The Old Calendarist Separations

When the Church of Greece changed its calendar in March 1924, a substantial body of clergy, monks, and laity refused, and by 1935 the refusal had become a separation with bishops of its own. This file records what happened in Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria, and states plainly where this library stands: it keeps the old calendar and does not follow those who broke communion over it. The people involved are treated as what most of them were — serious Christians acting from conviction, some of whom suffered for it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

How to Read This File

Three commitments govern it.

Factual, not polemical. The internal disputes of bodies outside communion are reported only so far as is needed to say where this library stands. This file does not adjudicate between the Old Calendarist synods, does not assess their sacramental standing, and does not use their fragmentation as a debating point against the old calendar itself.

Charitable. Many of those who separated were people of prayer who believed they were defending the Church, and a number of them were treated badly by the state and by their own hierarchy. That belongs in the record.

Honest about ROCOR’s own part. The Russian Church Abroad’s relations with these bodies were sympathetic at some periods and distant at others, and it participated in consecrations for them. That is part of ROCOR’s history and this file does not omit it.

Greece

1924 and the immediate refusal

The Holy Synod of the Church of Greece adopted the Revised Julian calendar by encyclical of March 1924: 10 March 1924 was kept as 23 March 1924. The change was made with the support of the government of the day, and was announced rather than debated in the parishes.

Opposition was immediate and came chiefly from below — from parish clergy, from lay confraternities, and above all from zealot monks of Mount Athos who travelled through Greece preaching against the change and serving as confessors to those who refused it. The Holy Mountain itself, though under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, retained the Julian calendar and continues to keep it (see Mount Athos). Communities of the faithful began organizing to obtain services on the old calendar, and by the mid-1920s an association of Old Calendarists existed with priests serving it.

The coercion should be recorded. The state and the ecclesiastical authorities of the period responded to the resistance with measures that included the suspension and defrocking of priests, the closure and in some cases the desecration of chapels, arrests, and the forcible interruption of services. Sources on both sides differ over the extent and severity, and Old Calendarist accounts naturally emphasize it while official accounts minimize it; but that repression occurred is not in dispute. It shaped what followed. A movement that begins as liturgical dissent and is met with police measures is very likely to end as a separate church, and this one did.

1935: bishops

In 1935 three metropolitans of the Church of Greece publicly joined the Old Calendarists and declared the state Church’s hierarchy to be in schism: Germanos (Mavromatis) of Demetrias, Chrysostomos (Kavouridis), formerly of Florina, and Chrysostomos (Demetriou) of Zakynthos. Between 23 and 26 April 1935 they consecrated four new bishops.

The movement’s leadership then thinned almost at once. Chrysostomos of Zakynthos returned to the Church of Greece shortly after the consecrations, as did two of the four newly consecrated bishops. Four remained: Chrysostomos of Florina, Germanos of Demetrias, Germanos of the Cyclades, and Matthew (Karpathakis) of Bresthena. Chrysostomos of Florina emerged as the movement’s leader.

1937: the split that was not about the calendar

Two years later the Old Calendarists divided among themselves, and the ground of the division is the most important fact in this whole history.

The question was not whether to keep the Julian calendar — all parties did — but what the New Calendar churches now were. Chrysostomos of Florina held that the change had placed the Church of Greece in a potential schism, and declined to declare its mysteries void; on his view New Calendar clergy who repented retained their orders and could be received by oikonomia. Bishop Matthew of Bresthena held that the New Calendar hierarchy was graceless and its mysteries empty, so that anyone coming from it required (re)ordination.

Matthew and those with him separated in 1937. The two currents — conventionally the Florinites and the Matthewites — have remained distinct in substance ever since, through many later reorganizations.

The point to take from this is not that the Old Calendarists were quarrelsome. It is that the fault line running through the movement from its third year was ecclesiological: whether a liturgical practice determines the boundaries of the Church. That is precisely the question treated at Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma, and the movement divided over it because it is the real question. The calendar was the occasion; the doctrine of the Church was the issue.

After 1937

The subsequent history is one of repeated division, and this file gives only its outline.

The Matthewite line perpetuated its episcopate in 1948 by consecrations in which Bishop Matthew acted without a second consecrating bishop — a canonical irregularity acknowledged even by sympathetic accounts, and one that later attempts at regularization were designed to remedy.

