Canonization 2013

The formal glorification of St. Porphyrios: the decision of the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, under Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, on November 27, 2013, to inscribe the beloved elder among the saints of the Orthodox Church, fixing his feast on December 2 — the anniversary of his repose. The file sets out the synodal act and its stated criterion (the witness of “the conscience of the whole Church”), the swift spread of his veneration and hymnography, and the relation of his glorification to that of his great contemporary St. Paisios two years later — both elders raised to the altars by the same Patriarchate within a remarkable two-year span.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

The Synodal Act (November 27, 2013)

On November 27, 2013, the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, presided over by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, decided the formal inscription of Elder Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia in the List of Saints of the Orthodox Church (Two Metropolitans on the Canonization of Saint Porphyrios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Canonization of Two New Saints by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, omhksea.org; Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia, Wikipedia). The decision was announced the following day. By the same act his feast day was established as December 2, the day of his repose in 1991 (johnsanidopoulos.com; Memory of Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (2 December), orthodoxtimes.com).

[Disputed: the synodal decision is most precisely dated to November 27, 2013, with the announcement on November 28 (so Sanidopoulos’s contemporaneous report and the OMHKSEA notice). Some summaries round the date or give the announcement date; this collection follows November 27, 2013, as the date of the synodal act, with the feast on December 2.]

The glorification by the Ecumenical Patriarchate — under which Mount Athos falls — was especially fitting for an Athonite saint, and it carried his veneration across the whole Orthodox world. (For the jurisdictional context of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece, see Greece, Bulgaria and Others.)

The Criterion: The Conscience of the Whole Church

The hierarchs who explained the decision were careful to state its ground, and the ground is illuminating. According to Metropolitan Meliton of Philadelphia, a member of the Patriarchate’s Canonical Committee, “the main criterion for the canonization of Elder Porphyrios was the conscience of the entire Church throughout the Orthodox world” (Metropolitan Meliton of Philadelphia, quoted in johnsanidopoulos.com). This is the classic Orthodox understanding of glorification: the Church does not make a saint but recognizes one whom God has already glorified, reading the settled conviction (phronema, conscience) of the faithful — a conviction that, in St. Porphyrios’s case, had already spread through the Orthodox world in the two decades since his repose. Metropolitan Meliton noted that St. Porphyrios was “truly a great Saint” who had helped many through his gifts, and that already more than fifty books documented his life (johnsanidopoulos.com).

Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou (Cyprus) spoke of the spiritual significance of the glorification for a time of crisis, describing the Church as offering “the eternal fire of our venerable Father Porphyrios” to a world in spiritual need (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, quoted in johnsanidopoulos.com). The point in both is the same: the glorification ratified what the faithful already knew.

The Spread of His Veneration and Hymnography

Veneration of St. Porphyrios spread with remarkable speed after 2013, building on the popular devotion that had already grown around him. Churches and chapels were dedicated to him; his icon — the gentle, bearded elder, often shown with a radiant or loving expression — multiplied across the Orthodox world; and liturgical services were composed for his feast, including an Akathist hymn and the proper hymnography (apolytikion, kontakion) for December 2 (the Akathist Hymn to Saint Porphyrios, Elder of Kavsokalyvia, akathisthymns.wordpress.com; Memory of Saint Porphyrios, orthodoxtimes.com). Relics and places associated with him — the Hut of St. George at Kavsokalyvia, the Monastery of the Transfiguration at Milesi, the Chapel of St. Gerasimos at the Athens Polyclinic — became sites of pilgrimage. The “saint of Omonia,” hidden for most of his life, became within a generation one of the most widely venerated of modern Orthodox saints.

Glorified Alongside His Contemporary

St. Porphyrios’s glorification belongs to a striking moment in the recent life of the Church: within a span of just over two years, the Ecumenical Patriarchate raised to the altars the two greatest Greek elders of the late twentieth century. St. Porphyrios was glorified on November 27, 2013; St. Paisios of Mount Athos (1924–1994), his younger contemporary and fellow Athonite, was glorified by the same Patriarchate on January 13, 2015 (see the sibling collection St. Paisios of Mount Athos). The two elders are constantly compared and often venerated together as the twin lights of modern Athonite holiness — though, as the next file discusses, their gifts and emphases differed in instructive ways (see The Books and the Influence). That the Church recognized both within so short a time is itself a testimony to the extraordinary flowering of Athonite sanctity in the twentieth century, and to the conviction of the faithful that in these two hidden monks God had given the modern world saints of the first rank.

