Tag: civil authorities
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Autocephaly or Subjugation to the State? The Church of Greece after the Revolution
The Greek War of Independence began 200 years ago, in 1821, and one of the big consequences of the war was the estrangement of the Orthodox Church in revolutionary Greece from its mother church of Constantinople. From the beginning of the revolution until 1833, the ecclesiastical situation in Greece was kind of a mess. (It…
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Turkish Interference in the 1972 Ecumenical Patriarchate Election
Athenagoras Spyrou was elected Ecumenical Patriarch in 1948 thanks largely to the influence of the United States government, particularly Secretary of State George Marshall. At the time, Marshall had consulted the powerful Greek-American businessman Spyros Skouras, and Skouras recommended the Athenagoras, who was then the Archbishop of the Greek Archdiocese of North and South America.…
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How the State Dept. Got Interested in Orthodoxy
In recent days, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. After the meeting, Pompeo tweeted that the Ecumenical Patriarchate is a “key partner” of the United States. This is no secret; the close relationship between the United States government and the Ecumenical Patriarchate is well known to go back decades,…
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Athenagoras: The Apostle of America to Orthodoxy
In a previous article, I shared some of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras’ declarations of loyalty to the United States, documented in U.S. State Department files from 1950-51. Thanks to Aram Sarkisian, I have since obtained many more State Dept. documents from the rest of the 1950s. In two of these reports, from 1953 and 1957,…
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Secret 1950 State Dept Memo on Ecumenical Patriarch
Lately I’ve begun to publish a series of articles on the relationship between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the United States government during the early Cold War period. The most recent of those articles focused on various statements of loyalty made by Patriarch Athenagoras to U.S. State Department officials. As I said in that article, context…
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Patriarch Athenagoras’ Declarations of Loyalty to America
Thanks to my colleague Aram Sarkisian, I recently came into possession of the first batch of a trove of U.S. State Department documents related to the Orthodox Church — and particularly the Ecumenical Patriarchate — in the early 1950s. It will take me months — maybe years — to sift through all these materials and…
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There’s a Piece of the True Cross at the Truman Library in Missouri
Yesterday, I published an article about the ouster of Ecumenical Patriarch Maximos V. In that article, I mentioned that on February 10, 1947, the Greek Archbishop Athenagoras awarded President Harry Truman with a piece of the True Cross. I tracked down the cross, and it turns out that Truman held onto it, and it eventually…
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Ousting the Ecumenical Patriarch: the removal of Maximos V according to CIA records
World War II ended in 1945, and immediately, the United States and the Soviet Union began jockeying for leadership in the postwar world. The Soviets swept as many countries as possible into their orbit; meanwhile, the United States adopted the Truman Doctrine, a foreign policy based on the containment of Communism throughout the world. Orthodoxy…
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Greek Archbishop to proto-CIA: “Your directions will be executed faithfully.”
It’s long been an open secret that Patriarch Athenagoras’ election as Ecumenical Patriarch was arranged, or at least facilitated, by the United States government. It’s difficult to write about this as an historian, though, because smoking guns for that kind of thing tend to be kept under wraps. Occasionally, though, something slips out. I was…
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Did an Athonite monk visit President Ulysses S. Grant?
In 1869, a priest from Mount Athos paid a visit to the sitting President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. The Aug. 18, 1869 issues of both the North American and United States Gazette (published in Philadelphia) and the Philadelphia Inquirer ran identical blurbs: The Rev. Father Christopher, a Greek priest from Mount Athos, has lately called…