Pastoral Psychology, VoL 40, No.

2, 1991

The Old Calendarists: A Social Psychological

Profile of A Greek Orthodox Minority

Bishop Chrysostomos ~ and Archimandrite Akakios 2,3

The authors discuss the social psychological dynamics by which a minority

group, faced with different levels of discrimination, moves from an initial reac-
tion of outrage to a state of passive fright and, finally, to a feeling of futility
and powerlessness. These dynamics and stages of accommodation to differen-
tial discrimination are applied to the historical experience of a Greek Orthodox
religious minority, the so-called Old Calendarists, to which the authors them-
selves belong. The authors argue that the historical experience of the Old
Calendarists suggests that minority groups, in their downward .spiral toward
powerlessness, become the victims of other social and political forces which
reinforce both discrimination against the minority group and the minority
group's perception of its own powerlessness'.

The first time an individual is spat on because of his minority char-

acteristics, whether they be associated with race, gender, or religious belief,
the experience engendered is one of outrage. One reaches out for others
to share this outrage.
The first time that one's social status, education, reputation, and per-
sonal integrity are set aside, and, because of some minority trait, he or she
is shunned and denied the courtesies of normal social intercourse, a kind
of humiliating rage sets in. The victim of this discrimination immediately
scans the environment for those to share in this injustice, seeking out those
who can restore self-esteem. But more often than not, the minority victim,

IAcademic Director, Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, St. Gregory. Palamos
Monastery, Etna, California.
ZAbbot, St. Gregory Palamas Monastery, Etna, California.
3Correspondence should be directed to The Very Rev. Dr. Akakios, P. O. Box 398, Ema,
California 96027-0398.

83
© 1991 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
84 Bishop Chrysostomos and Archimandrite Akakios

crippled by assaults on his or her self-worth, does so fearfully and ineffec-

tively, retreating into the minority group itself for like-comparison. There
the victim is tragically reinforced in his or her negative self-image by yet
other victims of discrimination.
The first time that one is threatened with or is the victim of physical
harm from those who object to his or her minority traits, a sense of passive
fright develops. One is overcome by a desire to submit to the attackers
and by an overwhelming sense of futility in attempting to restore justice
or to regain any modicum of self-respect (Chrysostomos, 1988).
It is at this third stage that the victim of bigotry becomes powerless.
The victim no longer reaches out for the aid of others. The victim no longer
seeks to restore his or her positive self-image. The victim fails to find com-
fort even in hiding among his or her own. And because of this, such an
individual becomes a double victim. Having fallen to passivity in the face
of discrimination, the individual is disenfranchised by his or her detractors.
The detractors make of passivity a protocol. Bigotry is thus raised to the
level of a unilateral social contract, imposed by the detractor and accepted,
by virtue of his or her non-resistant passivity, by the victim. If such a victim
should now dare to s p e a k - d a r e by some miracle of self-resurrection to
assert his or her humanity and personal integrity in the face of such a con-
t r a c t - t h a t victim becomes a usurper of the power which he or she has
ostensibly, and only ostensibly, relinquished (Gonz~ilez-Alexopoulos, Cor-
doza, & Chapman, 1976). The victim must now be punished for this further
"infraction."
Most social psychologists have failed to identify these three stages in
the development of the profile of what we call the powerless minority
group, that group which contains individuals who have given up the fight
for social justice, who have internalized their minority status, and who seem
to form those nameless masses of silent minorities who pass through life
expecting little and struggling for n o t h i n g - t h e disenfranchised, as some
political and social observers have called them. This failure stems not only
from inadequate attention to these groups, which seem hopeless in terms
of social rehabilitation, but also because so few who belong to these groups
have overcome the odds against rehabilitation and spoken of their experien-
ces. Those who have spoken, moreover, have too often become the victims
of the second level of discrimination to which we have r e f e r r e d - v i o l a t o r s ,
as it were, of the strangling contract by which the powerless agree to remain
silent and powerless.
We, the authors, belong to a minority of the kind that we have
portrayed, the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Greece, a group which,
against great odds, has spoken out. It has not had a wide forum in the
West, nor has it been widely heard. It has at times been silenced since it
Old Calendarists 85

has supposedly agreed to be silent before those who have usurped its rights.
But the Old Calendarists have been able to speak, nonetheless, which is
important. Some of what they have said and some of their trials provide
an excellent insight into the process by which a minority group slips into
a powerless state. We would like to share the Old Calendarist experience
here with other social scientists who maintain an interest in the psychology'
of minority groups in general and religious minority groups in particular.
In the 1920s, the Patriarch of Constantinople, the so-called "princeps
inter pares" (or "first among equals") of the Eastern Orthodox Church un-
dertook to involve the various national Orthodox Churches in the ecumeni-
cal movement and to make their Christian tradition, one of the oldest in
Christianity, known to the Western Christian Churches, This proved a for-
midable task. The Orthodox Church has traditionally rejected the idea of
authority in faith and dogma, except as it derives from the conscience of
the Church, the "People of God," or from the cornerstone of the Church,
Christ. The various national Orthodox Churches have always existed in
union by virtue of what Orthodox consider a mystical force of commonality
that defines the united Body of Christ (Hromfidka, 1967, pp. 289-290). Ec-
clesiological experiences, rather than theological and intellectual premises,
underpin the classical understanding of the "Church" in Eastern Chris-
tianity. Moreover, the Orthodox Church, until very recently, maintained its
separate identity from the Western confessions by a kind of spMtual isola-
tion (at times broken by the Uniate movement in Russia and the Islamic
yoke in Greece and the Balkan countries). This isolation is marked by its
use of the Julian Calendar and the celebration of the major Christian Feasts
on dates differing from the dates of such celebrations in the West (Chrysos-
tomos, 1935, p. 14). In view of this, Orthodox self-presentation to the West
was not an easy thing (Akakios, 1990, pp. 66-67).
The Patriarch set out on a course of accommodation. He first
redefined his position in the Orthodox Church in such a way as to suggest
that all Orthodox Churches were somehow validated by their organizational
association with Constantinople, a formula which even many of his own
Bishops, at the time, found at odds with traditional Orthodox thought and
the witness of history° Indeed, many periods of rich theological develop-
ment among the Greek Fathers were precisely those in which theologians
and celebrated Orthodox figures were in resistance to the heresies of the
See of Constantinople-a fact often cited as evidence for the danger of a
papal notion of Church governance. Nonetheless, the Patriarch set forth
his claims. In addition, he urged the Orthodox Churches to adopt the six-
teenth-century calendar of Pope Gregory, so that the Orthodox could come
into closer contact with Western Christians by sharing common Feasts. He
did not urge, however, an immediate change in the formula for calculating
86 Bishop Chrysostomos and Archimandrite Akakios

Easter, which was set in 325 by the undivided Christian Church at the
Council of Nicaea and which has been used since that time to calculate
the Orthodox Easter, or Pascha. He knew that such would have been too
revolutionary. His suggestions were accepted eventually by the Churches
of Greece, Antioch, Alexandria, Romania, Bulgaria, and by some smaller
national Churches, including the innovative Church of Finland, which even
adopted the Western formula for celebrating Easter. The Churches of Rus-
sia, Serbia, and Jerusalem, as well as a quarter of the population of the
Church of Greece, did not accept this innovation (Delembases, 1985, pp.
633-693). So the Old Calendar minority was born.
The Greek Old Calendarists are those Orthodox Greeks who, to this
day, refuse to accept the Gregorian Calendar and the neo-papal claims of
the Patriarch of Constantinople. The authors serve one group o f these
Faithful in diaspora, in America. In Greece today, some sources claim that
there are as few as two hundred fifty thousand Old Calendarists, while
others claim that there are as many as two million (Akakios, 1990, p. 68).
Accurate figures are difficult to ascertain. At any rate, whether a small or
relatively large number of Orthodox Greeks, they have become a powerless
minority, ironically enough, in the world of "ecumenical politics." They are
treated with hatred and disdain and have even tasted the bitterness of their
own blood in the efforts of the State Church of Greece and other powers
to eradicate their witness. The history of their slide toward powerlessness
is a significant one for those who would understand the process by which
the precipitous fall to depersonalization takes place. Their history is, as we
noted previously, an ideal case study.
Immediately after its adoption by the Church of Greece in 1924, the
Gregorian Calendar was hailed as a step into modernity and, in fact, invited
renewed attention to the Christian East by the Western Churches.
Archbishop Chrysostomos, who had, as a professor at the University of
Athens, rejected any idea of changing the Church Calendar, now hailed it,
in his new-found world eminence, as a great thing wrought "for the sake
of the people of Greece" (Cyprian, 1988, pp. 15). The Old Calendarists,
originally simple lay people and pious folk, were labelled fanatics, op-
ponents of progress, hard-headed simpletons, and impediments to ecumeni-
cal dialogue with the Western confessions. The Old Calendarists, who saw
the spirit of innovation possessing a Church which they understood to have
survived by the power of tradition and seeing the power of the Church
placed in a Hierarchy which did not derive from the conscience of the
people, protested vigorously. The State, at the request of the Church, began
breaking up meetings of the Old Calendarists, reviling them, and calling
them traitors (Chrysostomos, Ambrosios, & Auxentios, 1986, p. 10). Spat
upon, the Old Calendarists reached out for help.
Old Calendarlsts 87

