr. for Old Calendarists), a term used for the 200,000
Greek Orthodox who broke ecclesiastical ties with the main Greek Orthodox
Church because of the official Church’s change in 1924 from the Julian to the
Gregorian calendar. [While accurate statistics are difficult to ascertain and the
Old Calendarist population has dwindled, at the outset of the movement, the
number of Old Calendarists was many times this number.] In the late 30s they
split to form two separate hierarchies. There are about 250 Old Calendar Greek
priests [this is an absurdly underestimated statistic] who keep alive among the
faithful people the burning conviction that there is an immense importance in
maintaining the 13 days that separate the liturgical cycle (the Kingdom of God)
from the official state calendar (the Kingdom of this world). The Old Calendar-
ists consider the other Greek Orthodox who follow the Gregorian calendar as
heretical [this is not universally true and is an outrageous statement] and refuse
to communicate with them. [Old Calendarists, by virtue of their opposition to
the calendar innovation, do not have intercommunion with the New Calendar-
ist innovators.] All the monks on Mt. Athos, except those of Vatopedi follow
the Old Calendar. [All of the monastic institutions on Mt. Athos presently fol-
low the Old Calendar.] There are two such parishes in the United States. [There
are, in fact, scores of Old Calendar Greek parishes in the U.S. and Canada.]20
It is, to address these misperceptions (beyond our bracketed interjections
above), under the banner of the Church Calendar, and not out of an absurd
worship of days, that we Orthodox resisters carry out our opposition to the
ecumenical movement and the Papacy. This is because the issue of Church
Calendar is, in actuality, closely tied to the doctrine of Papal supremacy and to
the emergence of ecumenical ideas that, as we have demonstrated, erode the
very foundations of our Orthodox Faith.
A. The Papacy and the Calendar Issue. With regard to the Papacy, the Gre-
gorian Calendar was imposed on Western Christianity by the authority of the
Pope, as we observed earlier. Issues of astronomical accuracy—which are not of
concern to us here—aside, beyond the divisions and strife that the adoption of
the Gregorian Calendar by various Orthodox Churches produced, our resist-
ance to the Papal Calendar is also an expression of our opposition to the no-
tion that Pope Gregory XIII, acting as “sovereign pontiff,” had the authority to
impose his calendar reform on the world. The rabidly anti-Protestant Gregory,
who considered the calendar reform an effective tool in the Counter-Reforma-
tion, generated similar resistance to Papal power in Protestant Europe, where
the Gregorian Calendar was not adopted for several centuries after its impo-
sition: Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and Norway in 1700, and
England and the American colonies, where the Gregorian (or New) Calendar
was considered a “Popish” device, only in 1752. We Old Calendarists, therefore,
have an historical counterpart in such Western European and American colo-
20 George A. Maloney, S.J., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion (Washington, DC:
Corpus Publications, 1979), s.v. “Palaioimerologites.”

