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  • A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress: An Analysis and Translation of its Acts and Decisions
  • Dimitrios Stamatopoulos
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 Constantinople 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) [End Page 518] 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...

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