civil authorities Archives - Page 2 of 8

Athenagoras: The Apostle of America to Orthodoxy

In a previous article, I shared some of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras' declarations of loyalty to the United States, documented in U.S. State Department files from 1950-51. Thanks to Aram Sarkisian, I have since obtained many more State Dept. documents from the rest of the 1950s. In two of these...

Secret 1950 State Dept Memo on Ecumenical Patriarch

Lately I've begun to publish a series of articles on the relationship between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the United States government during the early Cold War period. The most recent of those articles focused on various statements of loyalty made by Patriarch Athenagoras to U.S. State Department officials. As I...

Patriarch Athenagoras’ Declarations of Loyalty to America

Thanks to my colleague Aram Sarkisian, I recently came into possession of the first batch of a trove of U.S. State Department documents related to the Orthodox Church -- and particularly the Ecumenical Patriarchate -- in the early 1950s. It will take me months -- maybe years -- to sift...

There’s a Piece of the True Cross at the Truman Library in Missouri

Yesterday, I published an article about the ouster of Ecumenical Patriarch Maximos V. In that article, I mentioned that on February 10, 1947, the Greek Archbishop Athenagoras awarded President Harry Truman with a piece of the True Cross. I tracked down the cross, and it turns out that Truman held...

Ousting the Ecumenical Patriarch: the removal of Maximos V according to CIA records

World War II ended in 1945, and immediately, the United States and the Soviet Union began jockeying for leadership in the postwar world. The Soviets swept as many countries as possible into their orbit; meanwhile, the United States adopted the Truman Doctrine, a foreign policy based on the containment of...

Greek Archbishop to proto-CIA: “Your directions will be executed faithfully.”

It's long been an open secret that Patriarch Athenagoras' election as Ecumenical Patriarch was arranged, or at least facilitated, by the United States government. It's difficult to write about this as an historian, though, because smoking guns for that kind of thing tend to be kept under wraps. Occasionally, though,...

Did an Athonite monk visit President Ulysses S. Grant?

In 1869, a priest from Mount Athos paid a visit to the sitting President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. The Aug. 18, 1869 issues of both the North American and United States Gazette (published in Philadelphia) and the Philadelphia Inquirer ran identical blurbs: The Rev. Father Christopher, a Greek priest from...

Greek Orthodox Opposition to Slavery in 1862

This article has been updated and is available HERE.

The Battle of Pacific Street, Part 4: Did St. Raphael Try to Shoot a Policeman?

In my last article, I wrote about the "Battle of Pacific Street" -- the gunfight between Syrian Orthodox and Maronites in Brooklyn on the night of September 18, 1905. As I said before, St. Raphael Hawaweeny fled the scene and was chased (and then arrested) by a policeman, Officer Mallon....

The Battle of Pacific Street, Part 3: Gunshots

As we've been discussing in detail, in September 1905, New York's Syrian community was on the brink of war. On one side were the Orthodox, who rallied around their bishop, St. Raphael Hawaweeny. The saint himself opposed violence -- both violent acts and violent words -- but his attempts to...

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