And help came in 1935. Three Bishops of the State Church of Greece,
headed by Metropolitan Chrysostomos, the retired Bishop of Florina, a
man of great stature among the Greek Hierarchs, returned to the Old
Calendar. These Bishops sensed the departure of the Orthodox Church of
Greece from Holy Tradition, from the ancient standards of ecclesiastical
rule, and from a respect of the simple pious. They were immediately ex-
communicated and deposed. Despite the popularity of their movement,
their theological education, and their years of service to the State Church,
they were treated like common criminals. Their Churches were bulldozed.
Presses were overturned, and any forum for the expression of the Old
Calendarist view was taken away, the State Church left to deride, insult,
and ridicule the Old Calendarists on the basis of caricatures, polemical
misinterpretations, and outright distortions of their views. Unable to
withstand the ridicule, some of the Old Calendarist B i s h o p s - new ones had
been Consecrated by the three original Bishops who came from the State
Church-returned reluctantly and with shame to the State Church (Chrysos-
tomos, Ambrosios, and Auxentios, pp. 14-18).
The Old Calendarists reached out again. This time there was no one
to help. And in a tragic move that still divides the Old Calendarists in
Greece, in 1937 one group of Old Calendarists split away, doubting that
the State Church could possibly have maintained its Orthodoxy if, indeed,
it could so viciously attack its own Orthodox brothers. Reaction was still
alive, even if it did serve the ends of the New Calendarists, since a divided
house falls more easily than one united. These extremists, represented in
Greece today by two Synods of Old Calendarist Bishops, deny the validity
of the State Church of Greece. Only one Synod, that of Metropolitan
Cyprian of Oropos and Fill, who also entered the movement from the New
Calendar Church and whose Synod the authors serve, still recognizes the
validity of the State Church of Greece, while, nonetheless, standing in resis-
tance to its reformed spirit (Chrysostomos, Ambrosios, & Auxentios, pp.
20-28).
Crippled by division, the Old Calendar Church had not disappeared
by the years immediately following World War II. It had been spat upon.
It had been ridiculed, its authenticity in terms of aid and support from
some of the finest Bishops in Greece ignored and set aside. But it had not
ceased to react. Thus violence set in. During the early '50s, Archbishop
Spyridon, newly elected to the highest post of the State Church, decided
to eradicate the Old Calendarists once and for all. He first did violence to
their Church foundations, by forbidding them to attend theological schools.
If the Old Calendarists had proved to be more literate than any thought,
and thus had attracted followers, they would be "made" illiterate. Bishop
Gabriel, placed under house arrest, died from his trials and hardships. The
88 Bishop Chrysostomos and Archimandrite Akakios

