The Prophetic Voice of

Metropolitan Augustine Florina, Greece

There is no permanent place for a Priest who aspires to teaching the Gospel in the Church with a genuine spirit and who desires to become a Herald of the Truth in every direction; toward those above and those below the social pyramid.

The free expression of one’s  views, candor, the love of truth and public rebuke from the pulpit are construed as an insult and a deadly deviation punishable with all severity.

No radical message against evil, no man-loving movement, no initiative within the framework of sacred responsibility can be engaged in by the Priest who abides in bondage and whose bonds, on which malice and jealousy of petty superiors are based, contrive countless ways of eliminating the laborers of the Gospel whose only crime is candor.

Today’s preacher — if he desires to spend a quiet and calm life — must become a flatterer when he ascends the sacred pulpit, singing the praises of the bishops against his own conscience…Flattery corrupts the Church.

The Church of our day is in peril. It is endangered from without. It is endangered by the attacks of the atheists and heretics. However, it is endangered much more from within. It is endangered by the unbelief and the sin of her children.

Evil has been nourished and has become gigantic, to use another more vivid illustration. It has become as a many-headed hydra and is already spreading its tentacles and devouring many souls.

The beast is one but with many heads and devouring mouths, and all those who are caught and devoured end up in the same stomach — in eternal Hell. But some of the heads of the beast are more terrible than the others, because they are more seductive and their victims are more numerous, and the harm penetrates the whole body of the Church, even unto the extreme ligaments and joints, and it paralyzes and kills the spiritual life, and it transforms those believers into carnal Christians who should normally move and labor in the world as spiritual Christians.

Sin as a hydra is laying waste society and the Church of our day. Among the many countless heads of that hydra the most dangerous ones are: 1) Fornication, 2) Homosexuality, 3) Greed and 4) Factionalism.

An old garment — something worse — miserable rags’ Behold, the vestiture of our Church today — a Church which, unlike any other Church, as the Bride of Christ, vested in the golden garment of the virtues of Christ, radiated for one-thousand years in the East and in the West.

Rags! O, who will burn the rags and clothe her with her first garment?

For the restoration of the Church we need a struggle, many struggles of a creative spirit, of a spiritual restoration. Heading such a struggle we need —  I dare to say — an Orthodox Luther, a man of an illuminated intellect, of a pure Orthodox spirit, of extraordinary holiness, of a diamond-like character, joining together in himself the wisdom of a St. Basil, the militant spirit of a St. Athanasius and the revolutionary thrust of a St. John Chrysostom. Such a man could initiate a crusade in the cause of the catharsis and rebirth of our Church.

(Taken from Metropolitan Augustine’s book, Free and Living Church, pp. 7, 9, 43, 44)