Elder Ephraim of Arizona — The American Period

Elder Ephraim Philotheites brought to North America the spiritual tradition he had received beside St. Joseph the Hesychast on the Holy Mountain. He first came to Canada in 1979, for surgery. He returned year after year to hear confessions and to give counsel, and from 1989 he began to found monasteries. Through the seventeen communities counted by his biography, he contributed decisively to the growth of Athonite monasticism in North America. Thousands of people learned there the Jesus Prayer, the night vigil, and frequent confession.

This work was accompanied by disagreements with the hierarchy, by litigation, by press investigations, and by testimonies from former disciples and their families. In 2012 Scott Nevins, a young man who had lived six years at St. Anthony’s Monastery, lost his life after a suicidal act near it. Some of these matters were clarified; others remain open.

The article follows both the Elder’s spiritual work and these controversies, keeping the distinction between established facts, testimony, and interpretation. Reverence for Elder Ephraim is not the same thing as the administrative responsibility of the monasteries. That must be examined for each person and each institution separately.

The sanctity of Elder Ephraim is not judged here: its recognition belongs to the Church, through the synodal authority appointed for this. One question remains, and the article does not answer it: what relation there was, especially in the last years, between his spiritual guidance and the governance of the monasteries.

Part I — From Volos to Arizona (1927–2004)

1. Athonite formation and work

Elder Ephraim was born on 24 June, the day the Church celebrates the nativity of St. John the Baptist, in Volos, to Demetrios and Victoria Moraitis. The year is not the same in the ecclesiastical sources: the biography of St. Anthony’s Monastery gives 1928, while the December 2019 announcement of the Metropolis of San Francisco gives 1927 and states that he reposed at the age of ninety-two. At baptism he received the name Ioannis.

The family was poor and devout. His mother prayed through the nights with tears and made countless prostrations; the monastery’s biography recounts that she had a vision of a star leaving their house toward the Holy Mountain, and a voice saying that of her three children only this one would live — which she later understood as a prophecy that her son would become a monk. The young Ioannis’s spiritual father in Volos was Father Ephraim Karagiannis, who had himself lived in the brotherhood of St. Joseph the Hesychast, at the Skete of St. Basil on Athos, and had afterwards become a hieromonk; he left the Holy Mountain and settled in Volos. When Ioannis began to ask his blessing to go to Athos, his spiritual father urged him to remain in the region of Volos: he hoped to build a monastery and wanted the young man beside him. With the years, Ioannis understood that the monastery would not be built and resolved to go — and his mother and his spiritual father directed him to St. Joseph, Father Ephraim’s own former elder.

So it was that in 1947 he found himself on the boat to Athos. The monastery’s biography recounts that, on his arrival at the harbour of St. Anne’s Skete, he was met by Father Arsenios, St. Joseph’s fellow-ascetic, who asked him: “Are you not Iannaki from Volos?” — for the night before St. Joseph had received a vision of the Forerunner, who told him: “I bring you a lamb. Place him in your fold.”

Under the guidance of St. Joseph the Hesychast, the young man was tonsured into the great schema on 13 July 1948, after nine months of obedience, receiving the name Ephraim. He lived at Little St. Anne’s until 1953, when the harsh climate of the place had weakened the brotherhood’s health and they moved to Nea Skiti, into cells received from the Monastery of St. Paul.

In those years the brotherhood had no priest of its own, and St. Ephraim of Katounakia came several times a week to serve the Liturgy for them; but since he was under another elder and could not come at will, St. Joseph arranged for Ephraim to be ordained deacon and Charalambos priest — in 1952, according to the monastery’s biography; the Life of St. Joseph gives October 1951 for Charalambos’s ordination. Father Ephraim would be ordained priest at Nea Skiti.

St. Joseph himself was an unordained monk: his guidance, the evening disclosure of thoughts, the teaching of the prayer of the mind, are something other than the Mystery of Confession and priestly absolution — a distinction to be kept in mind wherever the phrase “spiritual father” appears below.

At Little St. Anne’s the ascetic rule was the severe Athonite one: a single meal after sunset, night vigils, countless prostrations, the prayer of the mind for hours on end, silence. At Nea Skiti, the monastery’s biography says, the rule of work and food was eased somewhat, but the inner labour and the vigils remained. He cooked for the brotherhood outdoors, over an open fire, at times in wind that scattered his pots.

St. Joseph reposed on 15 August 1959 by the Athonite calendar — 28 August by the civil one — leaving his disciples the command to separate and each to form his own brotherhood. Father Ephraim thus remained the elder of the cell of the Annunciation. The brotherhood grew, and in 1968 it moved to the Skete of Provata, to the cell of St. Artemios.

Among those who struggled in those years under St. Joseph was also the future Elder Joseph of Vatopedi (†2009) — a fellow-ascetic of Father Ephraim under the same elder, who after 1959 formed his own brotherhood.

In 1973 the monks of Philotheou Monastery — one of the twenty sovereign monasteries of Athos, at that time nearly empty and still idiorrhythmic — asked Father Ephraim to come with his brotherhood, so that the monastery might be repopulated and set once more upon the cenobitic order. At first he did not wish to leave the stillness of St. Artemios for the cares of a monastery; then, the biography says, he consented. On 1 October 1973 he was enthroned abbot of Philotheou, a service he bore until 1991.

The brotherhood grew quickly — eighty monks by 1981. In that year Konstamonitou Monastery asked for help in its turn, and the Elder sent twenty monks. The same happened in 1983 with Xeropotamou and in 1986 with Karakallou. Four Athonite monasteries were thus brought back to life.

By the early 1980s Father Ephraim was one of the foremost spiritual fathers of Athos, known through the disciples he had formed and the brotherhoods he guided. The tradition received from St. Joseph the Hesychast passed on through a living channel: Joseph → Ephraim → Ephraim’s disciples.

2. The road to America and the Greek brotherhoods

Orthodox monasticism had been present in North America for more than eight decades: St. Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania was founded in 1905. According to Father Ephraim’s biography, however, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese had a single monastery before 1989. It was within this frame that his work developed.

In 1979 he went to Canada for medical care. While he was there he was called to hear confessions and give counsel in churches and in homes, and people begged him to return year by year. He understood, the monastery’s biography says, that this was the will of God, and he began to come also to parishes in the United States, returning annually at the call of Greek families who lacked spiritual guidance.

A leading part in the founding of the American monasteries was played by the sisterhood at Portaria, near Volos, governed by Gerontissa Makrina. Her connection with Father Ephraim had begun long before the monastery existed.

Maria Vassopoulou, the future Gerontissa Makrina, was born in 1921 in Asia Minor, near Smyrna. Her family fled to Greece and settled in the refugee camp at Nea Ionia, in Volos. Orphaned of both parents at about nine, she worked from childhood in other people’s houses, and sent her younger brother to a relative near Thessaloniki.

