The first lighting of St Nicholas Shrine, September 11, 2021. Fr Alex Karloutsos stands to the right of Archbishop Elpidophoros. (Photo: Orthodox Observer / Brittainy Newman)
This article is the fourth in a series on Fr Alex Karloutsos, based on many hours’ worth of interviews I did with him in 2024. Here are the previous three installments:
The Father Alex Karloutsos Origin Story
Karloutsos and the Rise of Bartholomew
Father Alex and the Mother Church
By 2001, the brief tenure of Archbishop Spyridon had come to an end, and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America was now led by Archbishop Demetrios. Fr Alex Karloutsos was, by this point, a parish priest in the Hamptons, on Long Island. No longer an exile, he had returned to Archdiocesan work as Executive Director of Leadership 100, the major endowment fund of the Archdiocese and as the Archbishop’s representative to the White House and Congress.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Fr Karloutsos and his wife Xanthi were in his car driving to the Archdiocesan headquarters in New York City, when he got a call from his secretary who told him that a plane had just flown into one of the Twin Towers. Karloutsos immediately called Archbishop Demetrios and the Archdiocesan VP / billionaire Michael Jaharis, who were in Boston. “I said, ‘Don’t get on a plane.’ And then all communications broke down. I tried to get into the city, but I couldn’t, so we went to our son’s apartment in Astoria and saw Tower Two fall.” His next move was to organize a church service at his parish, to pray in the midst of the crisis. “I thought we’d get twenty people, but it was as if it was an Easter night. It was Pascha, but it felt more like Holy Friday than Holy Saturday.”
Returning home after the service, Karloutsos got a phone call: it was the Port Authority, for whom Fr Karloutsos served as a chaplain. They needed him to come in to help with the relief efforts, to comfort victims. Karloutsos wondered how he’d possibly get to the relief site, since all the roads were closed. He was told, “Go on the left side of the road and show your badge at every checkpoint.” So Karloutsos prepared to head out, and he let his wife Xanthi know he was leaving. “She said, ‘I’m going with you.’ I said, ‘You can’t come with me.’” But she insisted, and he agreed. “I had to listen to my wife,” he told me. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be the only guy with his wife near him!’ But I married a Greek from Northern Epiros, you know?”
Every ten miles of their drive, they had to stop at a checkpoint, and Fr Karloutsos showed his badge and was allowed to continue. “I’ve been in motorcades with Presidents of the United States, but this was different. This was sailing all the way through nothing – no one’s on the road. They cleared it; they closed everything down. We went down to where St Nicholas [Greek Orthodox Church] was [at Ground Zero], and it looked like a Godzilla or King Kong movie. FBI, CIA, all these different police kind of jackets, uniforms, fire trucks, everything smoking. We went to the Holland Tunnel, and there were these two very, very large garbage trucks. They were bigger than tanks. You could not get through. So I went to the Holland Tunnel and showed them my badge, and they opened up so I could drive through.”
George Tenet, CIA Director and Greek Orthodox Christian
They arrived at the makeshift relief site. “People were crying because we lost 37 policemen from the Port Authority. I said, ‘What do you want us to do?’ I was told, We don’t want you to do too much. Just look holy. Just help us. Pray for us, talk to us, touch us. We just need to feel good, that there’s hope.” So I went around, talked with people, did what I could, tried to comfort. I was shocked when I saw an Orthodox Jewish rabbi comforting the wife of the Superintendent of Police who had just died. She was Catholic, he was actually holding her. Love knew no bounds that night, and I witnessed humanity’s finest hour in the midst of the worst inhumanity imaginable.”
In the coming days, Fr Karloutsos helped Archbishop Demetrios and other Orthodox bishops visit the site – including the destroyed Greek Orthodox church of St Nicholas, which was the only house of worship destroyed on 9/11. Decades earlier, Fr Karloutsos’s own father – himself a priest – had served at that parish.
On September 14, President George W. Bush stood on the rubble at Ground Zero and famously declared, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Fr Karloutsos was there, just a few yards away from the President. Then, Bush and other dignitaries bowed their heads as Cardinal Egan offered a hope-filled prayer. After this, everyone drove down to Washington, DC for a reception of religious leaders. (“You could only drive, not fly,” Karloutsos explains.)
Fr Karloutsos arranged for a meeting with CIA Director George Tenet, who is Greek Orthodox. “We went to the CIA and the Archbishop prayed over George. He was shaken up, but we prayed with him, and then the Archbishop had a private meeting with the President in the Oval Office. There were about ten religious leaders there. The Mormons were left out. I remember sitting with the head of the Mormon church, and he was asking how my archbishop got in there. And then they went into the Roosevelt Room, and the President bowed his head and asked the Archbishop to pray over him. Oh wow! So at the time we needed help as a nation, it was an Orthodox prayer that strengthened the President of the United States.”
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The original St Nicholas Church at 155 Cedar Street, with the Twin Towers in the background.
