Christodoulos spared no efforts to combat what he perceived to be Greek Orthodoxy’s foes. Secularism, Roman Catholicism, the Turks, the Americans, the Jews, the leftwing intelligentsia, even non-Greek Orthodox – all at times came under the lash of his emotional oratory.
February 1, 2008 Religion and Nationalism No Comments
Archbishop Christodoulos
Archbishop ChristodoulosArchbishop Christodoulos obituary – Times Online, January 29, 2008
Popular Greek Orthodox priest who used the media to energise his Church and relished attacking its secular enemies
Christodoulos presided over one of the more tumultuous decades of the Orthodox Church of Greece. Elected at 59, he was the youngest archbishop to lead the church. Often outspoken and always at ease with television and the internet, he did much to reinvigorate that unwieldy and somewhat conservative institution.
One of his much publicised achievements was to ease relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, in the process eliciting from Pope John Paul II an apology for presumed sins committed by Rome against the Greeks in the crusades.
A formidable priest, Christodoulos spared no efforts to combat what he perceived to be Greek Orthodoxy’s foes. Secularism, Roman Catholicism, the Turks, the Americans, the Jews, the leftwing intelligentsia, even non-Greek Orthodox – all at times came under the lash of his emotional oratory. Once elected to lead the Greek church, in 1998, he tried to use his power to revive the old tradition of ethnarch, or spiritual-cum-political leader, a model which had administered the Christian populations of the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire, and whose most effective recent exemplar had been Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus.
