The Reception of 1958

Timothy Ware was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation alone, on Friday of Bright Week 1958 — the Feast of the Life-Giving Source — by Bishop James (Iakovos Virvos) of Apamea, at the Greek Cathedral of St Sophia, Bayswater, entering the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. Almost every element of the version that dominates search results — “14 April 1958,” “baptism and chrismation,” “the Russian cathedral at Ennismore Gardens” — is wrong. This file gives his own account, corrects the false version, and sets out his deliberate reasons for not entering the Russian Church Abroad.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Six-Year Wait

Ware dated his conviction to the summer of 1952 and his reception to the spring of 1958: “In retrospect it is clear to me that my mind was already made up on that summer afternoon in 1952. Before being actually received, however, I waited for nearly six years” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000; see Anglican Boyhood and Oxford).

The delay was not indecision. It was, in the first instance, imposed. When Ware approached “the assistant bishop at the Greek Cathedral in London, Bishop James (Virvos) of Apamaea, he spoke to me kindly and at length, but urged me to remain a member of the Anglican Church in which I had been brought up. A Russian priest to whom I spoke in Paris gave me exactly the same advice” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).

Ware later reconstructed three reasons for that refusal, and reported them without resentment. First, ecumenical hope: in the first half of the twentieth century many Orthodox and Anglicans “sincerely hoped that the Anglican communion would be reconciled to Orthodoxy in a corporate way,” so that individual conversions were discouraged and High Anglicans were urged to act as “an ‘Anglo-Orthodox’ leaven.” Second, pastoral realism: “None of his parishes at that time used any English in their Sunday worship, and only a few of his clergy spoke anything but Greek. He was unwilling to accept British people into his care, lacking as he did the resources to look after them.” Ware endorsed this severely: “it is grossly irresponsible for Orthodox clergy to receive converts, and after that to do nothing further about them… Converts need to be integrated into a living community; they should not just be thrown in at the deep end of the Orthodox swimming-pool.” Third, testing: “Bishop James wished to test me… He knew that, if I was serious, I would come back to him again. And so indeed it turned out” (all Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).

The Three Things That Decided It

By Ware’s own account the wait ended because of three specific moments, all of which he dates.

August 1956 — Fr Lev Gillet’s definition. At the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius summer conference, Gillet was asked to define “Orthodoxy” and replied: “An Orthodox is one who accepts the Apostolic Tradition and who lives in communion with the bishops who are the appointed teachers of this Tradition.” Ware italicized the second half and called it “a critical turning-point”: as an Anglican he could hold the Apostolic Tradition “as my own private opinion,” but he could not claim it was “taught unanimously by the Anglican bishops with whom I am in communion.” Two confirmations followed in his reading — Khomiakov’s 1846 reply to William Palmer (“Their opinion is only an individual opinion, it is not the Faith of the Community”) and, in typescript, John Romanides’s article on the ecclesiology of St Ignatius of Antioch, which supplied him with “an all-essential missing link”: that the Church’s unity is constituted eucharistically, “around the same altar, to share in a single loaf and a single cup,” under the one local bishop (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” quoting Khomiakov in Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, 70–71, and citing Romanides, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 7:1–2 [1961–62], 53–77).

Pascha 1957 — the last Anglican communion. In 1957 the Orthodox and Western dates of Pascha coincided. Ware attended the Orthodox Paschal Midnight service intending to communicate later that morning at an Anglican church, and found he could not: “I had already kept Christ’s Resurrection with the Orthodox Church, in a manner that was for me complete and unrepeatable.” He adds: “Never thereafter did I make my communion at an Anglican altar” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).

September 1957 — Madeleine Lossky and the chapel at Versailles. After some months without the sacrament, Ware was warned by Vladimir Lossky’s widow: “‘You must not continue as you are,’ she insisted. ‘The Eucharist is our mystical food: without it, we starve.’” Days later, at the chapel in Versailles where Archbishop John (Maximovitch) — now glorified — was celebrating, Ware arrived near the end of the Liturgy. Nobody came forward to communicate, but the archbishop “remained standing with the chalice in his hand; and with his head on one side in his characteristic way, he stared fixedly and even fiercely in my direction (he had never seen me before). Only when I shook my head did he return to the sanctuary with the chalice.” At the moleben that followed, Ware hung back, uncertain whether a non-Orthodox should be anointed; “But this time he would accept no refusal. He beckoned firmly, and so I came forward and was anointed” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”; see St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco).

