Washington, D.C., February 7, 2022
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“It’s a Christian truism that you can hold seemingly contradictory views. Christian moral teaching isn’t black and white,” says Archon George Demacopoulos, reflecting upon Archbishop Elpidophoros’ controversial March for Life statement from last month.
The statement from the head of the Greek Archdiocese garnered strong reactions on social media, with some condemning him as a pro-abortionist, and others praising him as a compassionate pro-lifer. Meanwhile, the official Greek Archdiocese Press Office account retweeted explicitly pro-abortion praise for the Archbishop’s statement.
And now the hierarch’s statement has been placed in the same light by The Washington Post in its article, “The threat to Roe v. Wade is driving a religious movement for reproductive choice.”
There is “an increasingly bold and more visible religious movement for reproductive choice, a hard shove back to the decades-old American narrative that a devout person sees abortion only as murder,” happening in America today, the outlet writes.
Against this background, the Post recalls:
Last month, the most visible leader of Orthodox Christianity in the country, Archbishop Elpidophoros, said at the antiabortion March for Life that the biblical Mary “freely chose” to bring Jesus into the world, “and God respected her freedom … we march not for coercion.”
… Comments like Elpidophoros’ argue for the theological right of women to bodily autonomy and health and say it’s theologically wrong to uniformly choose a fetus over a woman.
Speaking with The Washington Post, Demacopoulos, the co-founder of the Fordham Orthodox Christian Studies Center and official historian for the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle (the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in America), comments that abortion is legal in every major Orthodox country, and while the faith is against it, it also respects the autonomy of women. Church and state are generally separate in these countries and abortion is less a political issue, he says.
Christian morality falls into the gray area, Demacopoulos continues, analyzing the words of Abp. Elpidophoros:
“In the United States, the debate is very much positioned as these two goods at war with one another; we’re being asked to pick. And he’s saying that’s theologically wrong,” he said of Elpidophoros. “It’s a Christian truism that you can hold seemingly contradictory views. Christian moral teaching isn’t black and white.”
The Archon echoes his earlier statement offered on Twitter, that “Not everyone can handle paradox but it has been a central element of Christian thought since antiquity.”
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