Mount Athos Questions Esphigmenou Visits

The Holy Community of Mount Athos has written the Ecumenical Patriarchate with concerns over recent visits of Constantinopolitan Orthodox metropolitans to the Esphigmenou Monastery, which ceased commemorating the ecumenical patriarch 38 years ago for his modernism and ecumenism and submitted to the jurisdiction of the Old Calendrist Genuine Orthodox Church of Greece (under Archbishop Kallinikos (Sarantopoulos)). The Ecumenical Patriarchate has affirmed its support for the Esphigmenou brotherhood it set up after the original brotherhood's break with Constantinople and claims it is simply exploring ways in which the schism could be healed. More on this here. More on the Esphigmenou Monastery's situation can be found here.

New First Hierarch of the 'Genuine Orthodox Church of Greece'

Also under the heading of old news, the Genuine Orthodox Church of Greece has a new first hierarch, Archbishop Callinicus of Athens. His enthronement was celebrated on 17 October in Athens' Church of St. Athanasius.

The Genuine Orthodox Church is a rigorist Old Calendrist schism and one of the larger Old Calendrist movements in Greece, deriving its hierarchy from the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR) and the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in Western Europe. Although the first Greek Orthodox Old Calendrist bishop in North America, Bishop Peter (Astyfides) of Astoria of the ROCOR, eventually joined this synod prior to his death, its presence in North America is rather limited numerically.