While serving in this way she came to know Father Ephraim Karagiannis, a hieromonk from the brotherhood of St. Joseph the Hesychast, from whom she learned the prayer of the heart. She had the same spiritual father as Victoria Moraitis, Father Ephraim’s mother, with whom she formed a friendship: they prayed together at night, and Victoria would send Maria food through her son, Iannaki. Other young women who wished to become nuns gathered around Maria. They lived in the world, but they laboured as in a brotherhood — fasting, vigils, thousands of prostrations, the services in common.

In 1952 Father Ephraim Karagiannis was slandered and forced to leave Volos, and his spiritual daughters were left without a guide. They then wrote themselves to St. Joseph the Hesychast, asking him to direct them. He accepted, and guided them by letter for seven years, until his repose. It was he also who, after prayer, appointed Maria to be the abbess of the sisterhood; she resisted out of humility, until St. John the Forerunner appeared to her in a dream, holding out the staff to her.

Toward the end of his life St. Joseph entrusted the guidance of the sisterhood to his disciple Ephraim Moraitis, the future abbot of Philotheou. In 1962 the property at Portaria was purchased, where the Monastery of the Theotokos the Directress was built. In 1963 Father Ephraim tonsured his mother Victoria a nun with the name Theophano, and shortly afterwards Maria with the name Makrina.

The testimonies gathered at the monastery on Thasos recount that Nun Theophano did not move at once to the monastery: her husband had died, but her youngest son, Christos, was not yet married, and she remained with him until he married. She was Maria’s sponsor at her tonsure, so that Gerontissa Makrina regarded her as her spiritual mother; for years they shared the same cell at Portaria and prayed together at night, as they had once done in Volos. She remained there until 1983, when her health worsened and her son moved her to the Monastery of the Archangel Michael on Thasos, where the climate suited her better. On 20 December of that same year, at ninety-two, she suffered a stroke and was left bedridden. She lived about two years more, lucid, and reposed on 27 February 1986, at ninety-five. She was buried on Thasos; her head is kept there in a reliquary. In Father Ephraim’s spiritual family she is called “Grandmother,” as St. Joseph the Hesychast is called “Grandfather.”

From the sisterhood at Portaria, nuns later went to the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner in Serres and to that of the Archangel Michael on Thasos. From these three Greek brotherhoods would come, in their turn, the nuns who would populate the American monasteries.

The first monastery founded by Father Ephraim in America opened in 1989: the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. From Portaria there came, in 1989, Mother Taxiarchia — Aphrodite Doukas, born in 1938 at Drakia, in Pelion — accompanied by one other sister; she was the first abbess. Her heart had been weak from her youth: she had once come to America for valve surgery and had promised the Mother of God then that, if she recovered, she would serve six months in a monastery. She recovered, entered Portaria in 1971, and never returned to her native village. She reposed on 3 August 1994, after about five years in America; the sisterhood commemorates her on that day.

Concerning the call to found monasteries in America, sources close to the monastery recount a vision: St. Joseph the Hesychast is said to have appeared to the Elder and poured oranges into his lap, telling him that he would build as many monasteries as he saw oranges. The details differ from one account to another — Alexandra Lagos tells it one way, Abbess Nikolaya of Maloyaroslavets another, with different words and a different number. These are accounts of piety, handed down through disciples.

3. The jurisdictional disagreement (1989–1996)

The official biography of St. Anthony’s Monastery says that Father Ephraim began founding monastic communities in North America at the call of the Orthodox faithful and with the blessing of the bishops of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Of any passage under another jurisdiction it says nothing.

Other sources — among them some close to the monastery — describe a far harder road. Archbishop Iakovos (Koukouzis) of America, primate between 1959 and 1996, is said not to have given him the blessing to found further monasteries after Saxonburg. Hierodeacon Seraphim Molibog, a monk at St. Anthony’s, recounts:

“They did not allow him to open other monasteries. They even tried to expel him from the country. Then he — I am sure by divine revelation — passed under the jurisdiction of ROCOR. The ROCOR Synod received Father Ephraim with great love and told him: ‘Father, open monasteries and bring monks and nuns from Greece to populate them.'”

The account is found also in other presentations of the episode, which add what followed: the Episcopal Synod of the Archdiocese resisted at first, the Elder sought the help of the Russian Church Outside Russia and was received — in his own words, “with great love and genuine understanding” — and after a year, under the personal patronage of the Patriarch of Constantinople, the matter was resolved. He returned honourably to his mother Church and received the right to found monasteries, which he then raised each time with the permission of the local Greek bishop.

There is also a third version, hostile. A. P. Cromidas reproduces a comment attributed to Theodore Kalmoukos and published in The National Herald in 1998; the original issue could not be consulted:

“He first joined the Russian synod in exile, after receiving a ‘directive’ from God as he proclaimed at the time. However, when he was threatened by the Ecumenical Patriarch that he would be defrocked, he received another ‘directive’ from God and abandoned the Russians.”

And Religioscope, presenting the research of Frances Kostarelos, summarises it thus: “In the 1990s, he briefly joined the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) due to its strong monastic direction, but later returned to the Patriarchate of Constantinople.”

The accounts differ as to the circumstances of the return under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Molibog, Kostarelos, and Kalmoukos mention the passage through ROCOR, while the monastery’s official biography does not discuss the episode.

Molibog also attributes to the Elder a sentence that has remained: “If it had not been for the protests, I would have remained in the Russian Church Outside Russia.” We do not have its text in any writing of the Elder himself; as rendered, the account presents the protests and the promises of support as the grounds of the return. How heavily this weighed upon the years that followed, the sources do not say.

Kostarelos also records that Father Ephraim “is alleged to have been removed” from the abbacy of Philotheou — a formulation that renders a reported claim, not a finding of her own. The monastery’s biography, however, gives the abbacy as lasting until 1991. The date on which the abbacy ended does not, by itself, clarify the circumstances of his departure.

4. The building (1995–2004)

In May 1995 several nuns from Portaria left for America. Gerontissa Makrina had for years resisted requests to give more sisters — “As long as I live, I cannot give any more!” — and relented only after the repose of Gerontissa Taxiarchia in 1994. At the parting she wept: “What mother has cared as I have? So many children to raise, to educate — and now you have taken them from my hands!” She reposed a month later, on 4 June 1995, after suffering from lung and heart conditions.

In July 1995 six monks from Philotheou arrived in the Arizona desert, on a tract of 106 acres near Florence, in the vicinity of the state prison. Here the Monastery of St. Anthony the Great would be built.

On 17 January 1996, the feast of St. Anthony, Archimandrite Paisios was enthroned as the monastery’s first abbot, under a blue tarpaulin stretched over the unfinished church. Metropolitan Anthony of San Francisco presided. From that moment the daily governance of the monastery belonged to Abbot Paisios, under the spiritual guidance of Father Ephraim.

