The Congress of 1923 and What It Proposed

The “Pan-Orthodox Congress” convened by Patriarch Meletios IV (Metaxakis) at Constantinople from 10 May to 8 June 1923 proposed the Revised Julian calendar, together with a package of other reforms most of which were never received anywhere. This file reports what the Congress was, who was there and who was not, what it actually decided, and what canonical weight its decisions carry — accurately, and without the exaggeration the subject usually attracts.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What It Was, by Its Own Description

The assembly styled itself a Congress (Greek Synedrion), not a Synod and not a Council. That self-description is not a debating point; it is how the acts describe the body and how its convener described it. It met in Constantinople from 10 May to 8 June 1923 at the invitation of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Meletios IV (Metaxakis), who presided.

The acts and decisions have been translated into English and analysed in full, which puts this subject on a much better footing than the polemical literature on either side: Patrick Viscuso, A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress. An Analysis and Translation of Its Acts and Decisions (Berkeley: InterOrthodox Press, 2006). Any serious engagement with the Congress should begin there.

Who Was There

Represented: Constantinople, the Church of Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Cyprus.

Not represented: the ancient Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — three of the four senior sees of the East, all invited, none of which sent delegates. Meletios’ letter of invitation did not meet with a positive response from them.

Russia is the complicated case and deserves care. The Russian Church was in the middle of the Bolshevik assault: Patriarch Tikhon was under arrest, and the state-favoured Renovationist (“Living Church”) body was attempting to seize the church administration. Two Russian émigré hierarchs took part — Archbishop Anastassy (Gribanovsky) of Kishinev, then administering the Russian churches in the Constantinople district and later First Hierarch of ROCOR, and Archbishop Alexander (Nemolovsky), formerly of North America. They attended initially as personal guests of Meletios; the ROCOR Synod recognized them as delegates on 4 June 1923, and their mandate was afterwards disputed (“Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad at the 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress,” ROCOR Studies, rocorstudies.org, 18 June 2021).

[Disputed: accounts differ on how the Russian presence should be characterized. The ROCOR Studies account, drawing on the Synod’s records, describes the participation of Archbishops Anastassy and Alexander as émigré hierarchs of the Russian Church Abroad. Other accounts state that the Russian representation at the Congress came from the Renovationist body rather than from the Patriarchal Church (“Council of Constantinople (1923),” Wikipedia, used as a locator per METHODOLOGY §2.3). The two claims are not strictly incompatible — the Renovationists sought and obtained recognition from Constantinople in this period — but the sources do not agree on who spoke for the Russian Church, and this file does not resolve it.]

What It Proposed

The Congress produced a reform package, of which the calendar was one item.

The calendar. It adopted the scheme presented by Milutin Milanković, the Serbian astronomer attending as a technical delegate: retain the Julian Paschalion, but bring the fixed calendar into line with the sun by deleting thirteen days and adopting a more accurate leap rule. The Congress specified that the change take effect on 1 October 1923, which would be numbered 14 October. In practice the churches implemented it later and separately (see The Revised Julian Calendar and Its Reception).

The Congress also discussed a more radical option: determining Pascha astronomically, by observation of the equinox and full moon at the meridian of Jerusalem. It did not adopt it. That restraint matters and is noted again below.

The other proposals. These are routinely omitted from accounts of the Congress on both sides, and they are essential to assessing it:

permission for widowed priests and deacons to remarry;
permission for marriage after ordination;
minimum ages for ordination — 21 for deacons, 24 for priests, 30 for bishops;
relaxation of the rules on clerical dress and appearance;
adjustments to the fasting rules;
a message of support for Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow against the Renovationist schism.

The proposals on clerical marriage touch canonical matter of a different order from the calendar; the tradition on both points is firm (see Orthodoxy: Ordination and Clergy Discipline). They were not received by any Orthodox church.

The Objections Raised in the Room

The Congress was not unanimous, and the record of dissent is part of its history.

Archbishop Anastassy opposed the calendar change, arguing from the consequences for the Paschal cycle and from the weight of received practice, and he opposed the second marriage of clergy on canonical grounds. Archbishop Alexander likewise objected to clerical remarriage, though he signed the final resolutions (“Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad at the 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress,” rocorstudies.org).

Outside the room the reaction was sharper. Patriarch Photios of Alexandria condemned the Congress and its decisions. By July 1923 the ROCOR Synod had formally rejected them as uncanonical, recalled its representatives, and denied that the Congress possessed pan-Orthodox authority — a position ROCOR has held without variation since (see Orthodoxy: Calendar and Typikon in ROCOR).

Its Canonical Standing, Stated Accurately

Here the temptation on this side of the argument is to overstate, and the temptation should be refused. Four things are true and sufficient.

It was not an Ecumenical Council, and it never claimed to be. No one at the time asserted otherwise. To announce that the Congress “was not an Ecumenical Council” as though it were a discovery is to attack a claim nobody made.

It was not a properly constituted pan-Orthodox synod either. Three of the four ancient patriarchates were absent, and the Russian Church — by far the largest — was in no condition to be represented. A body missing Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Moscow is not the Orthodox episcopate assembled, whatever it calls itself. This is not a partisan judgment: the standard objection to describing the 1923 assembly as ecumenical or pan-Orthodox is precisely the absence of those churches.

Its authority was contested from the moment it rose, by Alexandria, by the Russian Church Abroad, and shortly afterwards by large bodies of clergy and laity in Greece.

But the churches that adopted the calendar did so by their own synodal acts, not by the Congress’s authority. The Church of Greece changed by decision of its own Holy Synod, notified by encyclical in March 1924; Romania, Cyprus, Alexandria, Antioch and Bulgaria each acted at their own times and by their own procedures. This matters for the argument in section 06: the case against the New Calendar cannot be won simply by discrediting the Congress, because the Congress is not what the New Calendar churches rest on. It can, however, be made that the recommendation of a contested congress is a thin warrant for altering a practice that had been common to the whole Orthodox world (see The Case for the Old Calendar).

There is one further observation that cuts genuinely both ways and belongs here rather than in either advocacy file. The same body’s recommendations on clerical remarriage and marriage after ordination were rejected everywhere as uncanonical. A body whose judgment was found wanting on those questions is not obviously a reliable guide on this one — that is the old-calendar inference. The reply is equally available: churches evidently exercised discernment, accepting one recommendation and refusing others, which is what a receiving church is supposed to do. Both inferences are fair and the file leaves them standing side by side.

On Meletios IV

Meletios (Metaxakis, 1871–1935) was among the most controversial hierarchs of the twentieth century. He was Metropolitan of Athens (1918–1920), Ecumenical Patriarch (1921–1923), and Patriarch of Alexandria (1926–1935) — an unusual sequence — and his tenure at Constantinople was brief, politically embattled, and marked by decisions of lasting consequence, including the reception of Orthodox jurisdictions in the diaspora and the recognition of Anglican orders in 1922.

Two things should be said, and this library says both.

His convening of the Congress and the manner of the calendar decision are fairly criticized, and ROCOR’s criticism of them is longstanding and on the record (see Orthodoxy: Calendar and Typikon in ROCOR).

And a great deal of the polemical literature about him — above all the widely repeated claim of Masonic membership — is asserted far more often than it is documented, and this collection does not rely on it. Whatever its truth, the calendar question does not turn on the biography of one hierarch, and an argument that needs it is weaker than one that does not.

References

Viscuso, Patrick, ed. and trans. A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress. An Analysis and Translation of Its Acts and Decisions. Berkeley: InterOrthodox Press, 2006.
“Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad at the 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress.” ROCOR Studies, rocorstudies.org, 18 June 2021.
“Council of Constantinople (1923).” Wikipedia (locator per METHODOLOGY §2.3).
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (On the twentieth-century calendar disputes.)