Section 02: Illness and Return to the World

The hinge of St. Porphyrios’s life: the severe pleurisy that broke the young monk’s health and compelled his elders to send him off the Holy Mountain he loved; his recovery near his native Evia; his ordination — as deacon and then priest, with the new name Porphyrios — while still a very young man; and his swift emergence, in the parishes and villages of Evia, as a confessor of rare gift, the “knower of souls” whose long hours in the confessional and whose pastoral mercy already prefigured the elder he would become.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Contents

File Topic
Forced Back from Athos The pleurisy that struck the young monk Nikitas; the elders’ decision to send him from Kavsokalyvia for his life; the return toward Evia and the Monastery of St. Charalampos at Lefkon; the providential meeting with Archbishop Porphyrios III of Sinai; the ordination as deacon and priest (1927) and the new name Porphyrios; his grief at leaving the Mountain
The Young Confessor His appointment as a confessor while still very young; the hours-long confessions; the mercy of St. Basil’s principle over the rigorist letter; the gift of discernment turned toward guiding penitents to genuine self-knowledge and repentance; his elevation to Archimandrite (1938); the “knower of souls” emerging in the villages of Evia

How to Use

  • Read Forced Back from Athos for the catastrophe and the providence: how the loss of his Athonite life became the door to his priesthood and to a hidden ministry in the world.
  • Read The Young Confessor for the first flowering of his pastoral charism — the confessional as the place where his gift of insight became a gift of mercy.
  • The long chaplaincy in Athens to which this all led is treated in Section 03: The Priest at the Polyclinic.

Cross-References