In 1996 Archbishop Iakovos retired. His successor, Archbishop Spyridon (Papageorgiou), a lover of monasticism, supported him fully, and in the three years of his administration eight monasteries were opened, by Molibog’s count. In 1999 Spyridon was forced to resign following an internal crisis of the Archdiocese.

St. Anthony’s Monastery counts seventeen monasteries founded between 1989 and 2004 — ten of nuns and seven of monks. The Metropolis of San Francisco likewise gives seventeen in its announcement at the Elder’s repose. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos writes of nineteen, and other testimonies speak of “almost twenty.” The sources use different counts; the criterion of each could not be established.

The speed of the building raised from the outset a question the official sources have not clarified: where the money came from. The monastery’s sources say that people began to donate money and materials. The question would return, years later, in press investigations and in requests for transparency — treated below in the chapters on the Quantlab case and the OCL resolutions.

Part II — The documented controversies (1999–2017)

5. The report of the five metropolitans (January 1999)

On 12 January 1999 the five metropolitans then serving in the Archdiocese of America — Iakovos of Chicago, Anthony of San Francisco, Maximos of Pittsburgh, Methodios of Boston, and Isaiah of Denver — sent Patriarch Bartholomew and the Holy Synod of Constantinople a fifteen-page report on the crisis in the Archdiocese. It was published in The National Herald in Greek on 16–17 January 1999.

The report of the five hierarchs concerns the administration of Archbishop Spyridon and the divisions within the Archdiocese; it is not a synodal decision against Father Ephraim. The Elder’s name appears in a single complaint, the eighth in the list, on page 15:

“Fanatical Adherents and Super-Orthodoxy (Fundamentalism). Contributing factors to the divisions among our Christians are certain excesses, not necessarily of the Archbishop’s or Monk Ephraim’s making, but linked to them because some of the clergy and laity, for their own purposes, invoke their authority. Conservatism is one thing, fanaticism another. Traditionalism is one thing, ‘super-Orthodoxy’ and ‘fundamentalism’ other things.”

The hierarchs thus distinguished between the two men and those who invoked their authority. They named a real problem — division in the parishes, fanaticism — but did not automatically ascribe it to Father Ephraim: their wording is that the excesses were not necessarily of his making.

Four years later, The National Herald of 5–6 April 2003 reported the discussions of the Eparchial Synod concerning the monasteries founded in America and wrote — according to the contemporary reproduction by A. P. Cromidas, through whom we cite this passage — that it was said there that “a kind of fundamentalist movement with a cultic philosophy is being advanced by the followers of Ephraim and is having an impact among the clergy and the students of theology at Holy Cross.” This is a newspaper’s account of a synodal discussion — not a decision, and not the text of the 1999 report.

Between 1999 and 2003, then, the problem was named twice within the American hierarchical circle: once in writing, to the Patriarch, with the distinction given above; a second time in a discussion reported by the press. We have not identified a public patriarchal response to this report.

6. The case of former protopresbyter George Passias (1997–2015)

The sources consulted do not establish any involvement of Father Ephraim in the acts for which Passias was sanctioned. The case is recorded because it bears on the institutional climate of the period.

• 1979: George Passias graduated from Holy Cross School of Theology in Brookline.
• 1 June 1997: Archbishop Spyridon appointed him Chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. In the same period the network of monasteries expanded rapidly.
• November 1998: Theodore Kalmoukos wrote in The National Herald: “Fr. Ephraim has significant influence in the administration of the Archdiocese. The current Chancellor, Fr. George Passias, happens to be one of Ephraim’s most loyal followers.” Kalmoukos writes as a journalist with a declared position, in the midst of the Spyridon crisis. The connection does not rest on him alone, however: in his farewell letter to the parish, Passias himself calls Father Ephraim his spiritual father.
• 1 July 1999: Passias resigned the office of Chancellor.
• 2006–2015: parish priest at St. Spyridon in Washington Heights, New York, where he established a strict regime of outward piety.
• 16 September 2015: he was suspended, following a formal complaint by the parishioner’s husband to Bishop Andonios, Chancellor of the Archdiocese. On 6 October 2015 the Archdiocese issued a public statement on the case.
• 13 October 2015: the Eparchial Synod of the Archdiocese voted unanimously for defrocking — a step preceding the patriarchal decision, not a separate defrocking.
• 29 November 2015: the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate pronounced the defrocking, for violation of the Archdiocese’s policy on conduct. The members of the parish council at St. Spyridon were also removed.
• In his farewell email to the parish, Passias refers to “my spiritual father, Geronda Ephraim, who presides over St. Anthony’s Monastery in Florence, Arizona.”

The case concerns a cleric publicly associated with Ephraimite circles who held an important administrative office during the period of the monasteries’ expansion. The same cleric who required strict modesty of his parishioners was removed for a grave moral scandal. It is a lesson about the limits of outward rigorism, valid anywhere, not only here.

The Archdiocese acted in this case swiftly and firmly: from the suspension of 16 September to the patriarchal defrocking, approximately two and a half months passed.

7. Protocol #95 (16 February 2005)

On 16 February 2005 the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued the document General Regulations for the Establishment and Operation of Holy Monasteries in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America — Protocol #95, under the signature of Patriarch Bartholomew and the Holy Synod. The document is published on the Archdiocese’s website and contains sixteen articles regulating the relationship between the monasteries, the local metropolitans, and the Archdiocese. The dating fits the documentary record: the Uniform Regulations had been revised by the 37th Clergy-Laity Congress of July 2004 and sent to the Patriarchate for ratification.

The articles that matter here:

• Article 4 — the rights and duties of the Metropolitan, including “highest oversight” and “the audit of the financial records of the Monastery.”
• Article 14 — requires the explicit permission of the local metropolitan for any construction.
• Article 15(b), (c), (e) — obliges the monasteries to contribute financial assistance to the local metropolis and the Archdiocese, to submit annually to the metropolis a financial report and a budget, and to keep detailed records of income and expenditure.
• Article 16(d) — the monastery sanctuary is not a parish church; the celebration of Marriage is entirely prohibited in the monasteries of the Archdiocese, and Baptism and Chrismation may be performed there only with the permission of the local bishop, for a compelling reason.

The regulation establishes the obligations of the monasteries and the responsibility of episcopal oversight. Its application would return to discussion with the requests for transparency of the following years.

8. The KVOA Tucson reports (2006 and 2013)

On 9 February 2006 the Tucson television station KVOA broadcast the first investigation of the monastery — an eight-month piece of research by the journalist Kristi Tedesco, entitled Monastery Mystery. The report gives the floor to three families — Pantanizopoulos, Aleck, Nevins — whose children had entered the monastery, and to a former lay disciple, David Smith.