9
nial resistance to Papism, and it is only historical amnesia that allows ecclesias-
tical polemicists to dismiss our concerns as outlandish or eccentric.
B. Ecumenism and the Calendar Issue. It is an indisputable fact that the ad-
vocacy of the calendar reform in the twentieth century had its roots in the ecu-
menical policies first embraced officially by the Orthodox Church in an encyc-
lical promulgated by the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1920.
As part of its program for the reunification of the Orthodox and heterodox
Christian confessions, the Patriarchate proposed that Christians everywhere
accept “a uniform calendar for the celebration of the great Christian feasts at
the same time by all the churches.”21 It moved forward with this plan, not by
offering as a model of uniformity the ancient Orthodox Church Calendar, but
by adopting, in 1924, the Papal Calendar (or, as it was euphemistically and a
bit ridiculously styled, the “Revised Julian Calendar”). This action was justi-
fied by the rejection of the Julian Calendar, by which the Orthodox Church
Feasts are partly calculated, on the grounds of its “astronomical” insufficien-
cies, which were put forth in such a clearly unscientific and naive way as to be
embarrassing.
The hodgepodged New Church Calendar which Constantinople adopted
(as did the Church of Greece and other local Orthodox Church­es shortly there-
after), crudely grafting the traditional Paschalion of the Orthodox Church onto
a festal cycle determined by the Gregorian Calendar, was to suffice until such
a time as the Orthodox Paschalion could also be abandoned for the celebration
of a common Pascha by all Christians. That goal has not yet been achieved by
the innovators, who nonetheless still see it, along with the New Calendar, as
an essential component of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical move-
ment. Hence, while the Orthodox Churches of Russia, Serbia, Georgia, and
Jerusalem, among others, still follow the Old Calendar, but are to varying de-
grees active in such ecumenical organizations as the World Council of Church-
es, they too have flirted from time to time with the idea of adopting the New
Calendar or the Western date for Pascha. On account of this—and because of
their communion with the Orthodox innovators and ecumenists who follow
the New Calendar—the Holy Synod in Resistance does not commune with
these Churches (being walled off from them, as it is from the New Calendar-
ists, though not denying the Orthodox identity of either group), even if these
Churches do follow the Old Calendar. This fact further brings into focus our
fundamental raison d’être, which is not a witless commitment to the Church
Calendar alone, but that of a sober, circumspect opposition to the compromis-
ing effects of ecumenism and Papism on the integrity of the Orthodox Church
and its traditions, as evidenced in the calendar reform. In that opposition, our
goal is not to condemn and divide our fellow Orthodox, but to return them to
the fullness of Holy Tradition that is in the end, rising above temporary divi-
21 “Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1920,” in The Orthodox Church in the
Ecumenical Movement: Do­cuments and Statements 1902-1975 (Geneva: World Council of
Churches, 1978), p. 41.

10
sions, the fundamental unitive force of the Church in time space.

V. Concluding Statement

We are acutely aware that many of our intentions and goals, as well as the
Patristic language which we employ in formulating and expressing our opposi-
tion to ecumenism and Papism, are open to misinterpretation and misunder-
standing. This is partly because we are sometimes incautiously identified with
those who, departing from the Royal Path of moderation, undertake to oppose
the ecumenical movement and the Pope with a spirit of intolerance, disallow-
ing that many ecumenists and the vast majority of those who embrace the
Roman Catholic confession are individuals—though misguided— of sincere
purpose. These same unwise zealots misuse in a denigrating and insulting way
the diagnostic theological nomenclature of the Church Fathers, who, in op-
posing heresy and de­crying the demonic and diabolical nature of that which
leads one from Truth to error, speak with analytical purpose and certainly not
with ad hominem invective. By way of such mistaken association, the quality
of love in which our resistance is undertaken, and at which it inexorably aims,
is obfuscated. As we are also painfully aware, we are not infallible, whether in
our views or in expressing them, and our Bishops and clergy, individually, have
at times spoken or written injudiciously or imprudently. (I count myself chief
among these.) Demanding of us a perfection that none of us claims, some de-
tractors have used these instances further to denigrate us. This is regrettable.
It is also the case that we resisters are at times the victims of ecumenists
gone awry and of Papist policies and their designers gone astray, holding forth,
as they do, with the rhetoric of religious toleration and openness, while at the
same time deliberately distorting our pro­clamations and positions. Such unsa-
vory assaults against our integrity tend to mask the fact that we, no less than
the sincere ecumenist, pine for the unity of all Christians, for tolerance be-
tween people of all races and religions, and for peace and harmony, to the
extent that these things are possible in a fallen and imperfect world. That our
heartfelt quest for such ideals is bound by our commitment to the Truth of
the Orthodox Faith and constrained by the observance of our traditions in
the pursuit of holiness and perfection in Christ should not be something that
excludes us from proper treatment and the freedom to articulate and set forth
our views as they are, and not as others would distort them. It is for this reason
that I have, with the aid of the Fathers here at the monastery, compiled this
personal statement of my understanding of the intentions of the Holy Syn-
od in Resistance and the nature of our opposition to ecumenism and Papism,
speaking in peace and in love and with truth and sobriety.
 ❑

11