St. John Maximovitch: The Decline of the Patriarchate of Constantinople

Below we present the original pages of a report on the autocephalous Churches written in 1938 by St. John Maximovitch and published in Orthodox Word Magazine, 1972. From the translators’ introduction: “The anti-Orthodox career a11d statements of the late Patriarch Athenagoras of sorry memory have been so striking that they have perhaps tended to obscure the fact that the apostasy of this one man was merely the culmination of a long and thorough process of the departure from the Orthodox Faith of an entire Local Orthodox Church. The promise of the new Patriarch Demetrios to ‘follow upon the footsteps of our great Predecessor… in pursuing Christian unity’ and to institute ‘dialogues’ with Islam and other non-Christian religions, while recognizing ‘the holy blessed Pope of Rome Paul VI, the first among equals within the universal Church of Christ’ (Enthronement Address), only confirms this observation and reveals the depths to which the Church of Constantinople has fallen in our own day.” Read More →