Abbess Gabrielia: Her Life and Teachings

Gerontissa (Abbess) Gabrielia was born in Constantinople a hundred years ago on October 2/15, 1897. She grew up in the city until her family moved to Thessaloniki in 1923. She went to England in 1938 and stayed there throughout the Second World War. She trained as a chiropodist and physiotherapist. In 1945 she returned to Greece where she worked with the Friends Refugee Mission and the American Farm School in Thessalonika in early post-war years. Later she opened her own therapy office in Athens until 1954. In March of that year her mother died and the office was closed. Sister Lila left Greece and traveled overland to India where she worked with the poorest of the poor, even the lepers, for five years.

It was not until 1959 that she went to the Monastery of Mary and Martha in Bethany, Palestine, to become a nun. When she arrived she asked Fr. Theodosius the chaplain for a rule of prayer. Fr. Theodosius was somewhat surprised to find that she could read even ancient Byzantine Greek. Fr. Theodosius said, “The great elders that we hear about no longer exist. I certainly am not one. You came here to save your soul. If I start giving you rules, you will lose you soul and I will as well. But here is Fr. John. He will be your elder.” So for her first year in the monastery he set her to reading only the Gospels and St. John Climacus (it should be noted that at that time the Ladder had not been published in modern Greek).

She was three years in Bethany. In April, 1962, word came that Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople sought to send an Orthodox monastic to Taize in France. Sister Gabrielia went by way of Taize (she spoke fluent French from childhood) to America.

In 1963 she was back in Greece. The Gerontissa was tonsured to the Small Schema by Abbot Amphilochios (Makris) on Patmos in the Cave of St. Anthony under the Monastery of Evangelismos just before she and the nun Tomasina left again for India. Elder Amphilochios was enthusiastic at the idea a nun who would be open to the an active outreach in the world. In India she was for three year in Nani Tal in Uttar Pradesh where Fr. Lazarus Moore was the priest and where he consulted the Gerontissa in his translations of the Psalter and the Fathers. Between 1967 and 1977 the Gerontissa traveled in the Mission field of East Africa, in Europe including visiting old friends and spiritual fathers Lev Gillet and Sophrony of Essex, again to America, and briefly in Sinai where Archbishop Damianos was attempting to reintroduce monasticism for women.

Orthodox Saints and the Ecumenical Movement

For Christians, the criterion of truth is fidelity to Christ and the faith that was “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

The Saints, being wholly united to Christ by the Spirit in his holy Church, in turn become the empirical datum par excellence by which truth is measured. This is why, for Orthodox Christians, the teachings of the Holy Fathers are received as an authority to be followed and believed, far and above whatever opinions any individual or group may have.

I offer this foundational belief as a preface to discussing the issue of relations between the Orthodox Church and the See of Rome, which in light of the forthcoming Apostolic Pilgrimage is a topic generating some discussion in ecclesiastical circles.

Since Vatican II, Rome has developed the ecclesiological notion that our schism is a matter of separated ‘sister churches,’ and that the Orthodox Church ‘lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord’s Eucharist.’[1]. Does the Orthodox Church share this understanding of the schism and the status of the Roman Catholic church? To answer that question, we must turn to her Saints and synodal decrees. And when we do, the answer is a rather unambiguous ‘no’.

When we examine the controversies with Rome in the lives of St. Photios the Great and St. Mark of Ephesus (in the ninth and fifteenth centuries respectively), we find clear repudiations of Rome for her heresies—so long as she holds to them—and in the latter case, a rejection of the possibility for union with her for that very reason. In the eyes of the Orthodox Church—who not only canonized these men, but deemed them ‘Pillars of Orthodoxy’—their teaching with respect to Rome was vindicated over against papism, filioquism, and ecumenism. St. Photios’ teaching against the Filioque and papal supremacy was formally affirmed by the Church at the ecumenical Council of Constantinople (A.D. 879–880), and St. Mark was vindicated and affirmed in the Church’s rejection of the false union of Basel-Ferrara-Florence.