St.

Chrysostomos the New

(Commemorated on September 7)
The Icon painted for the Ἁγιοκατάταξις (“Glorification”) of
the Saint at the Icon Studio of the Holy Monastery of Sts.
Cyprian and Justina, in Phyle (Athens), Greece
The scroll on the Icon reads: “We elect to be persecuted,
struggling on the adamantine ramparts of Orthodoxy.”
 St. Chrysostomos the New
Confessor and Hierarch
“...But even if, hypothetically, all of the Old Calendarists were
to go over to the New Calendar, and there remained
only one Old Calendarist, I would be he.”

The long-awaited Ἁγιοκατάταξις1 of St. Chrysostomos the

New (1870-1955), the so-called “Father” of the Greek Old Calendar
movement, following a resolution of the Holy Synod of the Church
of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece on May 8, 2016 (Old
Style), took place on Saturday, May 15, 2016 (Old Style), the eve
of the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, at the historic Convent of
the Dormition of the Theotokos in Parnes (Athens), Greece (see
below), where the Saint was buried and where his Relics, which
were found to be wondrously and miraculously fragrant at their
exhumation, are kept for veneration by the faithful.

At the beautiful Liturgy and the Glorification service, many

hours in length, His Beatitude, Archbishop Kallinkos, First Hier-

1
The Ἁγιοκατάταξις (Hagiokatataxis) of a Saint signifies the Procla-
mation of the placement of his or her name in the Church’s Festal Calen-
dar. This is sometimes designated as the Saint’s “Glorification” in English,
in order to avoid the Roman Catholic term “canonization,” which does not
reflect properly an Orthodox understanding of the Christocentric nature of
sanctity and how the Church acknowledges the veneration of Saints. How-
ever, even the term “Glorification” is inadequate in describing the natural,
organic process by which holy men and women, united to and deified by
Christ, come to be venerated by the Christ-loving People of God as exem-
plars of human restoration in the Grace of the Redeemer and Savior.
6 Orthodox Tradition

arch of the Holy Synod, presided, concelebrating with all of the

members of the Synod, save those absent by virtue of illness or
infirmity, with His Eminence, Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa,
First Hierarch of our Sister Church, the Russian Orthodox Church
Abroad, and one of his Hierarchs, and with three Hierarchs from
our Sister Church in Romania. Many clergy, monks and nuns, and
faithful from throughout Greece and from Eastern and Western Eu-
rope, the Balkans, Africa, Australia, America, and the Far East were
also in attendance for what was one of the more important events
in the long history of the Church of the Genuine (Old Calendar)
Orthodox Christians of Greece, which St. Chrysostomos the New
served from 1935-1955.2 (See below, Archbishop Kallinikos and
two of the Deacons who served at the Divine Liturgy; the con-
celebrating Hierarchs just after the “Glorification” Liturgy; and

2
In 1944, he assumed full administrative guidance of the Church.
Volume XXXIII, Number 3 7

above, a portion of the large crowd in the courtyard of the con-

vent Church during the procession with the Saint’s Icon.)
The newly proclaimed Saint was born Χρυσόστομος Kαβου-
ρίδης (Chrysostomos Kabourídes [or Kavouridis]) on November
13, 1870, the Feast of St. John Chrysostomos, in Madytos, East-
ern Thrace,3 where he completed his secondary (high school) ed-
ucation. Recognized as a pious and gifted student, he went on to
study theology at the famous Theological School of Halki, on the
Princes’ Islands near Constantinople, from which he graduated mag-
na cum laude, in 1901, having written his baccalaureate thesis on
the Orthodoxy of the Holy Martyr Cyril I (Loúkaris), Œcumeni-
cal Patriarch of Constantinople.4
In the midst of his theological schooling, the future Saint was
ordained to the Diaconate by the Œcumenical Patriarch of Con-
stantinople, Joachim III, who also raised him to the rank of Pro-

