PATRIARCH OF JERUSALEM CONGRATULATES ARCHBISHOP OF CYPRUS
By His letter, number 802 and dated 7th/20th of September, His Beatitude Theophilos, Our Father and Patriarch of Jerusalem, congratulates His Eminence Chrysostomos, Archbishop of Cyprus, on his recent Synodic Encyclical (see link: http://www.churchofcyprus.org.cy/article.php?articleID=3550 ) which was read out in Churches during the divine Liturgy of Sunday 15th September 2013, upon the start of the new school year 2013-4. Stressed in the Encyclical is the absolute need to preserve our Greek Orthodox identity and Greek language in order to maintain our creative and dignified life and presence in the process of history.
This is an excerpt from the letter of His Beatitude Theophilos:
[…] With great interest we watched on television the Synodic Encyclical of Your dearest and erudite Beatitude, read out in the holy churches of the Archbishopric of the Church of Cyprus, on the occasion of the beginning of the new school year 2013-4.
The Encyclical points out the danger of the attempted effort to replace, in the new syllabi of the Cyprus Ministry of Education, the lesson of Religious Education with Religiology; to emphasize the Cypriot idiom over the Greek language; to develop only the democratic attitude of students, and silence the values of our Christian Tradition, which preserve our Greek-Orthodox identity and hold our blessed nation in unbreakable cohesion and unity.
Warmly we congratulate Your Beatitude on this brave pastoral Ethnarchic Encyclical and wish You a wealth of support from above over many years to come, in order to complete the work of rebirth and renewal You have initiated in the Church of Cyprus, and to continue Your contribution to the just geographical unification of the suffering island of Cyprus, now divided by the Turkish occupation. […]
Your dear brother in Christ
THEOPHILOS III
Patriarch of Jerusalem