Ware refuses to over-interpret the incident — “a strange incident that I have never been able fully to explain to myself” — but records the question it left him with: “The Archbishop was gifted with the power to read the secrets of the human heart; had he perhaps some intimation that I was on the threshold of Orthodoxy, and was this his way of telling me not to delay any longer?” (ibid.). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the account is reported as Ware’s own testimony about what he experienced and what he wondered, not as an adjudicated instance of clairvoyance.

Why Not ROCOR

Ware’s choice of jurisdiction was deliberate, reasoned, and — this is the point usually lost — made against the pull of his own sympathies.

He was strongly drawn to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. “What I admired in particular was its fidelity to the liturgical, ascetic and monastic heritage of Orthodoxy,” and he notes that “most of the monasteries in the Orthodox emigration belonged to the Russian Church in Exile”; he had been warmly received at the Convent of the Annunciation in London and the Convent of the Mother of God of Lesna outside Paris. He also “admired the way in which the Russian Church in Exile held in honor the New Martyrs and Confessors who had suffered for the faith under the Soviet yoke” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”; see Orthodox Monasticism).

What stopped him was canonical isolation: “I was disturbed by the canonical isolation of the Exile Synod. In the 1950s this was not so great as it has since become, for at that time there was still regular concelebration between Russian Exile clergy and the bishops and priests of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. But I saw that the Russian Church in Exile was becoming increasingly cut off from worldwide Orthodoxy, and that troubled me” (ibid.). ROCOR Studies, drawing on the same material and on ROCOR-side sources, describes the decision as one of “double loyalty” and records the counsel of the ROCOR archpriest George Cheremeteff against seeking ordination in that jurisdiction, on the grounds that “a very narrow minded spirit is taking place, and the younger bishops will be too narrow for you” (ROCOR Studies, “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia and the Russian Church Abroad,” 6 March 2009).

The Moscow Patriarchate he rejected for a different reason, and stated it with unusual bluntness: “I felt it impossible to belong to an Orthodox Church headed by bishops under Communist control who regularly praised Lenin and Stalin, and who were prevented from acknowledging the New Martyrs slain by the Bolsheviks.” He was careful to distinguish the hierarchy from the faithful — “I did not wish in any way to pass judgment on the ordinary Russian faithful dwelling inside the Soviet Union; they were under bitter persecution and I was not” — and quoted Fr George Cheremeteff’s summary: “In a free country we must be free” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”; see The New Martyrs of Russia).

He then gives four positive reasons for the Ecumenical Patriarchate: his Greek was good and his Slavonic non-existent; membership of Constantinople meant he “would not have to take sides between the rival Russian groups”; Constantinople was “the Mother Church from which Russia had received the Christian faith, and I felt it right in my quest for Orthodoxy to return to the source”; and he had come to believe that organizational unity for Orthodoxy in Western Europe “could only happen under the pastoral protection of the Ecumenical Throne” (ibid.). He also notes what he would have done otherwise: “Had there existed in Britain a Russian diocese under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as there was in France, then I would probably have joined it.”

Bishop James received him with one warning, which Ware recorded verbatim and evidently enjoyed: “Please understand that we would never, under any circumstances, ordain you to the priesthood; we need only Greeks.” Ware’s comment: “In fact I was ordained priest in 1966, eight years after my reception, by Metropolitan (later Archbishop) Athenagoras II of Thyateira, who had arrived in Britain in 1963/64. That did not worry me, for I was content to leave my future in the hands of God” (ibid.). And the bishop softened the jurisdictional separation deliberately: “It gave me quiet happiness when Bishop James appointed Father George Cheremeteff as my spiritual father, and so I was able to remain close to the Russian Church in Exile” (ibid.).

The Reception Itself

Ware’s own sentence is the whole of the primary evidence, and it is short:

“Thus I came to the end of my journey; or, more exactly, to a new and decisive stage on a journey which had begun in my earliest infancy and which, by the divine mercy, will continue into all eternity. Shortly after Pascha in 1958, on Friday in Bright Week — the Feast of the Life-Giving Source — I was chrismated by Bishop James at the Greek Cathedral of St Sophia in Bayswater, London. At last I had come home.” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”)

Four things follow from it.

The rite was chrismation only. Ware says “chrismated,” not “baptized and chrismated.” This is also the standard practice of the Greek Archdiocese in receiving a baptized Anglican, and it is consistent with Ware’s own refusal, stated in the same essay, of “the rigorist claim that sacramental life and the grace of the Holy Spirit can exist only within the visible limits of the Orthodox Church.”
The church was Greek, not Russian. The Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom (St Sophia), Moscow Road, Bayswater, is the Greek cathedral of London.
The jurisdiction was the Ecumenical Patriarchate, through its Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain — the jurisdiction he then served without interruption for sixty-four years (see Section 07).
The officiant was Bishop James of Apamea, identified in full by Brandon Gallaher as Bishop Iakovos (Virvos) of Apamea, who received him “on Bright Friday through Chrismation… at St. Sophia’s Cathedral in London” (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022).

The date. Ware gives the liturgical date — Friday of Bright Week, which is always the Feast of the Life-Giving Source (Zoodochos Pigi) — rather than the civil date. Orthodox Pascha in 1958 fell on 13 April (Gregorian), so Bright Friday was 18 April 1958. That computation is straightforward, but because it is a computation and not a quotation it is offered here as such.

[Corrected: The widely circulated claim that Ware was "received on 14 April 1958 through baptism and chrismation at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition and All Saints, Ennismore Gardens" is false in three particulars and should not be repeated. (1) *Rite*: Ware says he was chrismated; "baptism and chrismation" would additionally imply that his Anglican baptism was rejected, which contradicts both his own account and the Greek Archdiocese's standard practice for Anglicans. (2) *Place*: the Greek Cathedral of St Sophia, Bayswater, not the Russian cathedral at Ennismore Gardens — a confusion probably arising because the Russian parish whose 1952 vigil first drew Ware (at St Philip's, Buckingham Palace Road) moved to Ennismore Gardens in 1956 after St Philip's was demolished. (3) *Date*: 14 April 1958 was Bright *Monday*; Bright Friday, the day Ware names, was 18 April. On provenance: the fullest form of the false version appears in Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia, and is echoed by search answer-boxes; English Wikipedia's bare "14 April 1958" carries no citation in the article wikitext, and Orthodox Times echoes Wikipedia. Ware's own published account is the controlling source and is independently attested in multiple copies of the text.]

[Disputed: Hieromonk Patapios states that "at the time of his composition of the original book, Bishop Kallistos was a layman in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA), as indicated in the biographical note at the front of the first edition" of *The Orthodox Church* ("A Traditionalist Critique of *The Orthodox Church*," *Orthodox Tradition* XVI, no. 1, 39–72). Ware's own essay states plainly that he was received into the Ecumenical Patriarchate's Greek archdiocese in 1958 and gives his reasons for declining ROCOR, while noting that Bishop James assigned him a ROCOR priest, Fr George Cheremeteff, as spiritual father and that he remained "close to the Russian Church in Exile" — an arrangement a 1963 jacket note could easily have compressed into a misleading formula. The collection follows Ware's own account of his canonical membership and records Patapios's contrary description without resolving what the 1963 biographical note actually said.]

Afterwards

Ware closes the essay with a judgment on the whole affair, made after “more than four decades as an Orthodox.” Fr Lazarus (Moore) had warned him in an April 1957 letter that in Orthodoxy he would find “little generosity or heroism or real sanctity,” and advised: “Look not at the things that are seen.” Ware’s verdict: “he was much too pessimistic… within Orthodoxy I have in fact found warm friendship and compassionate love almost everywhere that I have gone, and I have certainly enjoyed the privilege of meeting living saints” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”; the “living saints” of that sentence include Elder Amphilochios of Patmos — see Elder Amphilochios and the Trees).

And he records a conversation that became, over the following sixty years, something like the charter of English-speaking Orthodoxy: “I remember a conversation that I had with two Greeks soon after my reception. ‘How hard you must find it,’ remarked the first, ‘to have left the Church of your fathers.’ But the second said to me, ‘You did not leave the Church of your fathers: you returned to it.’ He spoke rightly” (ibid.).

References

Ware, Kallistos. “Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 1–24. (The controlling primary source; all quotations of Ware are from this essay.)
Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (Identifies the officiant as Bishop Iakovos [Virvos] of Apamea and confirms Bright Friday, chrismation, and St Sophia’s Cathedral, London.)
ROCOR Studies. “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia and the Russian Church Abroad.” 6 March 2009. (Fr George Cheremeteff’s counsel; the ROCOR-side account of Ware’s relations with that jurisdiction.)
Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72. (The claim that Ware was a ROCA layman in 1963; recorded here as disputed.)
Khomiakov, Alexis. Letter to William Palmer, 28 November 1846. In W. J. Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years. London: Eastern Church Association, 1895, 70–71. (Quoted by Ware.)
Romanides, John. Article on the ecclesiology of St Ignatius of Antioch, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 7:1–2 (1961–62), 53–77. (Read by Ware in typescript in the 1950s; his “missing link.”)