Late in my stay in Albania, sitting next to him one night as we drove along a narrow, winding mountain road, I asked if he could tell me about the prayer life that sustains him. "The roots must remain hidden", he replied, but after a long silence, he began to answer my question. "I always start with the Jesus Prayer - Lord Jesus
"Now they are subject to another propaganda - the idea that status in society equals having money. The new system says that the more money you have, the more important you are. But without of love and sacrifice, people become wild animals. Today, without religious communities, there is no hope. Otherwise they cannot understand sacrifice motivated by love, by belief in Christ. It is
Related to the task of restoring the physical church and the understanding of what it means to pray together is the re-formation of understanding the co-responsibility of each person in the Church for the life of the Church. "We have three basic principles that I speak of again and again. The first is local leadership, next local language, and finally local finance. It is
One of the most pressing tasks for Archbishop Anastasios was directing the effort to provide places for worship in a country in which churches had been methodically destroyed or made over into buildings with secular functions. Perhaps the archbishop's most visible achievement are all the churches that have been erected since he arrived. By the middle of 2001, 80 new churches had been built,
Not all Albania's calamities occurred before the end of the rigid Communism in 1991. In 1997, Albania was plunged into anarchy after the collapse of pyramid investment schemes into which many Albanian had risked and lost their life savings. "The country was on the verge of civil war", Archbishop Anastasios recalled. "It was a full disaster revealing all the fear and violence that
In January 1991, one month after the government in Tirana had allowed the formation of non-Communist political parties and two months after his 61st birthday, Archbishop Anastasios received a telephone call from Patriarch Dimitrios in Istanbul asking if he would be willing to go to Albania as Exarch to see what if anything was left of the Orthodox Church? It was at the time
Archbishop Anastasios has a white beard and moustache. Mainly bald, what hair he has retained is silver. His glasses have tortoise-shell frames with gold stems and exceptionally thick lenses, though what you notice most of all is the twinkle in his welcoming brown eyes. His words are often echoed by hand gestures. While he never seems to hurry, he leads a busy life, as
For the first half of the 20th century, the Orthodox Church was relatively inactive in missions. The great missionary efforts of the Russian Church came to a close as the communist curtain placed the church in bondage. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Churches of the Balkans struggled to overcome the effects of the previous five centuries of Muslim subjugation. Although the Orthodox lands of Greece, Romania,
Over the past thirty years, the impact and influence of Anastasios Yannoulatos cannot be overstated. As a young theologian in the 1950s, he had a vision to rekindle the missionary spirit of the Orthodox Church. Forty years later, it is clear he has achieved his goal. Indeed, missions truly has become part of the basic life of 20th century Orthodoxy. As the Archbishop notes
A new challenge confronted Bishop Anastasios with the coming of a new decade. In January 1991, the Patriarchate of Constantinople elected Anastasios to go to Albania as "Patriarchal Exarch" with the mandate to contact Orthodox people irrespective of their ethnic origin and re-establish the Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania. The Orthodox Church in Albania had been decimated after forty years of the most severe
