PIRAEUS 2012
OPENING ADDRESS
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
by
His Eminence Serafeim, Metropolitan of Piraeus
Your Grace, Bishop Meliton
of Marathon, representative of His Beatitude Ieronymos II, Archbishop of Athens
and All Greece,
Your Eminence Damianos,
Archbishop of Sinai, Faran and Raïtho,
Your Eminence Pavlos,
Metropolitan of Glyfada,
Your Eminence Serafeim, Metropolitan of Kythira,
Archimandrite Damianos, Exarch of the Holy Sepulchre in
Greece and representative of His Beatitude Theofilos, Patriarch of Jerusalem,
Honourable Minister, representative of the Prime Minister
and the Government,
Very Reverend and Reverend Gentlemen,
Monastic Brothers and Sisters,
Honourable members of the Body of Christ,
Blessed Nikodimos, the
Athonite, that fragrant blossom of the grace of God and of the tradition of the
Kollyvades, wrote the astonishing work “Invisible Warfare” in which he
repeatedly refers to the debilitating labours of the vengeful and murderous
devil, of whom Saint Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, so eloquently spoke:
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in the heavenly realms…” (Eph. 6, 12). The attack and battle against the truth is being
intensified in our own apocalyptic days, when darkness has appeared as light
and light as darkness. It is being promoted within the walls of the Church,
with the cultivation and projection of ideas supposedly of theological
perspicacity and the contextual “updating” of the truth, the aim of which is
revision, negative transformation, banishment of true theological dialogue,
reinforcement of error and the conversion of the Church’s work of salvation
into a secular system of social principles which will embrace all the
tendentious contradictions of the
postlapsarian reality: a new and extremely dangerous process of structuring a
supposedly new theological discourse.
