Post by Bozur on Apr 12, 2005 17:19:17 GMT -5
Archbishop Iakovos, Major Ecumenical Force, Dies
BY RICHARD SEVERO
Published: April 12, 2005
images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=Archbishop+Iakovos&btnG=Search
Archbishop Iakovos, for 37 years the primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in North and South America, a towering figure in the ecumenical movement and the first Greek archbishop in 350 years to officially confer with a pope, died on Sunday at a hospital in Stamford, Conn. He was 93 and had a home in Rye, N.Y.
His death was announced by Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the church in America.
In his stewardship, Archbishop Iakovos became an imposing religious figure and a champion of social causes, and the Greek Orthodox Church moved into the mainstream of religious and political life.
His unexpected retirement in 1996 on his 85th birthday left church members stunned. Archbishop Iakovos's most dramatic action may have been marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 in Selma, Ala. The New York Times reported, "The striking cover of Time magazine that showed Dr. King side by side with the black-garbed Archbishop Iakovos marked a new presence of Greek Americans and the Greek Orthodox church in American life."
The archbishop became a regular visitor to the White House and a recognized voice on issues like the Vietnam War and abortion.
In an interview in 1995, he said he had accomplished a major goal: "to have the Orthodox Church be accepted by the family of religions in the United States."
He cited the recognition of Orthodox chaplains in the armed forces and the dialogues that he established with leaders of Episcopal, Lutheran, Southern Baptist and black churches, as well as with Judaism and Islam.
Archbishop Iakovos stepped down in 1996 after conflicts with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the patriarch of Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople (Istanbul).
The ecumenical patriarch is a "first among equals," enjoying a spiritual primacy but not governing authority over the independent national Orthodox churches of Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But he has direct authority over the Greek Orthodox archdiocese in the United States, which was created by immigrants.
Officially known today as the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese America, the church that Archbishop Iakovos led currently claims 1.5 million members in this country. Under Archbishop Iakovos, the archdiocese also embraced another 600,000 faithful in Canada and Latin America, now governed in separate jurisdictions.
The archdiocese here is the largest and most influential group among the estimated six million Eastern Orthodox Christians in the United States.
Some supporters of Archbishop Iakovos regarded Constantinople's pressure for his retirement as a sign that the patriarch wanted to reaffirm his authority over the American church.
Patriarch Bartholomew had appeared to favor the eventual unification of all the ethnic-based branches of Orthodoxy in the United States into a single church administration, but was said to have been displeased by a unification plan largely developed by Archbishop Iakovos. It involved virtually all the Orthodox churches in the United States with ties to mother churches overseas, among them Albanian, Ukrainian, Syrian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian churches.
When bishops from most of those branches of Orthodoxy in the United States held a unification conference led by Archbishop Iakovos in 1994 in Ligonier, Pa., Patriarch Bartholomew was unhappy that the archbishop had not sought his approval. The initiative was also denounced as a first step toward independence from his authority and that of the other mother churches.
Patriarch Bartholomew summoned Archbishop Iakovos and the other Greek bishops to Istanbul and ordered that they remove their signatures from the agreement.
Archbishop Iakovos was born on July 29, 1911, as Demetrios A. Coucouzis, on tiny Imbros in the Aegean Sea near the entrance to the Dardanelles. The island had belonged to Greece but was occupied by the British and then awarded to Turkey by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Its residents, who included Patriarch Bartholomew, clung to their Greek culture.
Demetrios's parents ran a general store, where he worked as a child selling items like dry goods and icons. At age 16 , he was admitted to the Halki Theological School. He graduated in 1934 and was named an archdeacon.
Five years later, Father Demetrios, as he was called, moved to the United States and taught at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Theological Seminary when it was in Pomfret, Conn.
In 1940, he was elevated to priest and took the name Iakovos, Greek for James. He served first in Hartford and later in New York, where he preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.
In World War II, he worked in Boston as dean of the Cathedral of the Annunciation and also attended the Harvard Divinity School, from which he earned a graduate degree in 1945.
