On this day in 1971, the Holy Kinotis of Mount Athos left the issue of commemoration of the Ecumenical Patriarch to be decided by individual monasteries on the Holy Mountain. In the Orthodox Church, a priest acts as an arm of his bishop. Priests have a number of “functions” that a bishop can perform, as well, like hearing a confession or celebrating the Divine Liturgy. Yet a number of “functions” is reserved for the episcopal office only. Among them are the ordination of new clergy and the consecration of new bishops (together with other bishops), churches, antimensia, and holy chrism. There are also administrative prerogatives belonging to the corporation of bishops. A parish where a priest serves must have an antimension (piece of cloth with a particle of a saint’s relics stitched in). This antimension (lit. “[thing] instead of the altar table”) is like diplomas that we see on the walls of doctors’ offices. It is a “license to practice” given by a ruling bishop to this church. Whenever there are serious disciplinary problems with a congregation, a priest is required return the antimension and holy chrism to his bishop. This fact that a priest – and even more so, a deacon, whose liturgical office is totally dependent on presence of a bishop or a priest – acts on behalf of their bishop, is demonstrated throughout multiple commemorations (public mention) of the bishop’s name during divine services. Canons 13, 14, and 15 of the First-and-Second Council of Constantinople (861; for details, see my account for November 5) prescribe for deacons, priests, bishops, and metropolitans mandatory commemoration of the names of their superiors at assigned “spots” in the liturgical “spots.” The only exception for temporarily suspending this chain of command is when a superior preaches a heresy that has already been condemned. The only point in history which fits this profile is the second period of Iconoclasm. Canon 15, where this requirement regarding heresy is spelled out, involuntarily responds to the events at the end of the eighth century when Emperor Constantine VI divorced his wife and remarried. In protest at Patriarch St. Tarasios’ permitting Constantine to have a wedding in the Great Church, St. Theodore the Studite ceased to commemorate his name. With this canon, it is important that the reason for breaching communion should be doctrinal. Yesterday, I wrote about the mutual cancellation of the anathemas of 1054 by Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Leo VI in 1965. Some monastics on the Holy Mount considered that Patriarch Athenagoras had fallen into heresy and ceased commemorating his name. A typically conservative approach is represented by Archimandrite Spyridon Biallis, who argued that the significance of the anathemas could not be reduced to a clash of two fiery personalities in the eleventh century (of Michael I Keroularios and Cardinal Humbert) since Patriarch Michael Kerularios had responded to the Latin anathemas directed against all those who did not subscribe to Roman Catholic beliefs, including the filioque. In 1971, the representative body of all Athonite monasteries, the Holy Kinotis (“Holy Community”), decreed that “[o]n the issue of resuming the commemoration of the Ecumenical Patriarch, each self-governing monastery must be free to choose its course of action, according to its conscience.” Understandably, the Ecumenical Patriarch, as the ruling hierarch of Mount Athos, did not see the issue of commemoration as optional. In 1974, Athenagoras’ successor, Patriarch Demetrios, banished thirteen monks, including three abbots, for refusing to commemorate his name. Sources: Monk Benjamin (Gomartely), “Letopis’ tserkovnykh sobytii” [Timeline of Church events. Part V. 1961-1971]. Archimandrite Spyridon Biallis, Orthodoxia kai Papismos [Orthodoxy and Papacy] 2 (Athens, 1969). The struggle against ecumenism: The history of the True Orthodox Church of Greece from 1924 to 1994 (Boston, 1998). |
