First, the calendar change was brought about by an anti-canonical act and in an anti-Orthodox manner. (Archimandrite Gabriel of the Sacred Monastery of Dionysiou, 1997, and others).
Others, from within the State Church of Greece or new calendar church if that makes for clarity, have advocated for a return to the Church calendar, including Archbishop Dorotheos of Athens, Archbishop Chrysostomos 11 of Athens, and Metropolitan Augoustinos (Kantiotis) of Florina (the eldest of the bishops). Archbishop Dorotheos said of the those adhering to the Church calendar, "The Old Calendar Movement is neither a heresy nor a schism, and those who follow it are neither heretics nor schismatics, but are Orthodox Christians". But for his removal by the colonels following their coup d'etat in 1967, Archbishop Chrysostomos had pledged to restore the traditional Church calendar to the Church of Greece.
I for one find the ready application of labels such as schismatic to one group or another like much else posted subjective and judgemental. Now if I am asked do I prefer this or that then a subjective statement should pose no problem, but for any of us to arbitarily decide who is and who is not 'in schism' appears to be 'spiritually dangerous'.
Despite many stays in Greece and much study of the matter I am more perplexed by the issues than before starting to try and make sense of this tradegy within Orthodoxy.
As I have written elsewhere there appear to be two outspoken minorities among us, whom we might refer to as:
The Uncanonical canonicals and the canonical Uncanonicals.
God will in His good time seperate the wheat from the tares, it is not for us to pre-judge that surely?