Archbishop ordered that no funeral would take place; no priest would be

allowed to serve a funeral. Poor Father Platon, an elderly priest in Patras,
was so badly beaten by the police, at Church orders, that he had to be
hastily buried to cover up the crime, which was nonetheless discovered.
The Mysteries (Sacraments) of the Old Calendarists were declared null and
void, so that marriages and births could not be registered and so that old
women could not get their pensions, when their husbands' deaths remained
unregistered. Persecution became widespread and vicious (Chrysostomos,
Ambrosios, and Auxentios, 1986, pp. 17-18; Delembases, 1985, pp. 758-
759).
This outrage was finally noticed by others. Metropolitan Chrysos-
tomos, then in his 80s, was released from exile and house arrest by the
new Greek Prime Minister in 1952. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Chris-
tophoros, long a friend of the Old Calendarists, protested vociferously to
the Church of Greece, and two Old Calendarist Churches were allowed to
function in Athens (where there are now thirty-eight parishes, giving one
an impression of the actual need for Churches). And even the Greek press,
which had so long ignored criminal acts against the Old Catendarists, spoke
out. From the Greek daily "Kathemerine" (November 20, 1952), we read
the following: "Excesses! We are neither disposed to defend the Old Calen-
darists nor to condemn them. But whatever else they may be..., they are
not criminals or vagrants. Nonetheless, in the offices of the Archbishop a
priest and an old monk of eighty years were treated like criminals. Their
cassocks were torn off and they were forcibly shaved [traditionally, Or-
thodox priests, in adherence to canonical proscriptions against such, do not
shave-the Authors]. We confess that, at the sight of their pitiable and
wretched appearance, we were overcome by a feeling of profound compas-
sion." Indeed, Archbishop Dorotheos, who served the State Church of
Greece from 1956-57, spoke out against the extremists, saying: "The Old
Calendar movement is neither a heresy nor a schism, and those who follow
it are neither heretics nor heterodox, nor schismatics, but are Orthodox
Christians" (Akakios, 1990, p. 69).
But this all came too late. In 1955, Metropolitan Chrysostomos died,
broken and depressed by what his Church brothers had done to him. He
left no Bishops to continue the moderate Old Calendar witness which he
had served, the only Old Calendarist Bishops left in Greece being the ex-
tremists who had broken away from the movement in 1937. The people
had b e e n systematically deprived of their power. T h e y sat back and
relegated themselves to being the remnants of a movement among the
Faithful which had tried, in all loyalty to its conscience, to preserve the
ancient Faith of the Greek people. They had become, in the eyes of others,
"illiterate outcasts," to q u o t e one New Calendarist theologian, and
Old Calendarists 89

relegated to a status outside the Orthodox Church, according to the present

New Calendar Archbishop of Athens (Chrysostomos, 1989, p. 5; Chrysos-
tomos, Ambrosios, & Auxentios, 1986, p. iii). For celebrating the Feasts
according to tradition and for rejecting a papal figure in Constantinople-
rejecting an attribution of unknown authority to the Patriarch that led to
the unilateral lifting of the anathemas between t h e Orthodox and Roman
Catholic Church in the early '60s-the Old Calendarists became, to quote
an Orthodox clergymen in Australia, "the proper targets, if there ever were
any, for extermination" (Janari, 1986, p. 6).
Yet the Old Calendarists, stripped of power save for a final statement
by the Greek Constitution in 1976 that their Mysteries must be registered
by the State along with those of the New Calendarist Church, stand where
they are (Cyprian, 1989, pp. 92-94). Neither criminals nor heretics or schis-
matics in the eyes of a theologian and former Archbishop of a Church that
has sought to eradicate them, they have accepted the role of outcasts. As
a young Old Calendarist university student told the senior author in Greece
some time ago, "I feel that I am not a human being. I feel that my Christian
conscience, which I cannot abandon, has made me something ugly and
something to be condemned."
Indeed, there are Old Calendarists who have tried to stand up and
renew their strength. But they have therefore become double victims of
discrimination. Not only do old accusations continue against them, but they
are flatly denied any rights of response, absolute outrage surfacing when
they do speak out. In the '60s, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which
was originally established as the Church of Russia in Exile after the Bol-
shevik Revolution (and this with the cooperation of the Patriarchs of Con-
stantinople and Serbia), consecrated Bishops for the G r e e k Old
Calendarists. All of this was ignored. The State Church of Greece con-
tinued to preach that the Old Calendarist Bishops were without valid or-
d e r s - a statement made today in many modernist Orthodox circles, despite
the fact that it is well known to be untrue. Attempts by our own Synod
(that of the authors) -which does not reject Orthodoxy in the State Church
of Greece, despite of its innovative w a y s - t o present a moderate Old
Calendarist witness have resulted in a policy of publishing nothing about
our true views, or of prompting the irresponsible Greek press to attack us
in reprehensible, vulgar expos6s. Any clergy who sympathize with us are
immediately reprimanded. And the many New Calendarist clergy who
return to the Old Calendar are immediately excommunicated, despite the
lack of any real canonical grounds for such. "How dare these Old Calen-
darists try to speak! .... How dare they maintain a witness!" These are the
characteristic responses that Old Calendarists meet.
90 Bishop Chrysostomos and Archimandrite Akakios