He became a United States citizen in 1950.
In the 50's, he was director of the Holy Cross seminary in Brookline, Mass.
Of his pastoral work with immigrants in New England and New York, he said, "I lived and struggled with them to maintain the faith and culture."
He disagreed strongly with many other Orthodox leaders who, he felt, insisted on treating the Greek Orthodox in America as a church "in diaspora" that should still take its lead from across the Atlantic. "We are not transients," he said.
Archbishop Iakovos took a vow of celibacy early in his career, a prerequisite for becoming an Orthodox bishop. He had no immediate survivors.
In the 1950's, he was also bishop of Melita (Malta), part of the Archdiocese of Central and Western Europe, and a representative of the Greek Church's Ecumenical Patriarchate at the headquarters of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
His efforts at restoring Orthodox-Roman Catholic ties followed four years of working with Protestant leaders at the council.
He was promoted to metropolitan in 1956 and three years later became archbishop of North and South America. The church then had 1.5 million communicants in 375 churches in the United States and 150,000 worshipers in Canada and South America.
From the start, he was a force for ecumenism. In 1959, shortly after being named archbishop, he called on Pope John XXIII in the first meeting of an Orthodox leader and a pope in 350 years. The encounter set the stage for a historic meeting between the pope and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964. The Eastern branch of Christianity, rooted in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire, and the Western branch, rooted in the Latin-speaking area, had their final break in 1054.
In 1965, partly because of the new efforts, ceremonies nullified the "anathemas" issued between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches when the patriarch of Constantinople ordered the closing of Roman Catholic churches there and was excommunicated by Pope Leo IX.
Archbishop Iakovos also met Pope Paul VI in the 1960's.
In 1961, he was elected one of six presidents of the World Council of Churches, which endeavors to foster closer cooperation among 173 Christian denominations.
He remained a lifelong foe of racial intolerance. He opposed the Vietnam War, voiced support for Soviet Jews' rights and tried to influence Arab Christians to work for peace in the Mideast.
In his church, he upset newer immigrants, traditionalists and Greek nationalists by encouraging greater use of English in the liturgy. Younger Greek-Americans were not always conversant in Greek, and 80 percent of the Greeks in the United States were marrying people not of Greek descent.
"If we lose our youth," he warned in 1969, "our churches will be empty within 10 years, except for a few survivors of our first-generation immigrants."
At the same time, he dismayed more assimilated Greek Orthodox members by injecting himself into political issues like the Turks on Cyprus and the recognition of Macedonia.
In 1973, he criticized the military government in Athens and asked Washington to "use its good influence to impress upon the Greek government leaders that the best interests of their country and its people require the prompt and orderly restoration of democracy and freedom."
In 1988, he helped start the presidential campaign of Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, Democrat of Massachusetts and a liberal Greek-American.
Three years later, under the archbishop's leadership, Orthodox churches briefly bolted from the National Council of Churches, complaining that the organization, based in Manhattan, was too liberal on issues like ordaining women, homosexuality and abortion.
After six months, the Orthodox churches returned to the fold. A few months after the reconciliation, the council announced a $10 million campaign named in honor of Archbishop Iakovos to raise money for ecumenical purposes.
Many honors and honorary degrees came his way. In 1980, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
His replacement is George Papageorgiu, who took the name Archbishop Spyridon. Archbishop Spyridon was born and educated in the United States but has spent much of his life in Greece and Italy.
"I will not remain still or I will die," Archbishop Iakovos said when retirement was thrust on him. "I will use the time I have left to further my ecumenical work. I will elucidate the positions of the Orthodox Church in America. It must be an active church and an activist church, because the world today needs to be rearranged."
Even as he aged, Archbishop Iakovos had a vibrancy about him, a way with children. On one occasion, he visited St. Basil's, a Greek Orthodox school in Garrison, N.Y. He met with the children there for a time, and after he left, one child, Marina Madiotis, 7, exclaimed: "He's my best friend. Make him come back!"
