Posted in MINNEAPOLIS 9:55pm Jan 29 2008 - London 3:55am 30/1
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“Keep alert, stand firm in your faith,
be courageous, be strong. ”
(1 Corinthians 16:13 NRSV)

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Original obituary by Gloriscope staff

Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and all Greece was a great leader and modernizer of the Greek Orthodox Church, a defender of the Christian identity of Greece and Europe, and a promoter of ecumenism. Together with Pope John Paul II, he achieved a historical healing of a 947 years old split between the churches of Rome and Greece.

He was a warm, passionate and charismatic man of childlike faith in Christ. He had great love for his Christian brothers and sisters in Greece and abroad. He used his considerable intellectual and leadership gifts to revitalize and modernize the Greek Orthodox Church and to contribute his views to the Greek public opinion at frequent occasions.

He died yesterday, aged 69. His death is a great loss to Greece, to Greeks and Orthodox Christians everywhere, to Europe as a whole, and to the worldwide Christian church. His loss is mourned by all of Greece and by Christians and governments in the world.

His life until the age of 28

Archbishop Christodoulos was born January 17, 1939 in the town of Xanthi in Thrace, in northeastern mainland Greece. His civil name was Christos Paraskevaidis and he was one of the two sons of a food importing father and a devout mother.

He was born almost two years before World War II came to Greece. At the liberation of Greece in 1945 he was six years old. He grew up first in Xanthi and later in Athens, in a densely populated part of Athens called Kypseli.

In 1961, at the age of 22, he was ordained a deacon in the Greek Orthodox Church. In 1962 he graduated from the School of Law at the University of Athens. Then he studied theology and was ordained a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church in 1965, before he graduated from the School of Theology in 1967. Eventually, he earned four academic titles: a doctorate in theology and degrees in law, English and French.

During and after his theological studies, he worked nine years (1965-1974) as a parish priest at the Assumption of Virgin Mary Church in the suburb of Paleo Faliro in southern Athens, an area of beaches and yachts. He was a preacher and also took spiritual care of the parishioners.

He served as a parish priest in Athens during the regime of the right-wing military junta (known as the “Dictature of the Colonels”), which ruled Greece from the coup d’état in 1967 to 1974.

An old photographs shows him in the company of the Greek military, standing behind the Colonel Stylianos Pattakos, one of the three leaders of the Greek junta, who became a notorious Minister of the Interior. (After the fall of the junta, Pattakos was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to 15 years in prison). That old photograph and the implied connection to the Greek military junta became a political embarrassment to Archbishop Christodoulos in the later period of his life. However, he said later that he was unaware of the junta’s numerous breaches of human rights because he was too busy studying at that time.

Chief Secretary of the Synod and a Bishop

The year 1967 was the first turning point in his young life. He became Chief Secretary of the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church. It was a great accomplishment and high honor for a man only 28 years old. He remained Chief Secretary seven years, responsible for ecumenical affairs.

His work as Chief Secretary marked a very productive period in his life. He traveled a lot, made a lot of ecumenical contacts, and wrote books, articles in Christian press and articles in daily press.

In July 1974 – the month the Greek military regime ended – he was ordained bishop of Demetrias, which is the old name for the city of Volos in Thessaly, in east-central mainland Greece. Volos is the third largest port of Greece. At the age of only 35, he was the youngest bishop in Greek history. He remained the bishop until 1998, when he was elected Archbishop of Athens and all Greece.

Elected as Archbishop of all Greece

On April 28, 1998, after the death of Archbishop Seraphim, the plenary session of the Church of Greece elected him Archbishop of Athens and all Greece. At the age of 58, he became the youngest primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in the history of that Church. He was also the first archbishop of Greece to be democratically elected. Archbishop Christodoulos was enthroned in a great ceremony full of Byzantine pomp and splendor.

In his long and passionate inauguration speech, Archbishop Christodoulos announced that he would reform and modernize the Greek Orthodox Church and improve the strained relations with churches abroad. Now we can look back at his record and see that he succeeded to carry out his ambitious program both in Greece and internationally.

His controversial views

During his nine years as Archbishop, from 1998 to his death in January 2008, he became known as a leading Greek political conservative and a proud, fervent Greek nationalist. Year after year he was an outspoken defender of the Orthodox identity of the Greek nation and of the Christian identity of the European civilization.

He influenced the public opinion by his press articles and his almost daily appearances on radio and television. He also made frequent visits to churches and schools. Nationwide polls showed continually that he was one of the most popular public figures in the nation, with approval ratings of about 75 percent.

Yet his outspoken criticism of secularist tendencies in the Greek society made him many enemies in politics and media. The Greek government often accused him of meddling in the affairs of the State, which to some degree was unavoidable because Greece does not have a separation between the Orthodox Church and the State. He also angered many people because of his outspoken opposition against celebrating Valentine’s Day and a “European-style” Christmas in Greece.