Chrysostomos of Florina died in 1955, leaving the Florinite body without bishops. Its episcopate was restored with the participation of hierarchs of the Russian Church Abroad: Bishop Akakios (Pappas) was consecrated at Detroit in 1960 with ROCOR participation, and further consecrations followed in Greece in 1962 involving Archbishop Leonty (Filippovich) of Chile. [Disputed: accounts differ on the identity of the consecrating hierarchs at Detroit in 1960 and on how far the ROCOR Synod as such authorized the act as against individual bishops acting on their own responsibility; Old Calendarist, ROCOR, and Greek Church accounts each give the events differently, and the primary documentation is partisan on all sides. What is not disputed is that ROCOR bishops took part.] ROCOR’s relations with the Greek Old Calendarist synods thereafter were intermittent and are described in the repository’s own account as complex (see Orthodoxy: Calendar and Typikon in ROCOR; Orthodoxy: Jurisdictional Disputes).

Further separations followed in the 1970s and 1980s, producing several rival synods, among them the body gathered around Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, whose “Holy Synod in Resistance” (organized in the mid-1980s) taught that the New Calendar churches were ailing but not graceless — a mediating ecclesiology that other Old Calendarist synods rejected. In 2014 a substantial reunion produced the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece under Archbishop Kallinikos, which absorbed the Cyprianite synod and entered into union with several Russian True Orthodox bodies.

Those Russian bodies, and the Cyprianite synod’s role in providing consecrations for the group formed around Bishop Agafangel after 2007, are treated in the repository’s own file on the subject, with which this account agrees and which it does not duplicate (see Orthodoxy: Post-2007 “ROCOR” Splinter Groups).

Romania and Bulgaria

Romania adopted the Revised Julian calendar in 1924 and produced its own Old Calendarist body, centred on the Slatioara monastery in Moldavia and now organized as an Old Calendar Romanian Orthodox metropolia. It too was subject to state and ecclesiastical repression in its early decades, and it too has not been received into communion by any canonical Orthodox church.

Bulgaria changed later — by Holy Synod decision of July 1968, effective 20 December 1968 — and the Old Calendar Bulgarian Orthodox Church formed in consequence. Its subsequent history includes prolonged litigation over legal recognition, which reached the European Court of Human Rights (Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar Church and Others v. Bulgaria, application no. 56751/13) — a reminder that these disputes have had civil as well as ecclesiastical consequences, and that the parties to them have at times had real grievances about their treatment by states.

Where This Library Stands

Stated once, plainly, and without qualification.

This library keeps the old calendar. It does not follow those who broke communion over it.

The reason is the one given in the companion file. The Church has never made the calendar a boundary of herself. No council defined one; no canon prescribes one; communion has never been conditioned on one. To separate from the canonical churches over a matter the Church has not made a matter of separation is not a stricter obedience but a different act altogether — it substitutes a private judgment for the Church’s own, on the very question of where the Church is.

And the practical demonstration stands: ROCOR keeps the Julian calendar without compromise and remains in the communion of the Orthodox churches. The old calendar can be held, argued for, and lived, without leaving. There is therefore no necessity in the separations, and a position that has an alternative is a choice (see Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma).

What Charity Requires

Several things, and this file means all of them.

That the great majority of those who refused the change in 1924 did so out of conviction, not faction, and that many of them were poor parish priests and monks with nothing to gain.

That the repression they met was real, and that a hierarchy which answers liturgical dissent with the police should not be surprised at what follows. Some responsibility for the separations lies with those who made refusal costly.

That among the Old Calendarists have been men of prayer and ascetic seriousness, and that this library does not describe them with contempt.

That the fragmentation of the movement is a tragedy rather than an entertainment, and is not to be recited as evidence against people who are not here to answer.

And that a canonical Orthodox Christian may not treat the calendar as a mark of the Church in one direction any more than in the other. The judgment above concerns a decision to separate. It is not a judgment about the souls of those who made it, which is not this library’s to make.

See Also

References

  • Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar Church and Others v. Bulgaria. European Court of Human Rights, application no. 56751/13.
  • “Old Calendarists”; “Greek Old Calendarists.” OrthodoxWiki and Wikipedia (used as locators per METHODOLOGY §2.3).
  • “The Old Calendar Orthodox Churches.” Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), cnewa.org.
  • Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (On the Greek calendar schism.)
  • Act of Canonical Communion of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia with the Moscow Patriarchate. 17 May 2007. synod.com.