BY RICHARD SEVERO
Published: April 12, 2005
images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=Archbishop+Iakovos&btnG=Search
Archbishop Iakovos, for 37 years the primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in North and South America, a towering figure in the ecumenical movement and the first Greek archbishop in 350 years to officially confer with a pope, died on Sunday at a hospital in Stamford, Conn. He was 93 and had a home in Rye, N.Y.
His death was announced by Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the church in America.
In his stewardship, Archbishop Iakovos became an imposing religious figure and a champion of social causes, and the Greek Orthodox Church moved into the mainstream of religious and political life.
His unexpected retirement in 1996 on his 85th birthday left church members stunned. Archbishop Iakovos's most dramatic action may have been marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 in Selma, Ala. The New York Times reported, "The striking cover of Time magazine that showed Dr. King side by side with the black-garbed Archbishop Iakovos marked a new presence of Greek Americans and the Greek Orthodox church in American life."
The archbishop became a regular visitor to the White House and a recognized voice on issues like the Vietnam War and abortion.
In an interview in 1995, he said he had accomplished a major goal: "to have the Orthodox Church be accepted by the family of religions in the United States."
He cited the recognition of Orthodox chaplains in the armed forces and the dialogues that he established with leaders of Episcopal, Lutheran, Southern Baptist and black churches, as well as with Judaism and Islam.
Archbishop Iakovos stepped down in 1996 after conflicts with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the patriarch of Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople (Istanbul).
The ecumenical patriarch is a "first among equals," enjoying a spiritual primacy but not governing authority over the independent national Orthodox churches of Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But he has direct authority over the Greek Orthodox archdiocese in the United States, which was created by immigrants.
Officially known today as the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese America, the church that Archbishop Iakovos led currently claims 1.5 million members in this country. Under Archbishop Iakovos, the archdiocese also embraced another 600,000 faithful in Canada and Latin America, now governed in separate jurisdictions.
The archdiocese here is the largest and most influential group among the estimated six million Eastern Orthodox Christians in the United States.
Some supporters of Archbishop Iakovos regarded Constantinople's pressure for his retirement as a sign that the patriarch wanted to reaffirm his authority over the American church.
Patriarch Bartholomew had appeared to favor the eventual unification of all the ethnic-based branches of Orthodoxy in the United States into a single church administration, but was said to have been displeased by a unification plan largely developed by Archbishop Iakovos. It involved virtually all the Orthodox churches in the United States with ties to mother churches overseas, among them Albanian, Ukrainian, Syrian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian churches.
When bishops from most of those branches of Orthodoxy in the United States held a unification conference led by Archbishop Iakovos in 1994 in Ligonier, Pa., Patriarch Bartholomew was unhappy that the archbishop had not sought his approval. The initiative was also denounced as a first step toward independence from his authority and that of the other mother churches.
Patriarch Bartholomew summoned Archbishop Iakovos and the other Greek bishops to Istanbul and ordered that they remove their signatures from the agreement.
Archbishop Iakovos was born on July 29, 1911, as Demetrios A. Coucouzis, on tiny Imbros in the Aegean Sea near the entrance to the Dardanelles. The island had belonged to Greece but was occupied by the British and then awarded to Turkey by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Its residents, who included Patriarch Bartholomew, clung to their Greek culture.
Demetrios's parents ran a general store, where he worked as a child selling items like dry goods and icons. At age 16 , he was admitted to the Halki Theological School. He graduated in 1934 and was named an archdeacon.
Five years later, Father Demetrios, as he was called, moved to the United States and taught at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Theological Seminary when it was in Pomfret, Conn.
In 1940, he was elevated to priest and took the name Iakovos, Greek for James. He served first in Hartford and later in New York, where he preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.
In World War II, he worked in Boston as dean of the Cathedral of the Annunciation and also attended the Harvard Divinity School, from which he earned a graduate degree in 1945.
