Ecumenism and the Calendar

The Calendar change was instituted unilaterally in 1924, at first in the Greek Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and then slowly spread to other local Churches (but never Catholically), opposing the catholicity of the Church both in its method of implementation as well as in its goal. The unilateral introduction of the New Calendar was an uncanonical and uncatholic act of local hierarchs which violated the external manifestation of the catholicity and ecumenicity of the world-wide Orthodox Church. The Church’s unity has always been expressed through the use of a single calendar, which was established at the First Ecumenical Council for that very purpose. Its pervasiveness in the liturgical life and the Eucharistic experience of the Church has steadily increased from that time forward, both through Synodal acts and through unwritten tradition. The changing of the calendar was an attempt to harmonize the external signs of Church’s unity with the heterodox churches of Western Europe, at the expense of unity within the Orthodox Church herself. The calendar change was the result of a secularized mindset which suffered from an inferiority complex toward the West; and it was only forced through during a time of national disaster. The Church calendar is the external manifestation of the unity of the Orthodox Churches, and to dispose of it in favor of unity with heretical churches is to violate the catholicity of the Church.

The modern Ecumenical movement is the result of thinking that the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ has lost her catholicity due to theological and political quarrels. It seeks to reconstitute the Church’s lost catholicity by uniting the split parts and restoring Eucharistic communion with heterodox groups without first reaching a common theological stance. Participation in the World Council of Churches (an organization which embodies the feeling of lost catholicity and seeks to restore it) on the part of local Orthodox Churches is a radical denial that the Orthodox Church is the totality of the Church of Christ. It presupposes the denial of the existence of authentic ecclesiastical catholicity today and it recognizes the need to reconstitute a “truly authentic” catholicity.


When our Lord Jesus Christ asked his apostles and disciples, ”Who do men say that I am?” the Apostle Peter confessed, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And straightway Christ answered, saying, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood have not revealed it to thee, but My Father which is in heaven. And I say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail over it” (Matt. 16, 15-19). The rock upon which Christ built His Church is precisely that confession of the truth which the heavenly Father revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ, His Son and Word. It is this common confession that binds the Church together and makes her one body, receptive of divine illumination, able and sufficient to assemble at the Eucharistic table.

[Excertped from the "Ecclesiological Statement" of the Old Calendar Greek Orthodox Metropolis of America, October 2004]