ATHENS, Greece — A group of Orthodox clergy in Greece, led by three senior archbishops, has 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 it 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,” the document states.
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 (bishops), 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 panheresy of ecumenism adopts and legalizes all heresies as ‘churches,’ and insults the dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” the group says in the document. “All boundaries the fathers set have been torn down; there is no longer a dividing line between heresy and church, between truth and fallacy.”
A member of the Greek church’s Synodical Committee for Inter-Orthodox and Inter-Christian Relations told Ecumenical News International that church leaders have not “rejected or accepted” the confession. He said the document would be debated if it was brought before the synod.
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