3
Thrace is an ancient region in southeastern Europe that today lies be-
tween Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria, its borders on the North defined by
the Balkan Mountains and on the South by the Rhodope Mountains and the
Aegean Sea.
4
His thesis was recently edited and published, with various apparatus,
by Nicholas Mannes: Ἡ ἐπὶ πτυχίῳ Διατριβὴ τοῦ Μακαριστοῦ Μητρο-
πολίτου πρ. Φλωρίνης Χρυσοστόμου Καβουρίδου: «Ἡ Ὀρθοδοξία Κυ-
ρίλλου τοῦ Λουκάρεως» (The baccalaureate thesis of the ever-memorable
metropolitan emeritus of Phlorina, Chrysostomos Kabourides: the ortho-
doxy of Cyril Loukaris) (Athens, 2016).
8 Orthodox Tradition

todeacon, appointed him a preacher, and, in due course, Great Chan-

cellor (Mέγας Πρωτοσύγκελλος) of the Œcumenical See. On Au-
gust 5, 1908, he was ordained a Presbyter, and the following day
was consecrated to the Episcopacy as Bishop of Imbros,5 where
he served until 1912. He was then appointed Metropolitan of Pelag-
onia,6 where he served until circa 1918, when, in the midst of po-
litical turmoil in Greece, he retreated to Mt. Athos, where he re-
mained until 1921.
Returning to Athens, Metropolitan Chrysostomos strongly op-
posed the election of the recently deposed Archbishop Meletios
(Metaxakis) of Athens, an extreme liberal and reformer, as Œcu-
menical Patriarch in November of 1921. Despite protests, Mele-
tios IV was enthroned in Constantinople in 1922. Having earned
the ire of the new Patriarch, who used his clout to persecute him
and to accuse him of various political motivations and ecclesias-
tical infractions,7 the Saint fled to Alexandria, where it was pro-
posed that he fill the orphaned Throne of the Patriarchate in that
city. He declined such an eventuality and returned to Athens.
In 1923, Metaxakis, after recognizing Anglican orders (a move
criticized even by the Vatican); recognizing the infamous “Living
Church” (Живая Церковь), a liberal reform movement support-
ed by the Soviet atheists in the hope, thereby, of further weaken-
ing the persecuted Orthodox Church of Russia; reforming the Or-
thodox Church’s Festal Calendar, on the pseudo-scientific pretext

5
Imbros (the modern-day Turkish island of Gökçeada) is a large island
in the Aegean Sea, inhabited since ancient times and frequently mention-
ed in Greek mythology. At the time that St. Chrysostomos was Bishop, the
island was still largely Greek, as it remained for some years. In the mid-
1940s, when a policy of discrimination and persecution by the Turkish gov-
ernment was implemented, the Greek population began to dwindle, and to-
day only a very small handful of Greeks live on the island.
6
Pelagonia is an ancient region that in modern times covers an area
shared by the Greek Macedonian district and the former Yugoslavian ter-
ritories known, since 1991, as the Republic of Macedonia. The city of Bito-
la (Битола in Macedonian, Mοναστήριον or Mοναστήρι in Greek, mean-
ing “monastery”), now in the Republic of Macedonia, was the ecclesiastical
Seat of the Greek Metropolis of Pelagonia.
7
Later, when he assumed the leadership of the Old Calendar move-
ment, despite his advanced age and the persecution that he suffered for do-
ing so, these same absurd accusations were leveled against him, as part of
constant attempts by the calendar reformers to discredit the Orthodox tra-
ditionalists in Greece.
Volume XXXIII, Number 3 9

of restoring its astronomical accuracy, but actually as part of an

effort to establish an ecumenical calendar for the common cele-
bration of Church Feasts by all Christian confessions, setting aside
the ancient Orthodox observances; and enacting other reforms con-
trary to Orthodox Tradition, Metaxakis left Constantinople, under
the pretext of needing medical treatment. Under pressure from the
Greek government, he retired in September of the same year. He
later (in 1926) became Patriarch of Alexandria.
Given the more favorable circumstances occasioned by the de-
parture of Patriarch Meletios from the Œcumenical Throne, Met-
ropolitan Chrysostomos was offered the newly established See of
Philiata and Geromerion, which he served as Locum Tenens from
1925 tο 1926.8 Then in March of 1926, His Eminence was trans-
ferred to the Metropolis of Phlorina (Florina), where he served un-
til 1932.9 Though the State Church of Greece, under political pres-
sure and the sway of certain reformists, had adopted the New Cal-
endar,10 the Saint continued to celebrate by the traditional Church
Calendar until 1928, when “he was forced to adjust the Orthodox
Church’s Festal Calendar to the secular calendar,”11 to which cir-

8
This See, now known as the Metropolis of Paramythia, Philiates, Ge-
romerion, and Parga, is in Greek Epirus, which is located in northwestern
Greece. The borders of ancient Epirus, after which Greek Epirus is named,
lie, today, within the borders of Greece and Albania.
9
Like Bitola, Phlorina, a city in the mountainous northwestern region
of Greek Macedonia, is situated on the expansive plain of Pelagonia.
10
The so-called “corrected” or “revised” Julian Calendar—in its orig-
inal form the invention of the Serbian astronomer Milutin Milanković, but,
as adopted only in part, in 1923, by Patriarch Meletios, a clumsy attach-
ment of the Orthodox Paschalion to the Gregorian Calendar—was imple-
mented by the Church of Greece in 1924. The result was a breach with Holy
Tradition and an assault on the liturgical unity of the national Orthodox
Churches, the majority of which, to this day, follow the traditional Festal
Calendar of the Orthodox Church, which is largely based on the Julian or
“Old” Calendar and runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian Calendar.
11
See Metropolitan Cyprian II of Oropos and Phyle, Ἱερὰ Ἀκολουθία
τοῦ ἐν Ἁγίοις Πατρὸς ἡμῶν Χρυσοστόμου τοῦ Nέου, Ὁμολογητοῦ Ἱε-
ράρχου (1870-1955) (The holy service for our father among the saints,
Chrysostomos the new, confessor and hierarch [1870-1955]) (Athens: The
Holy Synod of the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece,
2016), p. 18 (ιη). This publication contains the magnificent service to St.
Chrysostomos the New, composed by Metropolitan Cyprian, as well as a
helpful timeline of the Saint’s life.
10 Orthodox Tradition

cumstance he reacted with forceful objections to the Holy Syn-

od, seeing the calendar change as a dangerous innovation.
Following a serious illness necessitating his hospitalization
in Athens, the Hierarch retired from his See in 1932. He remained
in Athens, and in 1934 he came into contact with the ecclesiasti-
cal communities of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece,
the so-called “Old Calendarists.” In 1935, along with two other Hi-
erarchs of the State Church of Greece, Metropolitans Germanos
of Demetrias and Chrysostomos of Zakynthos, he formed a Syn-
od of Bishops to provide those Orthodox Christians in Greece who
opposed the calendar innovation, then a large part of the popula-
tion, with a synodal structure. Thus walling themselves off from
the innovators in order to preserve the purity of the Church’s wit-
ness, they established the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Chris-
tians of Greece, which the Saint served until his death.
To grasp the momentousness of the undertaking to which St.
Chrysostomos dedicated himself, we must understand that he had
become convinced, at a time in life that poor health and senescence
would have justified his leaving the task to someone else, that his
opposition to the change in the calendar was an absolute neces-
sity. Two very percipient statements from him encapsulate his un-
derstanding of the great importance of the Church’s Festal Cal-
endar and the deleterious effects of the precipitous reform there-
of. He observes that the Holy Fathers
raised in the form of ramparts and bastions the bulwarks of the Canons
and Synodal decrees.... One of these ramparts of Orthodoxy is the
Church Calendar, which separates the Orthodox Churches from the
heretical ones in the celebration of the Feasts and the observance
of the fasts, and thus provides the simpler among the faithful with
a perceptible conception of the ecclesiastical difference between the
Orthodox Christian and the heretic or heterodox Christian.
... The question of the Church Calendar is not one of times and dates
for our Church, but a matter of unity and a concerted line of defense
of Orthodoxy against heresy and false belief.12

