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Uh-oh, the Greek Orthodox archbishop of America is a liberal

(RNS) — A few weeks in the past, Elpidophoros, the Greek Orthodox archbishop of America, confirmed up in a seaside resort close to Athens and baptized the son and daughter of a outstanding homosexual couple, actor Evangelo Bousis and designer Peter Dundas. The baptism, which was adopted by a meal and “wild occasion,” was extensively publicized.

And it created a little bit of a furor within the Church of Greece.

As Orthodox protocol requires, Elpidophoros had knowledgeable the native metropolitan bishop that he could be performing a baptism in his diocese — however not that it could be on behalf of a homosexual couple. At the least that’s what the metropolitan, Antonios of Glyfada, claimed after information of the occasion occasioned an “uproar” over what was considered “the primary overtly homosexual baptism” in Greece. 

Antonios laid out his grievance in a proper letter of grievance to the Greek synod, whereupon the synod voted unanimously to ship its personal letter of protest to Elpidophoros and to ahead that letter to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (Istanbul), which oversees the American archdiocese.

This elicited a full-throated protection of Elpidophoros within the type of a Religion News Service op-ed from the Rev. John Chryssavgis, a deacon within the American church and theological adviser to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, whose works he has edited and biography he has written. You don’t should be an professional in Byzantine politics to reckon the op-ed as a riposte from Constantinople.

Asking rhetorically whether or not notification is predicted when mother and father are single, atheist, civilly married or single, Chryssavgis declared, “There needs to be no controversy over a baptism, to which all kids are entitled.” He didn’t hesitate to name out by title Greek bishops who criticized the baptism and prompt it was time for “a frank dialogue about intercourse and gender within the church.”

As for Elpidophoros himself, whereas he has to date saved mum on the difficulty, this isn’t the primary time since taking the reins of the American archdiocese three years in the past that he has fluttered conservative Orthodox dovecotes.

Tapped because the Orthodox chief to provide the opening prayer on the annual anti-abortion March for Life final January, he started with an compulsory “We affirm the reward and sanctity of life — all life, born and unborn.” However then he went on to say, “On the identical time, we additionally affirm our respect for the autonomy of girls,” noting how the Virgin Mary “freely selected” to convey Jesus into the world.

“We march not for coercion,” he mentioned. “We march with compassion. With empathy. With love. And with our arms prolonged to embrace all.”

Archbishop Elpidophoros of America. Courtesy picture

This acknowledgment that there was one other facet to the abortion query did not sit well with a section of the Orthodox Twitterverse or with the presiding hierarchs of 4 different American Orthodox church buildings (Antiochian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian), who proceeded to difficulty a rejoinder.

“The Orthodox Church is, and at all times has been, unabashedly pro-life, relating to abortion because the killing of one other human being,” they asserted. “In latest weeks, this place has been known as into query, and, consequently, we, Orthodox Presiding Hierarchs representing a number of canonical jurisdictions in america of America, are compelled to proclaim the one true and proper educating of the Church on this matter.”

On one other entrance, two years earlier, Elpidophoros took the position {that a} non-Orthodox one that marries an Orthodox particular person in a Greek Orthodox church might obtain Communion. Conservative hackles were raised by this obvious violation of Orthodox canons.

To grasp the place Elpidophoros is coming from, check out the lecture on Orthodox-Catholic relations he gave at Fordham College in September 2020. There he known as for overcoming the “oxymoron” of letting the Eucharist (“the sacrament of unity par excellence“) come between the type of interfaith couple that Greek Orthodoxy permits to be married in church.

Will we do it by working towards oikonomia, pastoral compassion, and accepting a measure permitting the non-Orthodox Christian partner to obtain Holy Communion? At the moment, on this distinctive context of Orthodoxy within the diaspora, we’re capable of study the difficulty of Communion, that’s contingent on the truth that we enable ecumenical {couples} to marry.

The precept of oikonomia, superior by the fourth-century Cappadocian fathers, is all about recognizing that strict adherence to non secular guidelines and laws ought to at occasions yield to the realities of a fallen world. In Orthodoxy it’s maybe most evident in a willingness to permit the divorced to marry in church a second and even a 3rd time — although with a liturgy much less celebratory than what’s laid on for first marriages.

To make certain, there has at all times been resistance to oikonomia inside Orthodoxy. (In America lately that resistance is usually coming from evangelical converts to a convention they want to make entrance and heart within the tradition wars.)

Pope Francis could also be mentioned to have embraced the precept when he permitted the bishops of his church to permit divorced and remarried Catholics to obtain Communion. It’s fairly clear that Elpidophoros, a Constantinopolitan by delivery, is lower from the identical pastoral fabric.

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