The Pantanizopoulos family, Greek Orthodox from Knoxville, Tennessee. Their son Niko, born 26 July 1977, met Father Ephraim in April 1996 and left home in May, at eighteen. His father, John Pantanizopoulos, had recounted earlier, in an interview for The National Herald, how he found his son on a visit made in September: “When I visited him with my wife, I thought we were seeing an old man at twenty years.” In the 2006 report: “Their brain is run by the monastery. They can’t read whatever they want. They have to ask permission for everything they do.”

The Aleck family. The mother, Mary Lou Aleck: “They’re taking these young people in such a vulnerable part of their life and sucking them in to this… monastic way.”

The Nevins family, of Modesto, California. The father, Ashley Nevins, summed it up: “You’re the frog in the pot. He raises the water temperature slowly and before you know it, you’re boiled. And the frog didn’t jump out because he didn’t see the temperature change.”

David Smith’s testimony. A former lay disciple between 1998 and 2001, baptised a Roman Catholic, rebaptised together with his wife by Abbot Paisios. He spoke under his real name.

In the KVOA report he says that he was told to live with his wife as brother and sister, and that in confession he was told about the Protocols: that the end of the world is coming, that a shadow government controls the United States, that FEMA had concentration camps set up to destroy families. He also says that he was taught to harm himself physically when troubled by sinful thoughts, and that he himself came to a grave crisis.

Other passages attributed to him — that he had been taught to be obedient to his spiritual father as if he were Jesus Christ; that he had been told that without that father’s prayers he would not pass through the aerial toll houses, and that this was the lever of obedience; that in the monastery they spoke more about Elder Ephraim than about Jesus — come from a written testimony whose original text could not be traced to its source in this research. They are given here as attributions, not as verified quotations.

An interview of Smith with Theodore Kalmoukos, republished in February 2013, shows that he publicly made accusations concerning the direction of married life, the ascetic practices required of him, and his relationship with the monastery.

The KVOA reporters investigated further and reported that Father Ephraim himself refers to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in one of his writings, calling the Zionists “infamous” and the Protocols “notorious”; the specialists consulted by the station said that a reference to that text has no place in Orthodox writing. The title of the writing, the edition, and the page could not be identified in this research. Without the original passage it cannot be established whether this was a critical mention or an endorsement of the text.

Father Anthony, who had served for thirty years at the Greek church in Tucson, was also interviewed. He defends the monastery and rejects part of the accusations. Asked why Father Ephraim does not speak in his own defence: “Because he is Father Ephraim. He’s not going to play those games people like to play.” Asked about the families divided: “The parents need to look within themselves.” Asked what the building of the monastery had cost: “A few thousand dollars. (…) A few thousand, I don’t know how much.”

In February 2013 the same journalist returned with a second investigation, after the death of Scott Nevins.

9. The money: SXP Analytics and the Quantlab case

What happened. In 2006 or 2007 Vitaliy Godlevsky — a quantitative researcher, former employee of the Texas firm Quantlab Technologies — was visiting a Greek Orthodox monastery in Arizona, where he happened to meet Emmanuel Mamalakis, a former securities lawyer from Milwaukee. The two decided to set up their own high-frequency trading firm, naming it SXP Analytics, after St. Xenia. They were joined by Andriy Kuharsky, a mathematician, also a former Quantlab employee.

In March 2008 the FBI carried out raids on former Quantlab employees. In 2011 the federal prosecutors in Houston closed the criminal investigation without bringing charges. In 2009 Quantlab sued Godlevsky, Kuharsky, Mamalakis, and others in the civil courts for misappropriation of trade secrets — source code, algorithms, mathematical models.

In May 2015 Godlevsky, SXP, and the others settled out of court, reportedly paying 28 million dollars. Kuharsky and Mamalakis went to trial, and the Houston jury ordered them to pay 12.2 million dollars in damages. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict on 22 June 2017.

The litigation was bitter. The appellate opinion deals at length with the destruction of evidence: Kuharsky deleted thousands of files and failed to preserve storage devices, despite the evidence-preservation order, which drew upon him direct liability for misappropriation of trade secrets as a sanction; Mamalakis too destroyed evidence, to a lesser degree, sanctioned differently. These facts concern the individual defendants, not the monastery.

What did not happen. This is not a money-laundering case, and no charges were brought in the criminal investigation opened in Houston. The monastery does not appear in the judgment as a party, as a beneficiary, or as the object of any finding — in the text of the appellate opinion consulted it is not mentioned at all. The connection with it comes from legal press reports, according to which two of the defendants met there; and Bradley Hope reported in The Wall Street Journal, in April 2014, that Godlevsky and Mamalakis had discussed founding the firm at a meeting held at the monastery in Florence, under a gazebo. These are press accounts, not judicial findings.

What could not be clarified. World Assistance Foundation, a foundation linked to Mamalakis, has public tax filings, accessible in the databases of American non-profit organisations; they do not, however, clarify the financing of the monasteries. We have not identified a complete public record that would allow the financing of each monastery to be reconstructed.

Supporters of the monasteries point out that many of the seventeen struggle to pay their bills: they receive no money from the Archdiocese, have no parish stewardship programmes, and live on donations, on the sale of candles and icons, on agriculture and on their publications. What could be said of St. Anthony’s cannot be said of all of them.

10. The MRC commission and the silence that followed (2010–2015)

According to the public testimony of the jurist Bill George Stotis, in October 2010 the Synod of America voted unanimously for an investigation of the monasteries under the guidance of Father Ephraim, and Archbishop Demetrios appointed five laymen to a commission first called the Monastery Task Force, later renamed the Monastery Review Committee (MRC), to which a priest and a bishop were added. Its nominal composition could not be documented in this research.

The commission worked for years and conducted interviews across the country with individuals and families affected by the teachings of these monasteries. Stotis writes:

“I served on the Monasteries Task Force, later renamed the Monastery Review Committee (‘MRC’), for the GOA. We were appointed by the Archbishop to the MRC in October 2010.”

That reports were written is what Stotis says. He also says they were never made public. This chronicle has not identified any public report of the commission; that is not, however, an independent confirmation of non-publication, only the observation that none was found.

On 18 October 2012, Michael Jaharis — Vice-Chairman of the Archdiocesan Council — spoke at the Council meeting of “a regrettable and most distasteful subject — that is, the current status of monasteries in their relationship with the U.S. Church.” He said that some monasteries had not kept their obligations to the Archdiocese, that the work of the committee charged with the investigation had met with “a lack of cooperation,” and, concerning the death of Scott Nevins, indicated that any measures were to be decided after a complete and objective investigation, taking account also of the awaited police report:

“We expect to take severe and appropriate action as required to remedy this existing issue — since not doing so could have long term consequences.”

We have not identified, in the sources consulted, any public measure taken as a result of these words. Michael Jaharis reposed in 2016.