12
See his “῾Yπόμνημα ἀπολογητικὸν ὑπὲρ ἀναστηλώσεως τοῦ Πα-
τρίου Ἐκκλησιαστικοῦ Ἡμερολογίου” (Memorandum in defense of the
restoration of the traditional church calendar), in Elias Angelopoulos and
Dionysios Batistatos, Μητροπολίτης πρ. Φλωρίνης Χρυσόστομoς Κα-
βουρίδης: Ἀγωνιστὴς τῆς Ὀρθοδοξίας καὶ τοῦ Ἔθνους (Chrysostomos
Kabourides, metropolitan emeritus of Phlorina: struggler for orthodoxy and
for the Greek nation) (Athens, 1981), pp. 157, 158.
Volume XXXIII, Number 3 11

At a time when the ecumenical movement—spearheaded by

Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis, who, under the influence of the uni-
versalist precepts of ecumenism, internationalism, and Freemasonry,
instituted the calendar innovation as a first move towards a uni-
versal “Christian calendar”—had only just begun to erode the self-
identification of Orthodox as the inheritors of the legacy of the ear-
ly Church and the continuators of undivided Christendom, the Saint
grasped clearly the link between the calendar innovation and the
threat posed by ecumenism to traditional Orthodox ecclesiology
and spirituality. Thus, he wrote with prophetic insight these words
about political ecumenism and Orthodoxy:
To be sure, rapprochement between the two Christian worlds
of the East and the West in the celebration of Christian Feasts is de-
sired by all and is a matter of great moral value and significance.
However, it must be pursued and attained in the service of Christ-
ian truth and for the glory of the God-Man Jesus Christ. Were such
to be the case, the moral interests of the entire Christian world would
truly be served in the right Faith. But when this rapprochement springs
from materialistic and worldly interests and motives and is under-
taken at the expense of Orthodoxy and to the diminution of the glo-
ry of Christ, then personal interests, and especially ecclesiastical am-
bitions and desires, are served, to the detriment of the idea of the
Church and of the prestige of Orthodoxy in general. Her soul con-
sists of the traditions and the God-inspired and unerring documents
of the Apostolic Constitutions and the decisions of the Seven Holy
and Œcumenical Synods, the distortion of which diminishes the Di-
vinely wrought and inviolable authority of the Divine essence of the
Church of Christ. Thus, all harm done to Orthodoxy and every dimi-
nution thereof becomes the harm and diminution of the Divinity of
Christ, from Whom there shines the sublime and Divine character
and the deeper and Divine meaning of the Christian religion.13
In the course of the struggles of St. Chrysostomos the New as
one of the founders—and later the acknowledged “Father”—of
the Greek Old Calendar movement, his staunch but moderate and
wisely articulated defense of the Church Calendar as a banner for
the preservation of Orthodox Tradition and of a proper self-aware-

13
Metropolitan Chrysostomos (formerly) of Phlorina, “Ἀναίρεσις τοῦ
«Ἐλέγχου» τοῦ Ἀρχιεπισκόπου Ἀθηνω ͂ ν Χρυσοστόμου Παπαδοπού-
λου” (Refutation of the “censure” of archbishop Chrysostomos Papado-
poulos), in Ἅπαντα πρ. Φλωρίνης Χρυσοστόμου (The complete works of
[metropolitan] Chrysostomos of Phlorina) (Ἑλληνικὸ τῆς Γορτυνίας: Hi-
era Mone Hagiou Nikodemou, 1997), Vol. I, pp. 260f.).
12 Orthodox Tradition