The Vatican, which knows that the Old Calendarists resist union with
Rome and reject papism both in Constantinople and Rome, has not resisted
printing untrue and misleading articles in the official Vatican press about
Old Calendarists, characterizing them as a sect outside the Orthodox Church
(Chrysostomos, Ambrosios, & Auxentios, 1986, p. iii). They do not mention
that the Patriarchate of Jerusalem supports the Old Calendarists (Akakios,
1990b, p. 1), that a million Old Calendarists struggle for survival in Romania,
and that national Churches following the Old Calendar have never con-
demned the Greek Old Calendarists as schismatics and heretics, but have
sympathized with them and aided them. The important thing for the Vatican
is to chastise any Orthodox minorities who might think that they have a
right to protest against the moves toward union, orchestrated by Constan-
tinople, that are being undertaken by the Vatican and various Hierarchs in
the Orthodox Church. These vulgar press attacks by the Vatican led to
protests from our Church which were dismissed with condescending rude-
ness bordering on an attitude of ridicule. Even some Roman Catholic friends
of the Old Calendarists have been appalled at this behavior from the Roman
Hierarchy (Chrysostomos, Ambrosios, & Auxentios, 1986, p. iii).
Though the Exarchate of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchal Throne in
America has recently been rocked by an unfortunate scandal that hit the
newspapers, magazines, and television (Clifford, 1987), any error, mistake in
judgment, or questionable clergyman among the Old Calendarists is dragged
out in public and used as evidence of the character of the entire Church. The
educational credentials of the Old Calendarists are ignored, while the simple
and pious village priests--who often lack university degrees-are scorned and
ridiculed. And this by a Church that forbade Old Calendarist clergy to attend
theological schools in the '50s! Old Calendarist scholars in America find it
difficult to find professorships in colleges or universities where the more
numerous New Calendarists have influence. The New Calendarists sometimes
abuse their influence by characterizing the Old Calendarists as fanatics,
legalists, or a sect. And if the Old Calendarists speak out in defense of their
position, they are told that they have no place in "world Orthodoxy" (though
the vast majority of Orthodox worldwide follow the Julian Calendar) and thus
have no right to speak. Indeed, most New Calendarist theological journals will
not publish articles by or about Old Calendarists.
The painful downward path to powerless minority status: that is what
we have tried to portray here in group and indeed individual terms. We have
focused on a group which we know--to which we belong--but have nonethe-
less touched on universal issues in our example. There is a universality to what
we have written about religious discrimination, too. The same dynamics apply
to any other kind of discrimination. We have written about the conflict be-
tween tradition and social change in the Church of Greece. This conflict can
Old Calendarists 91

b e applied to any culture and to any segment of that culture, be it ecclesiastical,

political, o r whatever. W e have spoken about suffering for a religious reason.
T h a t suffering is universal. It reaches down from the altar o f religion a n d
touches the suffering of any h u m a n in any circumstance o f discrimination o r
disenfranchisement.
W e have w r i t t e n with a p u r p o s e and with a sense o f p o w e r that b e l o n g
only to t h o s e w h o a r e n o t d i s e n f r a n c h i s e d . H e r e i n a l o n e lies any i n a u t h e n -
ticity in o u r c o m m e n t s . W e a r e disenfranchised. N o o n e r e a d i n g o r h e a r i n g
o u r w o r d s can ever k n o w o u r own suffering, o u r own h u m i l i a t i o n , a n d o u r
own struggle with the p o w e r f u l d e m o n o f powerlessness. T h e r e f o r e , o u r
w o r d s a r e to an extent n o t true and genuine. W e have s p o k e n with p o w e r
at t h e e x p e n s e o f a w e a k n e s s in o u r souls, a d e e p w o u n d that has b e e n
inflicted o n us by d i s c r i m i n a t i o n . Yet, p o w e r l e s s t h o u g h we m a y b e b e c a u s e
o f t h a t g a p i n g w o u n d , we can s p e a k o u t for t h o s e w h o have even less p o w e r
t h a n we, w h o have n e i t h e r voice n o r words. In t h e i r witness lies the missing
t r u t h a n d a u t h e n t i c i t y o f o u r words. T h e y fill o u t w h a t we have written.
A n d this w e know, b e c a u s e we are, at least in part, still a m o n g them.

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