A Desperate Appeal (Against False Union with Rome) - Elder Philotheos Zervakos

Reader’s Note: As you listen to this Appeal written in 1968 to then Patriarch of Constantinople, His All-Holiness Athenagoras, notice how few words would need correction or updating in order to apply to our own day, now in the year 2021. “What do You think You have achieved by Your unique, but wholly uncanonical and unprecedented meeting with the Bishop of Rome? Most simply, You strengthened the Latin position on the schism. And what did Your melodramatic, far-fetched salutation, Your clinging embraces, and Your uncanonical exchange of gifts achieve? Precisely to increase the danger—the danger that the awareness the faithful now have that Papists are heretics will be blunted. Dialogue, prayers together, receiving of gifts, and “liberalizing“ innovations are unforgivable according to Orthodox prescription, because they adulterate and change what has been transmitted through the holy Apostles, the holy Fathers, and the Ecumenical and Local Councils.” “Glory be to God, there exist in this