ness on the part of Orthodox Christians of their rôle in the Divine

Economy brought him many trials and tribulations. Though he
was accustomed to the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical life during the
politically unstable decades in which he served the Greek State
Church—a series of dictatorships, conflicts between the royalists
and anti-royalists, tragic wars in the Balkans, and the First World
War—facing persecution for his defense of the Church Calendar
must have been daunting for him.
Immediately after he and his fellow Bishops from the State
Church formed an administrative Synod for the Genuine Ortho-
dox Christians of Greece, consecrating four new Bishops in the
process, they were all censured, deposed, and variously arrested,
tried, and exiled at the behest of the State Church. They also be-
came the victims of character assassination and, causing the
greatest difficulty for them, saw actual violence visited on their
flock by police and military forces at the disposal of the State
Church of Greece. So extreme were some attacks against the Old
Calendarists, as authorities attempted to break up their worship
services, that a number of Martyrs emerged from this period.
Instances of personal weakness and internal strife also arose
among the Bishops themselves. Three Bishops (two of them
from among the new Bishops consecrated by the Synod), under
threat and unable to endure in their struggles, returned to the New
Calendar State Church. Two other Bishops, one of them also
from among the newly consecrated Bishops, initiated an ecclesi-
ological debate, one that fractured the movement and that remains
constantly divisive even to this day. One of these Bishops, pro-
claiming that the New Calendarists were heretics, without Grace,
and outside the Orthodox Church, by virtue of their innova-
tions—a position that St. Chrysostomos in particular would not
endorse without reservations—established a small, independent
group of Old Calendarist zealots that exists to this day.14
In 1951, when the Saint was already eighty-one years of age,
these hardships and disappointments weighing heavily upon him
(he had done all that he could to unite and strengthen the fractured
Old Calendarist communities), a new wave of persecution, insti-
tuted by the harsh and severe policies of the then Archbishop of
the State Church of Greece, Spyridon, was put in place. The Old

14
See Archbishop Chrysostomos, Bishop Ambrose, and Bishop Aux-
entios, The Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Greece, Fifth Edition (Etna,
CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2009), pp. 19-22.
Volume XXXIII, Number 3 13

Calendarist clergy were, with the collusion of government au-

thorities, arrested and beaten, their Churches confiscated, and even
their basic civil rights violated. Sadly, St. Chrysostomos was ex-
iled to a remote monastery, suffering great deprivation. Fortunately,
however, Spyridon’s policies were halted by the Greek Prime Min-
ister, who personally saw to it that the Saint was returned to Athens,
where he lived out his remaining few years in peace.15
As anyone who has read his extensive writings,16 subtle and
eloquent and composed in beautiful Greek prose, can attest, this
new Saint, a Saint for all Tradition-loving Orthodox, was a man
who never showed rancor towards his persecutors, always styled
himself as a man seeking their return to the full Traditions of the
Church, and, however firm, never relinquished a spirit of love. He
never raised his opinions to the level of dogma, was not arrogant
about his rightness and the wrongness of others, and would even
accede to what he did not necessarily endorse (as his own words
aver), for the sake of unity; yet on issues of true dogma and Holy
Tradition or loyalty to his word and to persons whom he respect-
ed, he remained uncompromising. And his legacy bore fruit in 2014,
when, in his spirit, the two major factions of Old Calendarists in
Greece, the Holy Synod in Resistance and the Church of the Gen-
uine Orthodox Christians of Greece, united.
Let us close with the words of two famous New Calendarist
Hierarchs. St. Chrysostomos’ spiritual son and former Deacon, the
late Œcumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, who was by any measure
an “arch-ecumenist,” referred, perhaps with foresight, to the new
Saint as his “blessed elder Μetropolitan Chrysostomos of Pelag-
onia.”17And the late Metropolitan Augoustinos of Phlorina, at his
enthronement to that State Church See, said of St. Chrysostomos
the New: “I am about to administer a diocese in which Hierarchs
radiating wisdom and virtue shone forth during the Turkish dom-
ination, the last of whom was the blessed and wise Chrysostomos
(Kavourides) of Pelagonia, the spiritual Father of the current Œc-
umenical Patriarch (Athenagoras).”
† BC

15
Ibid.,pp. 23-26.
16
For a partial list of the Saint’s numerous writings, see Metropolitan
Cyprian, op. cit, pp. 27-33 (κζ-λγ).
17
Chrysostomos et al., op. cit., p. 59.