He became a United States citizen in 1950.
In the 50's, he was director of the Holy Cross seminary in Brookline, Mass.
Of his pastoral work with immigrants in New England and New York, he said, "I lived and struggled with them to maintain the faith and culture."
He disagreed strongly with many other Orthodox leaders who, he felt, insisted on treating the Greek Orthodox in America as a church "in diaspora" that should still take its lead from across the Atlantic. "We are not transients," he said.
Archbishop Iakovos took a vow of celibacy early in his career, a prerequisite for becoming an Orthodox bishop. He had no immediate survivors.
In the 1950's, he was also bishop of Melita (Malta), part of the Archdiocese of Central and Western Europe, and a representative of the Greek Church's Ecumenical Patriarchate at the headquarters of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
His efforts at restoring Orthodox-Roman Catholic ties followed four years of working with Protestant leaders at the council.
He was promoted to metropolitan in 1956 and three years later became archbishop of North and South America. The church then had 1.5 million communicants in 375 churches in the United States and 150,000 worshipers in Canada and South America.
From the start, he was a force for ecumenism. In 1959, shortly after being named archbishop, he called on Pope John XXIII in the first meeting of an Orthodox leader and a pope in 350 years. The encounter set the stage for a historic meeting between the pope and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964. The Eastern branch of Christianity, rooted in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire, and the Western branch, rooted in the Latin-speaking area, had their final break in 1054.
In 1965, partly because of the new efforts, ceremonies nullified the "anathemas" issued between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches when the patriarch of Constantinople ordered the closing of Roman Catholic churches there and was excommunicated by Pope Leo IX.
Archbishop Iakovos also met Pope Paul VI in the 1960's.
In 1961, he was elected one of six presidents of the World Council of Churches, which endeavors to foster closer cooperation among 173 Christian denominations.
He remained a lifelong foe of racial intolerance. He opposed the Vietnam War, voiced support for Soviet Jews' rights and tried to influence Arab Christians to work for peace in the Mideast.
In his church, he upset newer immigrants, traditionalists and Greek nationalists by encouraging greater use of English in the liturgy. Younger Greek-Americans were not always conversant in Greek, and 80 percent of the Greeks in the United States were marrying people not of Greek descent.
"If we lose our youth," he warned in 1969, "our churches will be empty within 10 years, except for a few survivors of our first-generation immigrants."
At the same time, he dismayed more assimilated Greek Orthodox members by injecting himself into political issues like the Turks on Cyprus and the recognition of Macedonia.
In 1973, he criticized the military government in Athens and asked Washington to "use its good influence to impress upon the Greek government leaders that the best interests of their country and its people require the prompt and orderly restoration of democracy and freedom."
In 1988, he helped start the presidential campaign of Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, Democrat of Massachusetts and a liberal Greek-American.
Three years later, under the archbishop's leadership, Orthodox churches briefly bolted from the National Council of Churches, complaining that the organization, based in Manhattan, was too liberal on issues like ordaining women, homosexuality and abortion.
After six months, the Orthodox churches returned to the fold. A few months after the reconciliation, the council announced a $10 million campaign named in honor of Archbishop Iakovos to raise money for ecumenical purposes.
Many honors and honorary degrees came his way. In 1980, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
His replacement is George Papageorgiu, who took the name Archbishop Spyridon. Archbishop Spyridon was born and educated in the United States but has spent much of his life in Greece and Italy.
"I will not remain still or I will die," Archbishop Iakovos said when retirement was thrust on him. "I will use the time I have left to further my ecumenical work. I will elucidate the positions of the Orthodox Church in America. It must be an active church and an activist church, because the world today needs to be rearranged."
Even as he aged, Archbishop Iakovos had a vibrancy about him, a way with children. On one occasion, he visited St. Basil's, a Greek Orthodox school in Garrison, N.Y. He met with the children there for a time, and after he left, one child, Marina Madiotis, 7, exclaimed: "He's my best friend. Make him come back!"