Beyond the immediate response to the tragedy, Fr Karloutsos found himself running point on the effort to rebuild St Nicholas at Ground Zero. Archbishop Demetrios expected to rebuild at the exact location where the old church had stood – 155 Cedar Street. Fr Karloutsos disagreed. “It became apparent to me that they were making a park, Liberty Park, that would be a hub, like the Acropolis in Athens. 155 Cedar was on the wrong side of the street. I said, we should move it to a new site, 130 Liberty – that’s the best side of the street, the prime spot. I told the Archbishop, just trust me. And that’s what we did. Our old property was 1450 square feet. Our new property is 4,500 square feet with 7,000 square feet of landscaping complementing our complex.
This began when George Pataki was Governor of New York. “But then the administrations changed,” Karloutsos told me. “There were different Port Authority Directors, and some didn’t want us at Ground Zero at all. Some of them were atheists. At one point, after a couple more Governors and Executive Directors, we were told by Executive Director Chris Ward that they’re going to take the land using eminent domain.”
Fr Alex Karloutsos and Archbishop Elpidophoros meeting with Governor Andrew Cuomo and staff at the Greek Archdiocese headquarters
But then, an opportunity: “Andrew Cuomo was running for governor. I agreed with four guys – John Catsimatidis, Dennis Mehiel, Jim Chanos, and George Tsunis – who said , we’ve got to support Andrew, and we’ve got to go all-in for the Shrine at Ground Zero. So then I got a phone call, I think it was from George Tsunis or Dennis Mehiel one of them, and they said, ‘There’s going to be a breakfast for Andrew Cuomo in East Hampton, at Jim Chanos’s house – you have to come.’ I said, ‘When is it?’ ‘Sunday morning.’ I said, ‘Sunday morning, are you nuts? You think I’m going to miss liturgy?’ He says, ‘Father Alex, he’s going to be there from ten to twelve.’ I thought, ten to twelve, ten to twelve… I said, ‘You know what I can do? I’ll receive communion and then just take off. I’ll do the liturgy, then take off. Just keep Andrew there.’ So I got there and only the Greeks are left with him. He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Father. They wouldn’t let me leave. They said that you’re the one who’s going to tell me what the Greek Orthodox would like.’ So I told him about our house of worship, and how we’d like it built at Ground Zero, and how the director is trying to throw us out on eminent domain. Cuomo said, ‘Let me think about it.’
“So then there are two or three more fundraisers, and every time I went to a fundraiser, Andrew would say, ‘Father Alex, what would you like?’ Everybody would turn to me, and I’d say, ‘Well, we’d like to build the church, and I’d like you to fire Chris Ward, the Director of the Port Authority.’ So it goes on for the [campaign] season, and it looks like he’s definitely going to win. And we’re doing the last fundraiser at Dennis Mehiel’s house on 95th Street, and I got up and Andrew said, ‘Yes, Father Alex?’ – now, he knew what I was going to say – ‘What would you like?’ I said, ‘I would like to have St Nicholas Shrine built, and I’d like you to fire Chris Ward.’ After I finished, he said, ‘I’d like to talk with you privately.’ Then he said to me, ‘I want you to tell the Archbishop that we are going to rebuild St Nicholas Shrine. And you should know, my birthday December 6, the feast day of St Nicholas, and yes, I have the balls to fire Chris Ward.’” Cuomo won the gubernatorial election and kept his word, firing Ward within the year.
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By this point, a decade had passed since 9/11. The St Nicholas building project dragged on slowly, with a lot of difficulties. Fr Karloutsos quickly raised $25 million, giving the Archdiocese a total of $40 million to spend on the project. He recalls, “We thought the thing would be about $25-35 million, but as the bids went out and we saw Santiago Calatrava’s design, what he built was going to be a lot more, maybe about $60 million. We’re building. I’m working with them. I got architects, I got to get it all done. Then I asked Dennis Miehl to handle the political process. I was basically coordinating different people, but the one who took over monitoring the funds and spending the funds and working with the different elements was Jerry Dimitriou.”
What followed has been pretty well-documented in the Greek-American media: millions of dollars went missing from the St Nicholas Shrine fund, and the entire project was in jeopardy. Archbishop Demetrios was replaced by the new Archbishop Elpidophoros. And Fr Karloutsos needed to raise a lot more money, to account for massive cost increases due to the delays. In what is unquestionably the most impressive fundraising achievement in Orthodox history, Karloutsos worked with Michael Psaros, under the guidance of the Archbishop, to raise $55 million for the Shrine over a 55-day stretch in 2019. As they neared the end of that period, still running short of their target, Karloutsos came up with an idea: he convinced the Port Authority to let the Archdiocese put a donor wall outside of the church. “As soon as we announced that there would be a donor wall in Liberty Park forever, we raised $12 million in 12 days.”
The Shrine was consecrated on the Fourth of July, 2022.