The Glorification of St. Nektarios (20 April 1961)

The four decades of popular veneration that built between the saint’s death in 1920 and his official glorification; the Patriarchal and Synodal Act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on 20 April 1961, under Patriarch Athenagoras I, by which Nektarios Kephalas was formally numbered among the saints; and the 1998 decision of the Patriarchate of Alexandria formally restoring his ecclesiastical order — the institutional close of the century’s most public ecclesiastical injustice.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

When Nektarios Kephalas was buried at the Holy Trinity Convent on Aegina in November 1920, the institutional Church had not yet spoken on his behalf and would not do so for another forty-one years. What filled the interval was the testimony of the people. Within months of his burial, accounts of healings at his grave were circulating in Aegina and in Athens; within a few years, pilgrims were crossing the Saronic Gulf specifically to pray at the convent (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html; A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com).

The pattern of popular veneration that emerged in Greece during the 1920s and 1930s is characteristic of the way Orthodox sanctity is recognized before formal glorification: it runs ahead of institution, carried by the laity and by the monastic communities closest to the saint. The nuns of the Holy Trinity Convent were the first and most consistent witnesses — they had known him, tended him in his last illness, and received his body. Their testimony about the fragrance of the relics and the condition of the grave when it was later opened formed the nucleus around which a wider tradition grew (Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina, agiosnektarios-monastery.gr; see The Repose, 1920 for the relic accounts).

The Stream of Reported Miracles

By the 1930s and 1940s, Nektarios had become one of the most invoked saints in Greece, despite — or perhaps partly because of — his lack of official status. The reported miracles associated with his intercession during these decades range across the full spectrum of what the hagiographical tradition records: healings of cancers (the irony of his dying of a cancer of the prostate becoming a noted feature of the accounts, as healings of cancer were among the most frequently reported), recoveries from conditions that physicians had declared hopeless, and deliverances from paralysis — the last echoing the healing of the paralytic in the hospital ward at the moment of his death (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; “Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/98838.html).

These accounts are presented here as attested tradition — reported in the Lives, in the convent’s testimony, and in devotional literature — rather than as clinically verified cures. The Orthodox Church’s process of glorification does not require medical verification in the Roman Catholic mode; what it weighs is the consistency and breadth of reported wonders and the character of holiness attested in the candidate’s life. Both, in the case of Nektarios, had accumulated substantially by the mid-twentieth century.

The earliest sustained written treatment of these accounts appears in Titos Matthaiakis’s biography Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas (Athens, 1955), written within living memory of the saint and drawing on testimony from the Aegina community and from individuals who claimed healing through his intercession (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955, cited via Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com). The Matthaiakis biography is the documentary anchor for the tradition’s claims about the pre-glorification period; later works reproduce and extend its testimony.

The Question of Ecclesiastical Status Before 1961

One structural peculiarity of Nektarios’s case is that for the four decades between his death and his glorification, he was venerated by the faithful without any formal ecclesiastical sanction — and under an ecclesiastical cloud that had never been officially lifted. The Patriarchate of Alexandria had removed him from his position as Metropolitan of Pentapolis in 1890 on the basis of accusations that were almost certainly fabricated, and had issued him a letter of dismissal that left his standing ambiguous at best (see The Calumny and Expulsion). That injustice was formally addressed — but only partially — by his transfer to the Church of Greece and his appointment to the Rizareios School in the years that followed; it was never explicitly reversed by Alexandria until 1998.

This means that popular veneration of Nektarios before 1961 was veneration of a man who had been, in the judgment of one Patriarchate, dismissed under a disciplinary cloud. The fact that the people venerated him regardless, and that the Ecumenical Patriarchate ultimately glorified him, is itself a comment on the limits of institutional judgment and the resilience of the people’s instinct for holiness.

The Glorification: 20 April 1961

The official act of glorification was performed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on 20 April 1961, under Patriarch Athenagoras I (Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia, cross-checked against OrthoChristian.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). The act took the form of a Patriarchal and Synodal Act — a formal conciliar decision of the Patriarch together with the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which is the standard instrument of glorification in the Constantinople tradition.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s jurisdiction to glorify Nektarios requires a brief note. By 1961, Nektarios had spent most of his active ministry in the Church of Greece (as director of the Rizareios School, 1894–1908) and had died as a bishop in retirement on Greek soil. The Church of Greece might have been expected to initiate the glorification. That the Ecumenical Patriarchate acted may reflect both Constantinople’s traditional role as the locus of pan-Orthodox glorifications and the particular prominence of Nektarios’s veneration, which had by 1961 extended well beyond Greece’s borders (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The reading of the synodal act on 20 April 1961 formally inscribed Nektarios Kephalas in the diptychs of the saints. His liturgical feast was fixed on 9 November — the day after his repose (8 November), following the standard practice by which the date of death becomes the feast day in the Orthodox calendar (Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). The act recognized the witness of the people, the testimony of the convent, and the reported miracles as the grounds of the glorification — the Church confirming what the faithful had already recognized.

Patriarch Athenagoras I and the Context of 1961

Patriarch Athenagoras I (Spyrou, 1886–1972), who presided over the glorification, was one of the dominant figures of twentieth-century Orthodox ecclesiology — the patriarch who would conduct the celebrated lifting of the mutual anathemas between Rome and Constantinople in 1964 and who embodied the ecumenical thrust of mid-century Orthodoxy. The glorification of Nektarios in 1961 sits within a broader moment of institutional consolidation in the Greek Orthodox world: a period in which several figures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose sanctity had long been recognized by the people, received formal Patriarchal confirmation.

