THE CHURCH AND 2021
The Church of Greece aspires to carry out a series of anniversary events during the year of the Lord 2021, in which 200 years are completed from the outbreak of the 1821 Revolution and the obtention of our National Palingenesia (i.e. Regeneration). The body responsible for the planning and implementation of these events all around Greece is, by command of the Holy Synod, the Special Synodic Committee on Cultural Identity, which assumed the eminent task of highlighting the importance of this particularly significant anniversary for our present and future, by thoroughly studying the lessons extracted from the sacrificial struggle of our glorious ancestors.
Within this framework, with the approval and wholehearted support of the Holy Synod, the Committee has planned ten annual International Scientific Colloquia to take place by the year 2021, having implemented eight of them to this day and having published the Proceedings of the first seven in respective volumes.
The Greek and the ecumenical aspects of the Revolution
By the same token, the Revolution touched and rallied different and diverging groups and social classes of Greeks, such as merchants, armatoloi (i.e. Christian Greek irregular soldiers) and klephts (i.e. highwaymen and warlike mountain-folk turned self-appointed anti-Ottoman insurgents), intellectuals, teachers, enlightened personalities of the Church, which, within the framework of the Ottoman state, constituted the leadership of the enslaved Greek nation, a leadership both accountable in the legal sense of the term and culturally and nationally unchallengeable. This realization constitutes a most persuasive proof of the importance of the commemoration of this event in tracing the future not only for today’s Greek society but also of modern man more broadly. The reason that caused the members of the Body of Christ to come together in an armed rebellion was the preservation of the supreme good of the key condition of truth of the human person, as this was understood equally in the word of the Gospel and crystallized in the imperative of Freedom, not merely as national delineation vis-à-vis the ‘Other’ nor as potential of unlimited choices on an individual level but as struggle against any condition of death.
The aspiration of the Church for 2021