(RNS/ENI) A group of Orthodox clergy in Greece, led by three senior archbishops, have published a manifesto pledging to resist all ecumenical ties with Roman Catholics and Protestants.
“The only way our communion with heretics can be restored is if they renounce their fallacy and repent,” the group said in a “Confession of Faith against Ecumenism” that they circulated recently.
“The Orthodox church is not merely the true church; she is the only church. She alone has remained faithful to the Gospel, the synods and the fathers, and consequently she alone represents the true catholic church of Christ,” says the document.
The signatories say they wish to preserve “irremovably and without alteration” the Orthodox faith that the early church had “demarcated and entrenched,” and to shun communication “with those who innovate on matters of the faith”.
The list of clerics backing the manifesto is said to include six metropolitans, as well as 49 archimandrites (who oversee monasteries), 22 hieromonks (priests or monks), and 30 nuns and abbesses, as well as many other priests and church elders.
“This pan-heresy of ecumenism adopts and legalizes all heresies as `churches,’ and insults the dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” says the group. “All boundaries the fathers set have been torn down; there is no longer a dividing line between heresy and church, between truth and fallacy.”
The document says that the Catholic papacy has become the “womb of heresies and fallacies” by promoting “dogmatic minimalism” and causing “moral deviations such as homosexuality and pedophilia among clergymen”.
The statement says even greater criticisms should be directed at Protestantism, which has “inherited many heresies but also added many more” by rejecting tradition, the veneration of saints, monasticism and sacraments, and tolerating women priests and same-sex marriages.
A member of the Greek church’s Synodical Committee for Inter-Orthodox and Inter-Christian Relations told Ecumenical News International that church leaders had not “rejected or accepted” the confession. He said the document would be debated if it was brought before the synod.
“As things stand, our church is still participating in the ecumenical movement, with representatives in the World Council of Churches and Conference of European Churches. It is open to serious dialogue with all churches, and it could not do this without contacts with them,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “But everyone has a right in Orthodoxy to express opinions and positions, and there is a strong element here, as in other churches, against ecumenism.”
