"They’re successful, they’re well established. What I would advise them is to never forget that they’re Greeks and not to consider themselves Americans, because if they think they’ve become Americans they won’t achieve anything. They’re Greeks and they must remain Greeks, and they must support Greece and Cyprus and our race in general, and they have the ability to support it."
- Archbishop Chrysostom of Cyprus
when asked for advice to Greeks living in America
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Wow. That would be a prime example of the term.
ReplyDeleteIt is undoubtedly an expression of Greek nationalism, but I don’t think it counts as phyletism. Phyletism is a specifically ecclesiological heresy. There is no reference to the Church in this statement. It would be phyletistic if he were to assert that GOA should be exclusively or primarily for ethnic Greeks.
ReplyDeleteIt is very much "nationalism applied to ecclesiastical affairs" because his solution to heresy is to not be Americanized and maintain Greek national identity. It would be interesting to see what he would say about a Greek Church in America filled with xenoi who push for more pan-Orthodoxy over the hellenic one. I suspect he'd be quite perturbed.
DeleteByzTex: Unless there's another big Greek immigrant wave, the *xenoi* will dominate eventually. GOA will have to adapt -- or maybe they'll take the path of the Jerusalem Patriarchate with their Arab flock? More likely, now that I think about it.
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