In 2015 a twenty-six-minute documentary favourable to the monastery circulated, presenting the work as a gift from God. A. P. Cromidas, in an article republished on the OCL site under the title Ephraim Goes PR, reads it as a public-relations response to the controversies of those years. This is Cromidas’s interpretation; the sources consulted do not establish who commissioned the film or with what intention. The documentary does not answer the requests for financial reporting.

11. The transparency requests of OCL (February 2017)

Orthodox Christian Laity — a pan-Orthodox educational and advocacy organisation, founded in 1987 — adopted in February 2017 the Resolutions Relating to Monasteries, framed as a request for the application of Protocol #95:

“OCL respectfully calls upon the Eparchial Synod of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America to enforce its own Regulations relating to the Monasteries operating under its auspices in the United States; that each Metropolitan who has monasteries within his Metropolis require full compliance by those monasteries with the letter and spirit of those Regulations; and, that all information concerning the operations of those monasteries, including but not limited to financial disclosures, be made public.”

A second resolution asks the Assembly of Bishops that all jurisdictions which have not yet done so adopt regulations concerning monasteries in the United States, requiring transparency and accountability in financial reporting, as well as hierarchical oversight of teaching.

The resolutions were adopted at the OCL Board meeting of 10–12 February 2017, after the members had reread the provisions of Protocol #95.

The obligation to submit an annual report to the metropolis is distinct from the OCL request that information be made public. The documents consulted do not show to what extent each monastery fulfilled its obligations.

12. The “Ruth” letters, published in 2011

On the gotruthreform.org site there were published, beginning on 17 January 2011, the letters of a woman signing herself “Ruth.” She describes the difficulties that arose after she and her husband had decided that each would enter a monastery.

They are anonymous material published on a campaigning site openly hostile to the monasteries, not independently verified.

“Ruth” delivered a first letter to Archbishop Demetrios — dated 22 September, with the year removed at publication: “My husband and I prepared for the monastic life prayerfully for years; we took a huge leap of faith, and it has turned into the worst emotional and spiritual tragedy imaginable for our family. PLEASE help us!!” She says she received no reply. In December she wrote a second time: “It is now almost Christmas and I have waited patiently for the courtesy of any kind of reply or response to my first letter.” To this too, she says, she received no reply. In a testimony published in 2011, the husband recounts his departure from the monastery and ends with a question: “Why was there no response to my wife’s desperate appeal to Archbishop Demetrios?”

Whether the letters reached their addressee, and whether there was any reply by another route, the sources consulted do not clarify.

13. The death of Scott Nevins (11 June 2012)

Scott Nevins, of Modesto, California, son of Ashley and Diane Nevins, spent more than six years as a novice at St. Anthony’s Monastery, under the name Ioannis. He left there at the beginning of 2011 and enrolled at a college in Oregon. He died on 11 June 2012: after a suicidal act committed near the monastery, he was flown by helicopter to a hospital in the area, where he died.

What the parents say. Their son had withdrawn from the family and had begun speaking about conspiracies. In the photographs from those years he had lost much weight. They maintain that he was not permitted to visit his family, not even when his grandmother was dying, and that his letters were read. His mother, in the KVOA report of 2013: “He was scared to death. He was paranoid and panicked.” His father publicly called for the removal from office of those he held responsible: “Those people need to leave, especially those who were in positions of authority who knew better.”

What happened between his departure and his death. After leaving, Nevins kept a public site on which he called the monastery a cult and Father Ephraim, in his own word, a “charlatan”: “I was a rasophore at St. Anthony’s Monastery for six years, and I saw Elder Ephraim, the charlatan, daily. I am convinced, based on my experience, that the Elder is a cult leader, and the monastery is a cult.” The quarrel that preceded his death concerned, according to the account of The National Herald and of Abbot Paisios, a dental retainer left in his cell and thrown away by the monk who cleaned it: Nevins demanded 4,000 dollars, the monastery offered to pay for its replacement with an orthodontist in California, and he refused. In April 2012 he wrote to a monk words full of hatred toward the Elder. According to Abbot Paisios, on 4 June he telephoned him and threatened him; the abbot says he replied that he should go and see a psychotherapist.

That night. According to the KVOA account, which cites the report of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, Nevins drove from Oregon to the monastery, armed. A monk on guard duty saw him at the entrance; when approached, he turned around fast and drove away. The monk followed by car. A short distance from the gate, Nevins stopped and harmed himself.

What the monastery answers. In the interview given to Theodore Kalmoukos for The National Herald (23–29 June 2012), Abbot Paisios acknowledges that Nevins claimed to have been threatened by monks, including Elder Ephraim — and denies it plainly: “all these were in his fantasy,” and “Fr. Ephraim doesn’t threat nor has any intent to threat anybody.” He adds that Nevins had no way of speaking directly with the Elder, who does not know English, while he did not know Greek.

The same denial had come earlier, in writing, from Father Hilarion: “the elder has never threatened anyone who wanted to leave here. All who come here as novices or guests come of their own free will and leave of their own free will.” Hilarion also writes that on the day of the departure, fearing for the young man’s fate, he himself called the sheriff’s office and filed a missing-person report; the sheriff called back to say he had spoken with the young man’s parents and that he had left for good. And as to the departure “in the middle of the night, in haste,” Hilarion says that Nevins had been seen going to church, receiving the Elder’s blessing, and walking out the front gate at about the hour of the Liturgy. Nevins disputes this version in the same correspondence, saying that he had been told to leave with nothing.

Paisios also says that he himself had spoken to the young man about returning home and doing something with his life, since he was not progressing at the monastery; and that, after what happened, he is convinced Nevins had come in order to kill them and then take his own life.

What the Church did. On 14 June 2012, three days after the death, Metropolitan Gerasimos of San Francisco — in whose jurisdiction the monastery lay — issued an announcement to the faithful. In it he states that the authorities are investigating the case and that the Metropolis will cooperate in whatever is needed, and he adds that the Metropolis is itself conducting an investigation. The announcement closes with prayer for the Nevins family and for the young man’s soul.

We have not identified the public results of this investigation. The announcement of an inquiry is not the same as its outcome, and the absence of a public result proves neither that the inquiry did not take place nor that it was sufficient.

In February 2013 the parents engaged the San Francisco attorney Stephen M. Murphy and sent the Archdiocese, the Metropolis, and the monastery a demand letter, giving notice of a possible wrongful-death suit. We have not identified the record of any such action being filed.

None of the facts above lessens the grief of these parents, and none answers the question of what happened to that young man in those six years. The family’s testimonies do not turn of themselves into a verdict. We have not identified, in the sources consulted, a case concluded by a judgment establishing the monastery’s liability. But they remain a grave pastoral signal about the vulnerability of young converts and the need for real episcopal oversight where there are many novices.

