Repose, 1970

His community relates that Amphilochios foresaw his approaching death at Easter 1968, and that when he asked for more time to help his spiritual children the request was refused; he reposed on 16 April 1970, aged eighty. This file follows the close of his life and the veneration that immediately grew around his memory and tomb.

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

The Foreknowledge of Death

The sisterhood’s biography relates that Amphilochios received a foreknowledge of his approaching death. At Easter 1968, the account runs, he was given to understand that his end was near, with a period of preparation before him; and that he asked for more time — not for himself, but “to develop his spiritual children,” to complete the formation of those in his charge. To this request, the biography says, the Mother of God and St. John the Theologian appeared to him and answered that it was denied (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on the Easter 1968 foreknowledge and the vision; Sanidopoulos, “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010, following the sisterhood).

Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this is reported strictly as the community’s account of what the elder told them and of what they believed — the testimony of disciples about their father’s inner experience, pinned to its source and not certified as adjudicated fact (see Gentleness and Discernment; The Sources for His Life). What is worth noting, whatever one makes of the vision, is the shape the story gives his death: the elder’s last recorded desire is not for his own life but for more time to serve the souls entrusted to him — a fitting close for the confessor of the “religion of love.”

The Repose

Amphilochios reposed on 16 April 1970, aged about eighty, after an illness (the accounts give a bout of influenza in his final days) (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on his death; OrthodoxWiki, Amphilochios [Makris] of Patmos, giving 16 April 1970; Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018, on the dates 1889–1970). The date 16 April is secure and multiply attested, and it is the date on which he is now commemorated (see Glorification 2018).

The biography preserves an image from near the end that has become part of his memory: shortly before his death, in March 1970, word was brought to him that a woman he had helped — a formerly barren woman — had borne a son; and the dying elder “simply looked up to heaven and smiled” (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography, on the birth of March 1970 and the elder’s smile; see Gentleness and Discernment). Whatever the precise circumstances, the image the community chose to preserve is of an elder receiving, as his life closed, a last sign of the life-giving grace to which he had given his own life — and receiving it not with words but with a smile toward heaven.

He died where he had been born and had lived: on Patmos, the island of the Apocalypse, within the world of the monastery of St. John and the convent he had founded (see Athanasios Makris of Patmos). His nuns buried and mourned him, and the convent of the Annunciation became the guardian of his tomb as it was of his memory.

The Growth of Veneration

Veneration of Amphilochios did not wait for a formal glorification; it grew immediately and spontaneously around his tomb and his memory. The pattern is familiar in Orthodoxy, where the Church’s canonization typically ratifies a cult that has already arisen among the faithful rather than creating one. Amphilochios’s spiritual children — the nuns of his convents, the clergy and laity of the Dodecanese, his diaspora children, and eminent figures such as Kallistos Ware — kept his memory, sought his intercession, and spread his sayings, so that in the decades after 1970 his reputation grew steadily across the Greek world and beyond (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography and publications; Ware, “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity,” in The Inner Kingdom, SVS Press, 2000, itself a vehicle of that growing reputation).

This grassroots veneration was the ground on which the formal glorification of 2018 was built. The convent gathered and published his life and counsels; his tomb drew pilgrims; accounts of answered prayers and of his continued intercession circulated among his people. By the 2010s the cult had reached the point at which the Ecumenical Patriarchate — the Church of which Patmos is a part, being a Patriarchal and Stavropegic island — took up the question of his formal canonization, which it granted in 2018 (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Synodal Act, 29 August 2018; see Glorification 2018). The forty-eight years between his repose and his glorification are thus not a gap but a story: the steady deepening of a veneration that began at his tomb in 1970 and that the Church confirmed when the time was ripe.

See Also

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 Easter 1968 foreknowledge and the vision; the final illness; the birth of March 1970 and the elder’s smile; the growth of veneration.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Amphilochios (Makris) of Patmos.” (The repose on 16 April 1970.)
  • Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Synodal Act for the canonization of St. Amphilochios of Patmos, 29 August 2018. (The dates 1889–1970; the basis of the glorification.)
  • Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos (of Diokleia). “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity.” In The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (A vehicle of his growing reputation.)
  • Sanidopoulos, John (Mystagogy Resource Center). “Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos,” 2010. (Aggregator translation following the sisterhood; used to locate, not as terminal citation.)
  • Methodology reference: METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 (attestation of charismatic and visionary claims).