A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-OrthodoxCongress: An Analysis and Translation of its Acts and Decisions(review)

Dimitrios Stamatopoulos

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 26, Number 2, October 2008,pp. 518-521 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mgs.0.0025

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raised in this volume beg to be dealt with in depth in a companion volume, When Turks Think About Greeks.

Eleni BastéaThe University of New Mexico

Patrick Viscuso, A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress: An Analysis and Translation of its Acts and Decisions. Foreword by Demetrios Constantelos. Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press. 2003. Pp. xix + 205. $24.95.

The Reverend Dr. Patrick Viscuso’s publication of the proceedings of the 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress in Constantinople is a significant contribution toward familiarizing the English-speaking public with the efforts to reform and modernize the Orthodox churches, as well as with inter-faith dialogue in the Christian world. This volume of translated proceedings includes an informative and comprehensive introduction in which Viscuso presents the historical framework within which the Congress’s deliberations took place, the basic themes around which it revolved (chiefly, the issues surrounding the correction of the Julian calendar and the marriage of priests and deacons), the procedures employed in convening the Congress, a description of the participating delegations, and, finally, its decisions and their operational consequences for Orthodox churches.

The Congress was held between 10 May and 8 June 1923 and, despite the fact that not all Orthodox churches were represented, it was called “Pan-Orthodox.” Delegations came from the Churches of Constantinople, Russia (the Russian representation came not from the Russian Church, controlled at the time by the Bolsheviks, but from the schismatic Renovationist Church), Serbia, Cyprus, Greece, and Romania.

The Congress was convened under entirely extraordinary circumstances. In November 1921, Meletius IV (Metaxakis) had risen to the leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarchate; he was the first (and last) Patriarch of Constan-tinople to have previously been Archbishop of Athens and All Greece. For the first time, a former Archbishop of Athens was occupying the Patriarchal See in Constantinople, and the Megali Idea (the Greek irredentist ideology) held sway in the Patriarchate even as it was being defeated on the battlefield. Metaxakis was a fervent supporter of Eleftherios Venizelos and had become Archbishop with Venizelos’s support. Soon after becoming Archbishop, he set out to expel bishops in the Church of Greece who had participated in the anathemization of Venizelos, but when Venizelos lost the November 1920 elections (which occurred in the midst of the Asia Minor campaign), Metaxakis was himself deposed from the Archdiocese of Athens and sought refuge in the United States.

Metaxakis’s election to the position of Ecumenical Patriarch drew a negative reaction from the Ottoman government, which considered the election illegal, given that Metaxakis did not hold Ottoman citizenship. Although the (royalist)

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Athens government took the same position, Metaxakis was supported by “National Defense” Venizelists and he proved to be a source of ongoing problems for King Constantine and his associates. The influence of the Athens government over seven of the 12 members of the Synod of Constantinople, who questioned the validity of Metaxakis’s election, threw the conflict into even sharper relief. Indeed, the Synod of the Church of Greece, held between the 22nd and 29th of December 1921, proceeded to dethrone Metaxakis “from his high rank of Prelacy,” due to the irregularity of his election but also due to his activities in America, where, presumably, his objective was to reorganize the Orthodox Church there. The Greek government sanctioned the Synod’s decision with a royal decree on 25 January 1922.

Metaxakis, however, arrived in Constantinople on 24 January1922 and was proclaimed Ecumenical Patriarch. Through an act of the Patriarch and Synod on 1 March 1922, the Orthodox Churches and communities of the diaspora, which had been ceded to the Church of Greece in 1908 by Joachim III, were returned to the control of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Also during his tenure, in April 1922, the Diocese of Thyateira was established as an exarchate of Western and Central Europe and, on 17 May 1922, the Archdiocese of North and South America was established.

The course of events in the Asia Minor campaign during the summer of 1922 would prove irreversible and the campaign signified the collapse of the Megali Idea, whether in its Venizelist or royalist version. The pro-Constantine government’s distrust of the Church of Constantinople, and fear on the part of the former lest collaboration with the latter bring about the reinstatement of Venizelism, brought about an impasse in Constantinople’s firm intention of dealing with the nationalist question with a movement that would make Asia Minor autonomous.

Metaxakis was on the Patriarchal throne throughout this critical juncture. The movement by Nikolaos Plastiras (11–24 September 1922), the loss of Eastern Thrace, and the corresponding triumph of the Turkish Kemalists did not lead to his immediate expulsion from the Patriarchal See, the basic reason being that Metaxakis had been placed under the protection of allied forces, in particular the English (thus, it was not by accident that the Ecumenical Patriarchate decided to recognize the validity of Anglican Orders in July 1922). Furthermore, the need for a recognized Ecumenical Patriarch at the time of negotiations between two nation states (that would result in the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne) led the Holy Synod to recognize Metaxakis as Patriarch.

The basic issues around which the 1923 Congress revolved were the correc-tion of the Julian calendar, the marriage of priests and deacons following their ordination (as well as their second marriage as a result of a spouse’s death), the celebration of the 160th Anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, and other canonical matters. As Vasileios Stavridis has rightly observed, perhaps this Congress’s most important contribution was its insistence on the need for strengthening relations among the various Orthodox churches in an age that had witnessed not only the splintering of the old, unified Orthodox Oikoumene, but also the greatly altered status of one of its important bastions, the Russian

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Church, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ victory over the White Russians.

Nevertheless, the issue of the Julian calendar and the “modernization” of the Orthodox world to bring it in line with Western Christianity constituted the Congress’s main focus. Viscuso correctly observes that World War I brought East and West into closer contact. Bulgaria (1916), the Bolsheviks in Russia (1918), and the United Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians (1919) had already adopted the Gregorian calendar, and Greece would follow in their footsteps a few months after the convocation of the Pan-Orthodox Congress on 1 March 1923. The Orthodox Churches in these countries, however, continued to use the Julian calendar, resulting in a lack of correspondence between the ecclesiastical and civil year.

The Gregorian calendar’s adoption by Greece would become the occasion for the actual convocation of the Pan-Orthodox Congress, since the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate would be called upon to recognize its legality and examine it in accordance with the letter and the spirit of the Sacred Canons. At the Congress’s first session, there were proposals for resolution of this issue by the Greek, Serbian, and Romanian delegations. At the core of all the proposals discussed were the issues of the calendar’s correction (i.e., the addition of 13 days to the Julian calendar) and the question of the date of the celebration of Easter. Finally, through the refinements offered by the three delegations and with a focus on the problem of the proposed changes’ compatibility with doctrinal teachings, the Congress arrived at a number of important decisions, including the need to reform the calendar and Paschalion, with the goals of having all Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on the same day, the elimination of discrepancies between the religious and civil calendars, the correction of the ecclesiastical calendar through the omission of 13 days from the Julian calendar (1 October 1923 would become 14 October 1923), and the determination that Easter would fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

It is important that the Congress saw the latter choice as one imposed by the Sacred Canons (Canon 85 of the Holy Apostles) and not as an arbitrary one. The Congress decided that the Ecumenical Patriarchate would propose the worldwide use of the corrected Julian calendar to the League of Nations. One of the direct consequences of the Congress was the adoption of its decisions by the Church of Greece (23 March 1924) and the Romanian Church (14 November 1924). The Patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, the Archdiocese of Cyprus, and the Bulgarian Church (1968) would follow suit. This, however, did not hap-pen with the Russian and Serbian churches, which insisted on using the Julian calendar (as was also the case with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Churches of Georgia and Poland, and the Greek Old Calendarists).

After dealing with the calendar issue, the Congress turned to questions concerning the possibility of widowed clerics remarrying, the married episcopate, the proper age for ordination, clerical dress, and related issues. Essentially, the Congress reached a decision on only the first of these, adopting the view that a second marriage was possible after the loss of one’s spouse and in cases where the priest specifically requested it; however, individual Churches were granted

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latitude to deal with this on a case-by-case basis. Especially interesting is that the decision was based on the view that a second marriage was not prohibited by the Sacred Canons, since the rites of marriage and ordination are not mutually exclusive or irreconcilable. Thus, while in the case of the calendar, the Orthodox Church showed an understanding of the need to adjust to new scientific discov-eries in astronomy, in this case it insisted on retaining the progressive elements that characterized the function of the Orthodox clergy. To put it otherwise, the effort to modernize the Orthodox Church did not always look to Western reality as its lodestar.

After the defeat of the Greek army in Anatolia, opposition to Metaxakis increased, even among lay members of the Greek Orthodox community (e.g. Damianos Damianides, an epitropos [churchwarden], from the parish of Panagia Kafatiani in Galata). Damianides led demonstrations against Metaxakis in June 1923 during the very days the Pan-Orthodox Congress was being held. Indeed, Damianides’s supporters broke into the Congress and interrupted its delibera-tions, demanding the immediate resignation of the Patriarch. In response, the Patriarchate excommunicated the ringleaders: Damianides, Ioannis Tsirigiotes, and Stergios Polykritos. The events only served to hasten Metaxakis’s resignation, however, as he continued to be viewed as a spearhead of modern Greek national-ism by the Kemalist establishment and thus the Kemalists raised the matter of his dismissal in Lausanne. Indeed, Ismet Inonu, the chief negotiator for the Turks, himself put the demand to Eleftherios Venizelos. Venizelos acquiesced and, in turn, requested the patriarch’s resignation. Since Greece’s foreign policy prior-ity was that the Ecumenical Patriarchate remain in the Phanar (its traditional headquarters in Constantinople), it would not attempt to rescue specific individu-als. This became all the more true when Metaxakis expressed the opinion that the Patriarchal See be transferred from Constantinople to Mt. Athos or even to Thessaloniki. The Patriarch would be turned into a simple Archbishop should his flock be limited to a mere 200,000 of the faithful.

Thus, increasing pressure on the part of Venizelos finally led to the preva-lence of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affair’s view. In order to facilitate the peace process, on 10 June 1923—14 days before the Treaty was signed—Metaxakis withdrew from Constantinople to Mt. Athos with the permission of both govern-ing bodies of the Patriarchate. He sent his formal resignation from the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch on 20 September 1923. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the simultaneous shrinking of Hellenism into a “national center,” still undergoing formation, led the institution of the Ecumenical Patriarchate into a new era. Notwithstanding, the convocation of a Pan-Orthodox Congress constituted an important bequest by this “ethnocentric” (from every standpoint) Patriarch, towards both the homogenization of the Orthodox churches’ internal functioning and the Orthodox world’s convergence with the West.

Dimitrios StamatopoulosUniversity of Macedonia