14. Academic research: Frances Kostarelos (2011–2018)

The sociologist Frances Kostarelos (Ph.D. in anthropology, University of Chicago, 1989; professor at Governors State University), of Greek descent, studied the phenomenon systematically and presented her work at verifiable conferences: the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (Milwaukee 2011, Atlanta 2016, Washington 2017), and in the Orthodox Christian Laity Occasional Paper Series 8, 2018.

Her conclusions, as presented by Religioscope in November 2011:

“The ‘Ephraimite’ monasteries stress reclusive living, fasting, bodily mortification, vigils, and constant recitation of the Jesus Prayer.”

In her study of three Chicago parishes influenced by these teachings she found divisions and losses of membership, as well as changes in parish life — the disbanding of choirs, the prohibition of certain social events in the parish hall. Most of those who criticised Father Ephraim were, according to her research, educated professionals and second-generation Orthodox.

Religioscope also records that Father Ephraim enjoyed the firm support of various Greek bishops, who allowed the monasteries to be built in their dioceses. The research does not describe a man set against the hierarchy, but a phenomenon that divided at parish level.

The study concerns social effects and the life of parishes; it does not constitute a doctrinal assessment or an ecclesiastical decision.

15. The volume The Departure of the Soul (2017)

In April 2017 St. Anthony’s Monastery published The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church — one thousand one hundred and eleven pages, two hundred and sixteen pages of colour plates, with a preface signed by Father Ephraim and a foreword by Metropolitan Nikolaos of Mesogaia. The volume gathers the testimonies of more than one hundred and twenty saints concerning the particular judgment and includes a chapter answering those who have written against this teaching.

The book does not open the dispute; it answers it. The volume belongs to an older controversy about the aerial toll houses and responds, among others, to the criticisms of Lazar (Lev) Puhalo and Michael Azkoul.

The reception was divided.

Against: Paul Ladouceur (Trinity College, Toronto) published an extensive review on Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy on 18 August 2017, taken up as an article in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 62.1 (2018). The core of his objection: “an anthology of patristic and other writings, however numerous, attesting to the toll-house doctrine does not establish a teaching of the Orthodox Church.” Stephen Shoemaker writes about the volume in Public Orthodoxy, the publication of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham, on 17 October 2017, calling it a fundamentalist work designed to mislead the reader as to the teaching of the Church. He also signs an academic review in the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (2018).

In favour: the volume carries the endorsement of eight Orthodox hierarchs, and the publisher gathers on the book’s page favourable reviews as well, among them academic ones. The reception was not, therefore, uniformly hostile. The wording of those reviews is not reproduced here, in the absence of complete bibliographical references.

The number of reviews does not settle the theological question, and the absence of an explicit synodal definition does not by itself remove a teaching from Tradition.

A distinct problem is the use of this teaching in spiritual direction. In the testimony attributed to David Smith it is said that he was told that without his spiritual father’s prayers he would not pass through the aerial toll houses, and that this was the lever by which obedience was required of him. It is one man’s account of his own spiritual relationship, and cannot be extended to others. If the account is accurate, it describes the use of a teaching to impose obedience through fear. Such a manner of direction raises a pastoral problem, distinct from the discussion of the teaching itself.

The author of these lines, formed in the Romanian spiritual tradition, sets the aerial toll houses within the wider frame of God’s mercy, of the Church at prayer, of the Divine Liturgy as the soul’s covering. They are not denied; neither are they put in the place of Christ.

In July 2017 Abbot Gregory Zaiens wrote that the Elder had withdrawn more than a year earlier from his work as spiritual guide, for reasons of health. The sources consulted do not state when the preface was written, nor who had charge of this editorial project.

Part III — The last years (2014–2019)

The testimonies of Archimandrite Symeon Gagatik, of Father Sergei Baranov, and of Ekaterina Malenchenko come from the same memorial collection, published by orthochristian.com on 17 December 2019, ten days after the repose, and were selected in a clearly favourable setting. They describe distinct encounters, by distinct people; their publication together is not, however, of itself an independent verification of each account.

What is seen in them is a man of nearly ninety, ever weaker, receiving pilgrims according to an established order of the brotherhood. The witnesses interpret these encounters spiritually; their accounts do not allow a judgment about his bodily condition.

16. May 2014: a recorded conversation

In May 2014 disciples from Greece visited him in Arizona and recorded a long interview, later published on doxologia.ro and in several languages. The content is purely Athonite: memories of Elder Joseph, exhortation to the prayer of the heart, the need to confess Christ in the present age. Past eighty-five, he speaks clearly and coherently.

17. Summer 2014: Bishop Macarie of Northern Europe

In the same summer, His Grace Macarie, Romanian Orthodox Bishop of Northern Europe, travelling in America, arrived at the monastery gates without having planned the visit. His testimony, published on doxologia.ro:

“I knew that Father Ephraim Philotheites does not receive for counsel without prior notification, so I expected a negative response from those at the monastery. However, not only was I received and counselled, but Father Ephraim accompanied me to the night vigil service, crowned by the Divine Liturgy.”

Visits for counsel were made with prior notice. Bishop Macarie was nevertheless received without an appointment, and the Elder counselled him and accompanied him to the vigil and the Liturgy.

18. Archimandrite Symeon Gagatik

Archimandrite Symeon Gagatik, an abbot in Ukraine and the Russian translator of the Elder’s book about St. Joseph the Hesychast, went three times to Arizona. His testimony is warm and detailed.

On his first visit he asked a blessing for the translation and the original text of the memoirs; he received it at once, he says, with pure joy. On his second he came with a list of some fifty questions. The Elder’s attendants told him it was not possible to go through them all with him, since he was too tired, and they themselves helped him to clear up the difficult places, leaving for the Elder only the most personal questions, which no one else could have answered. To those the Elder replied. On that occasion he also asked him how an abbot ought to be, and received the answer Gagatik says he keeps as a treasure: “An abbot must be, above all, a father. He must never govern the monastery as an administrator, as a commander. No commands, no orders. Never! Only as a father!”

The third time he brought him the printed book. The first two meetings had been short, because the attendant who arranged the reception of pilgrims had warned him from the start: the Elder was old, with little strength, and many were waiting. “But the third time the Elder did not let me go quickly.” He began to recall the years of his childhood in Volos under the German occupation — how he sold small goods at the market so as not to starve, how he was arrested, how he saw children killed. And when at last he let him go and Gagatik went out into the hall, the attendant shook his head reproachfully. “But what could I do? I could not interrupt the Elder…”

The reproach was therefore for the visitor, in the hall, after he had left. And the one who had lengthened the meeting was the Elder himself.

19. Father Sergei Baranov

Father Sergei Baranov, a spiritual father at Orsk, went twice to St. Anthony’s Monastery, spending a week there each time.

He recounts that the Elder was already weak and that they did not speak much — but that he did not seek to speak either: it is always awkward, he says, to come with questions; it is enough to be beside such men. Of the services he writes: “He stands with you near the altar, but his soul is not there.” And he interprets the words himself: the Elder was far away in spirit, not on earth, not with those present.