He defended the privileged position of the Orthodox Church in Greece from the very beginning of his office as archbishop. He was telling his fellow Greeks that they lived in paradise compared with other Europeans, because Greeks had strong faith, resisted globalization, and lived according to their old tradition.

Archbishop Christodoulos was strongly resisting the forces of secularization in the Greek society and in the European Union. He was fighting for the preservation of the unique legal standing of the Greek Orthodox Church in the country, including in schools.. He was very critical of gays and lesbians, calling them “handicapped persons,” and he opposed abortion and euthanasia.

He also opposed globalization, which he saw as a conspiracy to erase national identities. He opposed redefinition of civil rights and the so-called “americanization” of the Greek society and international relations. He strongly opposed the efforts of Turkey to become a member of the European Union, because in his view it would undermine the Christian nature of Europe.

He was known to be very critical of NATO and the U.S. foreign policy during the Yugoslav Civil War. As a supporter of fellow Christians in the predominantly Orthodox republic of Serbia, he criticized the United States because it supported the Croats (a predominantly Catholic people) during the Yugoslav civil war and bombed Serbia. In March 1999, in his speech in the church of St. Neapolis in Thessaloniki. he called the American President a “devil” and “a Christian in name only.”

His statements about domestic and international issues created many controversies in Greece and abroad, notably in Turkery and the European Union. He was repeatedly criticized by the Greek government, the Greek Left and Greek minorities (Catholics, Muslims and Jews) for his views regarding the position of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Greek nation and for his views about Europe and Turkey.

His revitalization of the Greek church

As a colorful, dynamic and ambitious man of great spiritual and rhetorical gifts, a man of great intellect and big organizational skills, Archbishop Christodoulos did a lot to develop the inner life of the Greek Orthodox Church. His style was completely different from that of his predecessor Archbishop Seraphim, who hardly ever appeared in public. Archbishop Christodoulos liked to meet all types of people and vas very active in the public life of the nation.

One of the most important things he did was this: he opened the Greek Church to young people, treating them with more respect than his predecessors and inviting them to return to church “as you are, with all your stuff.” He loved young people and had a good relationship with them ever since he became the bishop in Volos in 1974. In Volos he established a local Christian radio station which was very popular and became the first of a nationwide chain of radio stations run by the Church of Greece.

As a polyglot who surfed the Web, he brought the Greek Orthodox Church into the digital age and made the Church launch its Web portal.

He modernized church activities and established many church-based ministries to help the homeless, single mothers, abused women, and people with HIV/AIDS and substance addiction. He also instituted sign-language liturgies for the deaf.

He had a God-given gift for public speaking, for writing, and for languages. He had degrees in English and French and also spoke fluent German and Italian. His knowledge of German and Italian served him well during his meetings with Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.)

His knowledge of major languages and his high position at the Holy Synod offered him good possibilities to study the history and culture of Europe and to make many international contacts. During his life, he wrote books not only on church and theological topics but also on history and social topics.

One of his recent books is “The European Psyche,” in which he wrote about one of his favorite interests: the role of Christianity in creating the European civilization. In another recent book, “Proselyte Hellenism: The transition from Antiquity to Christianity,” he described how the Christian church succeeded to evangelize the Greek and Roman world of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Healing the split with Rome

One of his major achievements was the healing of the centuries-old split between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. He responded positively to the initiative of Pope John Paul II to re-establish relations between the churches of Rome and Greece. In Athens in May 2001, he warmly welcomed Pope John Paul II with a brotherly kiss. It was the first papal visit to Athens in nearly 1,300 years – an action that received much opposition from conservative zealots in the Greek Orthodox Church. It was a historical meeting unimaginable even ten years before that.

John Paul II died before Archbishop Christodoulos was able to pay him a return visit in Rome, but Archbishop Christodoulos was in Rome during the Pope’s funeral. In December 2006, he visited Pope Benedict XVI in Rome and the two church leaders issued a joint declaration on the common tasks of the two churches.

The relations between Rome and Athens had been broken for over nine centuries, from the Great Schism between the eastern and western church in 1054 until the visit of Pope John Paul II to Athens in 2001.

The re-establishment of relations between the two churches was a huge achievement of Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Christodoulos, of great importance for the global church, particularly for its ecumenical movement. It was a reconciliation that greatly honored Jesus Christ and promoted a joint Christian witness to nonbelievers in the world. Archbishop

Overall assessment

Archbishop Christodoulos was diagnosed with liver and colon cancer in the summer of 2007 and died from cancer on January 28, 2008, eleven days after his 69th birthday.

His death is a great loss for Greece and the Greek Diaspora, a great loss for Orthodox churches worldwide, for the global church as a whole, and for all who care much about the deep-seated Christian identity of the European civilization.

He was not only the youngest Archbishop of Athens and all Greece in Greek history, he was also one of the most popular, most charismatic and most controversial archbishops in Greek history. He initiated important changes in the Greek Orthodox Church and healed the 947 years old schism between the churches of Rome and Greece.

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