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The Papal Claims and the First Millennium

Examining whether the Bishop of Rome exercised supreme jurisdiction over the entire Church in the first thousand years.

The early Church never recognized the Pope as having supreme jurisdiction over all Christians. The councils, the canons, and even early popes themselves rejected this idea. The claim of papal supremacy was formalized at Vatican I in 1870 — over 800 years after the Great Schism.

St. NektariosOrthodox Church

Divine Liturgy · Sundays · 10:00 AM CET

Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg

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Under the omophorion of the Church of the True Greek Orthodox Christians of Greece — the faithful who, since 1924, have held the ancestral Julian Calendar and the apostolic Faith unaltered, in canonical continuity with the pre-innovation Orthodox Church.

Holy New Martyr Catherine of Mandra

Holy New Martyr Catherine of Mandra

In Memory · †November 15/28, 1927

Saint Catherine of Mandra — First Martyr of the Old Calendar Struggle

In November 1927, three years after the Greek hierarchy imposed the Revised Calendar, police surrounded a church in Mandra, Attica, on the orders of the new-calendar Archbishop of Athens — to arrest the faithful's Old Calendar priest. Catherine Routis, a 27-year-old mother of two, formed a human wall with the other pious women. When a policeman raised his rifle-butt to strike Father Christopher, Catherine covered him with her body. She received the mortal blow to the back of her head. She died seven days later, whispering "Most Holy Theotokos…" Her last note to her husband asked him to care for their children — one four years old, the other a few months old.

A mother of two, aged 27, who shielded her priest with her own body and received the blow meant for him.

Glorified as a saint by the Holy Synod of the Church of the True Greek Orthodox Christians of Greece, September 6/19, 2014.

Read her full martyrdom →

St. Nektarios Orthodox Parish · Diocese of Richmond, UK

Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg