Freemasonry at the highest levels of the Orthodox Church?

A big fat Greek wedding earlier this week looked like it was going to be the usual scene at first.  Join the queue to hand over your entrance fee to the bride and groom, pick up a lokoumi  tou gamou, quaff a quick bevvy and then split.  Duty done. 

But mingling among the throng of chicken kebab-gorging guests was a most amiable Greek Orthodox priest who’d flown all the way from the Antipodes to officiate at his sister-in-law’s wedding. 

Smiling in his robes, he introduced us to his bubbly wife and two delightful children and told us that when he wasn’t busy with church services, he and his wife ran a fish’n’chip shop.  We like this guy.

 

From cod and plaice, somehow the chat got onto the Orthodox hierarchy.  Quite casually he dropped a little bombshell:  

“We suspect that our last three Patriarchs were Freemasons.”

He was talking about the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is primus inter pares among all the other Patriarchs of the Orthodox Sees.  Bartholomew I was elected in 1991. His predecessor was Demetrios I (reigned 1972-1991) who succeeded Athenagoras I (reigned 1948-1972). 

Digging a little today, I find this from a Greek newspaper of 1964:  

“In Paris, a book entitled The Sons of Light was published, in which it is stated that Patriarch Athenagoras is a Freemason. On page 313, the Patriarch is called a Freemason. Since the Patriarch has not come forward to deny this, the scandal persists in the consciences of Christians who have read such frightful news in the daily Athenian press and in publications coming from America–a scandal not so much because of what the journalists report, but because the Patriarch himself, who seems indifferent about the matter or does not wish, for reasons best known to himself, to come forward and deny this report” (Χριστιανική Σπίθα [Christianiki Spitha], No. 268, January 1964).

Archbishop Gregory of Colorado, USA, writes that the leading Masonic periodical of Greece in 1977, "Pythagoras", stated that Athenagoras’s successor, Demetrios, was a Mason, and put him on the cover: 

Elsewhere, Archbishop Gregory says about the current Patriarch Bartholomew:  “Now, taking up where his Masonic predecessors left off, Bartholomew will more explicitly affirm [an Ecumenical agenda] and work for the practical realization of the unity of all men and all religions, condemning all efforts at proselytism as sin and working with pan-religious organizations for the employment of religion as a pliable propaganda tool and control mechanism of global government in the hands of the United Nations Organization ... As an adept Royal Arch Mason, [Bartholomew] knows how to ‘be all things to all men’ in a sense which the Apostle Paul definitely rejected.”

UN flag

Flag of the Greek Orthodox Church

Great Seal of the USA (obverse side)

Any similarities in the emblems?

In Orthodoxy, as in Catholicism, Freemasonry is forbidden for any member of the Church, whether priesthood, monastics, or laity.  

I disagree with the American cleric’s views on “Papist heresies”.  I think he has misunderstood the concept of sister Churches.  We Catholics refer benignly to our Orthodox brothers and sisters, but that is not the same as Ecumenism.   There is only One Church founded by St. Peter.  

Most glorious and most bountiful God, accept our praises and thanksgivings for your holy catholic church, the mother of us all who bear the name of Christ, for the faith which it has handed on in safety to our time, and the mercies by which it has enlarged and comforted the hearts of mankind; for the virtues which it has established in the world, and the holy lives by which it gives glory both to the world and to you; to you be all honour, might, majesty and dominion, O Blessed Trinity, now and forever.  Amen.

- Memorials