Recognition, Not Creation: What Glorification Means

For readers unfamiliar with Orthodox practice, it is worth being precise about what happened in 2013, because the word “canonization” can mislead by analogy with other traditions. In Orthodox theology the Church does not, by an act of judgment, make someone a saint or promote them to sainthood. God alone sanctifies; God alone glorifies. What the Church does, in an act of glorification (Greek anakēryxis, “proclamation,” or the entry into the diptychs and the saints’ calendar), is recognize and proclaim what God has already done — to confirm, by the authority of the Church, that a particular departed Christian is among the saints in heaven, and to authorize their public veneration: the painting of icons, the dedication of churches, the composition of services, the keeping of a feast.

This is exactly what Metropolitan Meliton meant in naming the criterion as “the conscience of the entire Church” (see above). The Church reads the settled conviction of the faithful — a conviction itself understood as guided by the Holy Spirit and confirmed by the saint’s life, the testimony to their holiness, and often by miracles and the fragrance of grace surrounding their memory — and gives it official voice. In St. Porphyrios’s case that conviction had become, in the twenty-two years since his repose, overwhelming and pan-Orthodox; the synodal act of 2013 ratified it. The saint had not changed; what changed was that the Church now openly numbered him among those whose intercession may be sought and whose memory is liturgically kept. Glorification is the Church catching up, in her formal acts, to what God and the faithful already knew.

A Saint for the Modern World

The glorification of St. Porphyrios carried a particular significance noted by many at the time: here was a saint emphatically of the modern world — a man of the twentieth century who had lived not in a remote desert but in a hospital in the middle of a great city, who knew the noise and pressure of modern life, who was open to science and learning, and whose luminous teaching of love, beauty, and joy spoke directly to the anxieties of contemporary people. His canonization was received as the Church’s affirmation that holiness is fully possible in the conditions of modern urban life — that one can, as the title of one collection of his life puts it, “become a saint anywhere” (obitel-minsk.org). The hidden chaplain of Omonia became, in his glorification, a sign that the love of Christ he had taught was not a relic of an older world but a living possibility for this one.

The Reach of the Veneration

The years since 2013 have seen the veneration of St. Porphyrios spread far beyond Greece and the Greek-speaking diaspora. His icon and his book have traveled wherever the contemporary Orthodox renewal has reached — into the Slavic Churches, into the convert communities of Western Europe and North America, into Africa and beyond — and his name is now among the first that a newcomer to Orthodox spirituality is likely to encounter. Parishes far from the Aegean keep his feast on December 2; children are baptized with his name; his sayings are quoted from pulpits and printed on the inside covers of countless editions. The hidden chaplain of Omonia, who for most of his life was known to only a few, has become in death one of the most universally beloved saints of the modern Orthodox world — venerated not as a remote ancient figure but as a recent father, a man of the twentieth century whose photograph survives, whose voice was recorded, and whose spiritual children are in many cases still living. This nearness is part of his power: he is a saint one can almost reach out and touch, a witness that the holiness of the ancient Church is not a thing of the past but a living and present possibility, attested in a man who died within living memory.

References

Two Metropolitans on the Canonization of Saint Porphyrios. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now), December 2013. The synodal decision of November 27, 2013, under Patriarch Bartholomew; the criterion of “the conscience of the entire Church”; the comments of Metropolitan Meliton of Philadelphia and Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou; feast on December 2.
Canonization of Two New Saints by the Ecumenical Patriarchate. omhksea.org. The 2013 synodal act inscribing Elder Porphyrios among the saints.
Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia. Wikipedia. Glorification November 27, 2013, by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate; feast December 2.
Memory of Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (2 December). orthodoxtimes.com. The feast and the spread of his veneration.
Akathist Hymn to Saint Porphyrios, Elder of Kavsokalyvia. akathisthymns.wordpress.com. The hymnography composed for his feast.
The Life and Words of Venerable Porphyrios Kavsokalivite (“You Can Become a Saint Anywhere”). obitel-minsk.org. On his significance as a saint of the modern world.