Nektarios was not the only saint glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in this period, but he rapidly became one of the most widely venerated. Within years of the 1961 glorification, his icon was standard in Greek Orthodox churches throughout the diaspora, and the stream of pilgrimages to the Holy Trinity Convent on Aegina intensified markedly.

The Relics at the Holy Trinity Convent

At the time of his glorification and in the years that followed, the saint’s relics were at the Holy Trinity Convent on Aegina — the community he had founded and where he had been buried in 1920. The skull (head) is recorded as the principal relic preserved at the convent and venerated by pilgrims; the translation of the remaining bones had been completed by the time of glorification or in the period surrounding it (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina, agiosnektarios-monastery.gr).

[Disputed: The precise year of the final translation of the bones is not uniformly given in the sources consulted. Sanidopoulos (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com) discusses the translation without a specific year; the Holy Trinity Monastery account (agiosnektarios-monastery.gr) describes the state of the relics at translation without pinning a date; and secondary sources give varying indications. The glorification in 1961 would have given the natural occasion for a solemn translation, but this cannot be confirmed from the sources at hand.]

The skull is venerated as a primary relic and is present at the convent for the veneration of pilgrims who come on 9 November, his feast day, and throughout the year. The convent itself — the community he founded — thus serves simultaneously as the site of his memory, the custodian of his relics, and the living community of prayer that bears his name forward (see Founding Holy Trinity).

The 1998 Decision: Alexandria Closes the Account

The formal glorification of 1961 established Nektarios among the saints of the Church but left one wound unaddressed: the 1890 dismissal by the Patriarchate of Alexandria, the act by which his metropolitan career had been ended, had still never been officially retracted. For over a century, the injustice had been acknowledged in the popular tradition and in hagiography, but the institution that had committed it had not formally confessed it.

This changed on 15 September 1998, when the Patriarchate of Alexandria, under Patriarch Petros VII (Papapetrou), issued a formal decision of the Holy Synod titled Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria (Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, 15 September 1998, orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml). The decision:

  1. Formally restored the ecclesiastical order of Metropolitan Nektarios of Pentapolis — recognizing that his dismissal in 1890 had been unjust and that his standing as a metropolitan of the Orthodox Church had been unlawfully compromised.
  2. Asked forgiveness — on behalf of the Patriarchate of Alexandria — for the wrong done to him.

The decision is remarkable as an institutional act of repentance: a Patriarchate formally asking pardon from one of its own victims, nearly a century after the injury and nearly eighty years after his death. It closed, at least institutionally, the longest-running ecclesiastical injustice associated with a saint of the modern Greek Church.

The 1998 decision also implicitly vindicated the people’s judgment, and the judgment of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1961, against the original accusers. The Patriarchate of Alexandria’s act of restoration and repentance is the formal terminus of the story that began with the slanders of 1890 (see The Calumny and Expulsion).

The Widening Veneration After 1961

In the decades following his glorification, Nektarios became one of the most broadly invoked saints in global Orthodoxy, not merely in Greece. Several factors contributed to this. His biography contains the pattern that resonates most deeply in the modern Orthodox imagination: a man who suffered institutional injustice without bitterness, who was vindicated posthumously, and whose intercession is reported to be particularly powerful in the healing of cancer — the disease that took him — and other grave illnesses. The combination of innocence, suffering, silence, and posthumous power is the classic pattern of the wonderworking saint, and Nektarios embodies it with unusual clarity.

His veneration extends through the Greek diaspora in Australia, the United States, and Western Europe; to Antiochian, Serbian, and Russian communities who encountered his icon in the second half of the twentieth century; and to converts to Orthodoxy for whom he represents the accessibility of modern sanctity — a saint who died in 1920, in a hospital, of a recognizably modern disease (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com). The trajectory of that widening veneration is treated in its own place (see The Modern Veneration).

See Also

References

  • Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/50001.html). The principal comprehensive English Life; covers the pre-glorification veneration, the 1961 glorification, and the relics.
  • Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. Mystagogy Resource Center, johnsanidopoulos.com. Covers the growth of popular veneration, the reported miracles, and the glorification.
  • “Do you want to see an angel?” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/98838.html). Extended hagiographical account covering miracles in the decades before glorification.
  • Matthaiakis, Titos. Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Venerable Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. The earliest book-length biography, written within living memory; the primary documentary source for the pre-glorification miracle tradition.
  • Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria (15 September 1998). Available: orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml. The formal act restoring Nektarios’s ecclesiastical order and asking forgiveness — the primary source for the 1998 Petros VII decision.
  • Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina. Official website: agiosnektarios-monastery.gr. The convent’s account of the saint’s burial, relics, and ongoing veneration.
  • Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia. Used for cross-checking dates: repose 8 November 1920; glorification 20 April 1961; Patriarch Athenagoras I; feast 9 November. Not cited as terminal authority.
  • METHODOLOGY.md (this repository). Section 3.5: hagiographical claims pinned to earliest written attestation; miracle accounts reported as what the sources attest, with the source named. See ../../METHODOLOGY.md.