The Nuns and the Mission

From the Convent of the Annunciation on Patmos, Amphilochios’s spiritual daughters spread outward — founding daughter-houses on other Aegean islands, staffing the orphanage and charities he established on Rhodes after the war, and, through his spiritual children, reaching as far as the Orthodox mission in East Africa and the communities of the diaspora. This file traces that reach at the level the sources support.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Daughter-Houses

Amphilochios’s monastic founding did not remain a single convent. From the mother-house of the Annunciation on Patmos, and from his ministry across the Dodecanese, several women’s communities trace their origin to him. Accounts associated with the Patmos monastery attribute to him the founding of women’s monasteries beyond the Annunciation itself — including the Eleousa (“the Merciful”) on the island of Kalymnos, a monastery of the Annunciation on Ikaria, and St. Minas on Aegina (accounts of the Patmos monastery of the Annunciation and its history, on the several women’s communities founded by the elder; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, following such accounts). [Disputed: the precise number and the degree of the elder’s founding role in each daughter-house. The sisterhood-based accounts credit him with founding several women’s monasteries in the Dodecanese and neighbouring islands (the Annunciation on Patmos, the Eleousa on Kalymnos, the Annunciation on Ikaria, St. Minas on Aegina); shorter summaries mention only the Patmos convent. The founding of a network of women’s communities under his direction is well attested in outline; the exact roster and his role in each rests on the community’s own histories and is reported as such.]

The pattern is significant. Amphilochios was not merely the confessor of a region but the organizer of a small monastic movement — a network of women’s houses, formed from among his spiritual daughters, bound to the mother-house on Patmos and animated by his spirit. This is the institutional form of his “religion of love”: not only a teaching but a set of living communities carrying it on (see Founding the Evangelismos Convent; The Gospel of Love and Joy).

The Charities: The Orphanage of Rhodes

The most concrete extension of the sisterhood’s work was charitable. After the liberation of the Dodecanese, in 1947, Amphilochios was given the opportunity to help the orphans of Rhodes, and he organized a group of his nuns — the sources name the abbess who led them (Abbess Eustochia / Evstokia) — to establish on Rhodes an orphanage together with related institutions: a home for pregnant women in need, and, in some accounts, a nursery school and primary school (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on the Rhodes orphanage of 1947 and the nuns who staffed it; OrthodoxWiki, following the sisterhood, on the orphanage, the maternity home, and the schools). The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s summary at his canonization names his responsibility for “orphanages and various charitable institutions” as a mark of his life (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018).

This charitable turn is characteristic. The nuns of the Annunciation were not enclosed contemplatives only; under their founder’s direction they went out to the orphaned, the poor, and the vulnerable, embodying the double commandment — love of God and love of neighbour — that stood at the center of his teaching (see The Gospel of Love and Joy). The care of orphans in particular, in an Aegean impoverished by war and occupation, was among the most needed works of mercy of the age.

The Missionary Reach: East Africa

The reach of Amphilochios’s spiritual influence extended, through his spiritual children, as far as the Orthodox mission in East Africa. The pioneer of the modern Greek Orthodox mission to sub-Saharan Africa, Fr. Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos, was among the elder’s spiritual children, and it was under Amphilochios’s encouragement and blessing that he undertook the mission that took him, already an elderly man, to Kampala, Uganda in 1960, and from there to Kenya, Tanzania, and the Congo, where he founded churches, catechetical schools, and educational institutions (Orthodox Missionary Fraternity [Porefthentes] and related mission literature, on Papasarantopoulos’s connection to Elder Amphilochios and the dates of his African mission). Others of the elder’s circle — including the future Metropolitan Amphilochios (Tsoukos), named for the Patmian elder — likewise laboured in the African mission (Orthodox mission literature, on Metropolitan Amphilochios Tsoukos and the African mission).

[Disputed: the precise nature and extent of Amphilochios of Patmos’s personal role in the African mission. That Fr. Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos was his spiritual child and undertook the East African mission with his encouragement is attested in the mission literature associated with the Orthodox Missionary Fraternity; some devotional accounts amplify this into a direct personal role for the Patmian elder in the African churches, which the sober record does not support. What can be said is that the elder of Patmos was the spiritual father of one of the founders of the modern African Orthodox mission, and that his influence reached Africa through his children rather than through his own travels — he himself scarcely left Patmos and the Dodecanese. This is reported at that level per METHODOLOGY §3.5.]

The significance is real even when stated conservatively. Amphilochios’s “religion of love,” his universal love that reckoned “the Turk, the black, the white” all equally the image of God (see Gentleness and Discernment), was not an abstraction: it bore fruit in a missionary movement that carried Orthodox Christianity to East Africa, and the elder who preached that love was the spiritual father of the man who planted it there. In this the confessor of a single small island became, at one remove, a father of the African Church.

The Diaspora

Amphilochios’s influence reached the Western diaspora as well. His spiritual children included Orthodox living in Europe and America, to whom he gave a characteristically wise and irenic counsel: “do not be either defensive or aggressive; simply be yourself” — advice for living the Orthodox faith among the heterodox without either a fortress mentality or a proselytizing aggression (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his counsel to those in the diaspora; Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood). The most eminent of his diaspora children was the English convert and Oxford theologian who became Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia — through whose writings the elder’s sayings reached readers across the English-speaking world (see Gentleness and Discernment; The Confessor of Souls).

A Small Island, a Wide Reach

The picture that emerges is of a man who spent almost his whole life on one small island and yet whose influence radiated across the Orthodox world. From Patmos he founded a network of women’s monasteries in the Dodecanese; from those communities he sent nuns to care for the orphans of Rhodes; through his spiritual children he touched the mission to East Africa and the life of the diaspora in Europe and America. The instrument in each case was personal — a spiritual son sent out, a group of nuns organized, a word of counsel given — and the animating principle was always the same: the love that he believed to be the whole of the Gospel (see The Gospel of Love and Joy; on the sober assessment of this reach, see Legacy and Assessment).

References

The Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation (Evangelismos), Patmos. Biography and counsels of the Elder Amphilochios Makris. Patmos: Holy Monastery of the Annunciation. (The daughter-houses; the Rhodes orphanage of 1947 and Abbess Eustochia; his counsel to the diaspora.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The women’s monasteries founded by the elder; the orphanage, maternity home, and schools on Rhodes.)
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal Act for the canonization of St. Amphilochios of Patmos, 29 August 2018. (His responsibility for orphanages and charitable institutions.)
Orthodox Missionary Fraternity (Porefthentes) and related mission literature. On Fr. Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos and Metropolitan Amphilochios (Tsoukos) and the East African mission’s connection to Elder Amphilochios of Patmos.
Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010; “Saint Amphilochios Makris Resource Page,” 2019. (Aggregator translations following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)