He also describes the order of the monastery — each comes in turn for a blessing, and the Elder taps them lightly on the head, with a joke and a smile — and the rule given to all who come: one hundred prostrations, nine hundred Jesus Prayers, three hundred to the Mother of God. Baranov calls it the minimum blessed for all alike, monks, priests, and laypeople — as he himself knew it, not as a rule offered to the reader.

The testimony shows an old man, weak, silent at the services, receiving pilgrims according to an established order. Baranov understands this silence as deep prayer. His account does not allow a judgment about the Elder’s bodily condition or his strength.

20. Ekaterina Malenchenko

Ekaterina Malenchenko, wife of the cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, was in Arizona two years before the Elder’s repose:

“When I approached Elder Ephraim, he didn’t even say anything to me but just beckoned with his finger: ‘Let’s go.’ So I went, and we went into the church. There he simply led me throughout the church. There was no need for any words about anything earthly… The Elder looks at you and you understand that he knows everything, and even more.”

The rest of her testimony speaks of what she found at the monastery: Russians, Greeks, and Americans together, without divisions.

21. Mihai Neșu

Mihai Neșu, a former Romanian international footballer, paralysed in 2011 in a training accident and brought to faith after it, recounted in August 2019, in an address at ITOM Iași:

“Someone else there received me, and I told him: ‘Father, I am looking for a recipe to solve all my problems.’ And he replied so beautifully: ‘Yes. You do well. We give you recipes, but you have to start cooking.'”

Neșu does not specify who received him, or why the meeting took place with another father.

22. July 2017: Abbot Gregory Zaiens

In a tribute published on 11 July 2017 on thebaid.org, a publication close to the monastery, Abbot Gregory Zaiens writes in passing:

“Father Ephraim has been retired for over a year, no longer functioning as an elder, for health reasons.”

What is meant is his work as spiritual guide, not the abbacy: the abbot of the monastery had been Archimandrite Paisios since 1996. The account links the withdrawal to the Elder’s health and says nothing about texts published under his name afterwards.

23. January 2019: the article of Father Matei Vulcănescu

On 16 January 2019 Father Matei Vulcănescu published on marturisireaortodoxa.ro an article questioning the authenticity of certain positions attributed to Father Ephraim in the polemics surrounding the Council of Crete, and the role of those who spoke in his name. The article comes from a side with a polemical agenda, and most of its assertions are not supported by documents. The text circulated in Romanian-speaking circles as well.

24. The conversation recounted by Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol

Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol recounts, in a homily given on 8 December 2019, the day after the repose, a conversation he had with Father Ephraim in Arizona. The date of the conversation is not specified. The Elder was speaking to him about his coming to America:

“I want to tell you what I went through when I came to America. (…) I encountered many temptations, many dangers. They wanted to kill me. They were trying to destroy me… on the physical plane and on the spiritual plane… Many dangers, many temptations, and many tribulations… And many problems… Many times I asked myself: Did I do well coming here? And what can I, a simple and humble monk, do on a continent with so many difficulties?”

Athanasios then recounts the vision given to the Elder in that period, which itself supplies the meaning of the words above. The Elder saw himself in a jungle full of beasts, running with a small child in his arms. The beasts pursued him, wanting to tear the child apart. On a narrow path a huge dragon came before him, ready to swallow him. He cried out: “My Holy Mother!” — and heard the voice of the Theotokos saying: “Michael!” The Archangel came, struck the dragon, and the dragon perished. When he asked what the vision meant, he was answered:

“This will be your life: full of persecutions, sadness and dangers, bodily and spiritual.”

And of the child: “The child is your soul. You must save your soul, whatever obstacles you meet.”

Who exactly wanted to kill him, the published account does not say. Through the vision it contains, the testimony shows that he himself read his trials in a spiritual key and regarded them as foretold from the beginning.

25. 7 December 2019: the repose

On the evening of 7 December 2019 Father Ephraim reposed at St. Anthony’s Monastery. The announcement of the Metropolis of San Francisco says he was ninety-two; if the year 1928 from the monastery’s biography is taken, he would have been ninety-one. Accounts published immediately after the repose say that he gave up his soul standing and that he remained lucid to the end. The same accounts mention the doctor’s advice that he should no longer come out to the pilgrims, and his custom of blessing them.

Part IV — After the repose

26. Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou: the three crowns

In a homily of December 2019, Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou recounts a message received from someone he calls “a man of God with the eyes of his soul cleansed”:

“My beloved brother Neophytos, I saw three crowns given by the Lord at the glorification of Father Ephraim. The first was the crown of the Saint — for the love he showed to prayer and the Jesus Prayer. The second was the crown of the martyr. He was martyred, as often happens, due to the envy of monks, priests, abbots, hierarchs. The third was the crown of equal-to-the-Apostles — for the apostolic work he accomplished on the American continent.”

Another account of three crowns appears in a 2016 article about Nun Theophano, the Elder’s mother: it is said there that, while she was pregnant, she saw between sleep and waking three crowns flying toward heaven — two of laurel and one of gold, the golden one going toward the Holy Mountain. We have no data that would establish a connection between the two accounts.

What Metropolitan Neophytos shares is not a vision of his own, but one received from another and recounted in a homily. It is not a synodal act, it names no one, and it is not an ecclesiastical finding about the monastery’s leadership. It is the testimony of a devotion, in which the second crown is linked to the envy the Elder is said to have met. Who exactly, when, and in what manner, is not said.

27. 11 December 2019: the funeral

To the funeral came Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, Metropolitans Alexios of Atlanta, Gerasimos of San Francisco, and Isaiah of Denver, Abbot Nikodemos of Philotheou — who read the message of Patriarch Bartholomew — the representative of the Metropolis of Limassol, and clergy from the monasteries founded by the Elder.

Archbishop Elpidophoros had said, in a statement published on 9 December: “I bow before the holy figure of Elder Ephraim with reverence and gratitude, for he established Orthodox monasticism in America.”

From the eulogy of Abbot Paisios:

“You have suffered greatly, Holy Father, you have endured pain, and we with you; you were defamed, you knew rejection, you patiently endured the martyrdom of illness, you took up your heavy cross with faith in God’s mercy and love. (…) We have gained a martyr who suffered all kinds of tribulations from his fellow man, and also from his unseen enemies.”

This language — defamation, rejection, trials at the hands of one’s fellow man — is the usual language of a funeral eulogy for a man publicly attacked during his lifetime. And Father Ephraim was publicly attacked enough: in the press, on websites, in books, in open polemics. To read the eulogy as a confession about life within the monastery is to ask of it more than it can give.

28. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos of Nafpaktos knew Father Ephraim from the 1960s, when he was a student and went often to Nea Skiti, and kept up the connection with him all his life. He wrote the foreword to My Elder Joseph the Hesychast and to The Art of Salvation (2003) — the latter the Elder sent him in manuscript, asking him to read it and show him what should be corrected, lest it depart from Orthodox theology; afterwards he wrote that he accepted everything proposed and that he might make any other change, even without informing him. Vlachos sees in this the humility of a great and tried father.

In the article published in December 2019 he writes:

“Since the time when Elder Ephraim went to America, we have not met. I did not have the blessing to visit him at the Holy Monastery in Arizona. But I was and am in communication with his spiritual children. Through them I asked for his prayers, and he would send me various prophetic words and his love. Sometimes I would speak to him on the phone.”

(In the original: “Δέν εἶχα τήν εὐλογία νά τόν ἐπισκεφθῶ στήν Ἱερά Μονή Ἀριζόνας.”)

He also says there that Gerontissa Photini, abbess of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Pelagia, corresponded with the Elder, and that the letters show his whole personality and the way he guided monastics. And he promises: “One day I shall publish this correspondence.” We have not identified, in the present research, an edition of this correspondence.

The Metropolitan does not say that anyone prevented his visit, and the text nowhere mentions a refusal. The expression alone does not allow it to be established either that there was a prohibition or that there was not. In ecclesiastical Greek it is often used as a formula of humility, but neither does this reading follow necessarily from the sentence. For that matter, the Metropolitan’s whole article is a eulogy — he calls Father Ephraim a prophet, a martyr, equal to the Apostles, and a holy ascetic.

29. The case of Frank Atwood (2022)

Frank Atwood, sentenced to death in Arizona in 1987 for the abduction and murder of an eight-year-old girl, wrote from prison in 1998 to Father Athanasios — at that time abbot of Machairas Monastery in Cyprus, later Metropolitan of Limassol — who put him in contact with St. Anthony’s Monastery. In 2000 he was baptised by Abbot Paisios, receiving the name Anthony, and from then on Paisios was his spiritual father — by Atwood’s own testimony, he confessed to him every two weeks. On 7 June 2022 he was tonsured into the great schema with the name Ephraim, and the next day, 8 June 2022, he was executed, Abbot Paisios being present.

The case illustrates Abbot Paisios’s role in external relations and in difficult pastoral cases, both during Father Ephraim’s lifetime and afterwards. Father Ephraim does not appear as a direct spiritual father in the published correspondence.

The testimony about confession every two weeks is Atwood’s own. Machairas Monastery, which publishes his life, also maintains his innocence; this is its position, not a judicial finding.

30. The public image today

In August 2022 the monastery began raising funds for five volumes of the Elder’s life. From the announcement: “In every generation, God sends His chosen servants to help those who seek eternal life. In the last half-century, there has been a man who has transformed more lives than anyone else in the history of the North American Church.”

In December 2022 Archbishop Elpidophoros served the Liturgy and the memorial service at the tomb. The tomb, in St. Mina’s chapel, is adorned with a mosaic in which the figure of St. Joseph the Hesychast appears alongside; it was in place by April 2023 at the latest. The place has become a place of pilgrimage.

Thus is formed, by the ordinary means of a brotherhood honouring its founder, the public image of Father Ephraim. The participation of hierarchs in the memorials shows the veneration he enjoys today within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Conclusions

What is known

Father Ephraim Philotheites was a disciple of St. Joseph the Hesychast and carried further the tradition he received from him. He founded seventeen monasteries and established Athonite monasticism within the Greek Orthodox communities of North America, where the Archdiocese had until then a single monastery. Thousands of people learned there the prayer of the heart. He died past the age of ninety. Accounts published immediately after his repose say that he gave up his soul standing.

The controversies also had an institutional course. In 1999 five American metropolitans wrote to the Patriarch about the divisions in the Archdiocese and named, among their causes, the excesses of some who invoked the authority of the Archbishop and of Monk Ephraim. In 2005 the regulation concerning the monasteries of the Archdiocese was adopted, providing for episcopal oversight and financial reporting to the metropolis. According to Bill George Stotis, in 2010 the Synod voted unanimously for an investigation of the monasteries, and the commission then appointed worked for several years and produced reports; we have not identified a public version of them. In 2012 the Vice-Chairman of the Archdiocesan Council said publicly that the commission’s work had met with a lack of cooperation and that severe measures might be required. In 2017 Orthodox Christian Laity asked for the application of the 2005 regulation.

The documents consulted do not permit each of these steps to be followed to its end. No public reports have been identified that would present the conclusions of the investigations and the measures that followed.

And in the midst of this period there are people. Three families who lost their children, in the sense in which a parent says he has lost his child. A former disciple who recounted under his own name what was asked of him and what he came to believe. A young man who lost his life after a suicidal act near the monastery. These are not items in a file.

What is not known

The financing of the monasteries could not be reconstructed. There are public explanations — Abbot Paisios spoke, in 2012, of eight to nine million dollars from donations for St. Anthony’s Monastery — and there are some public tax filings; but we have not identified a complete public record that would allow the financing of each monastery to be traced.

We have not identified a public version of the reports produced by the commission appointed in 2010.

We have not identified a public report setting out the conclusions of the investigation announced by the Metropolis of San Francisco after the death of Scott Nevins, nor the measures that may have followed from it.

And above all, it is not known what relation there was, in the last years, between the Elder’s spiritual guidance and the governance of the monasteries. It has often been said that the Elder was kept apart and that his name was used without his knowledge. The material verified for this chronicle does not support this. What the testimonies show is a very old man, ever weaker, who received pilgrims according to an order of the brotherhood — and, wherever the sources allow it to be seen, a man who still decided: who kept a visitor longer than was appointed, who beckoned a pilgrim to follow him and led him through the church, who came out to the pilgrims until his last days.

What can be said

A large monastery, with numerous donors and a considerable public presence, is not the same thing as the cell in which hesychasm was learned. The administrative side of a network of seventeen monasteries is something altogether different from the life of a small hesychast brotherhood. This is no one’s fault; it is a change of setting, and a change of setting calls for fresh discernment.

Episcopal oversight is part of the order of a monastery and protects those within the brotherhood as well. The OCL resolutions of 2017 show that the application of the 2005 regulation remained a public concern twelve years after its adoption.

Veneration of a spiritual father and examination of an institution can go together. The hierarchs who wrote in 1999 were making precisely this distinction, and they made it on their own authority: the excesses are not necessarily the work of the man whose name is invoked.

The relation between Father Ephraim’s guidance and the administration of the monasteries in his last years remains insufficiently documented. The available testimonies and documents permit the examination of particular episodes, but not a conclusion about the whole period.

Chronology

Contents

Part I — From Volos to Arizona (1927–2004)

1. Athonite formation and work
2. The road to America and the Greek brotherhoods
3. The jurisdictional disagreement (1989–1996)
4. The building (1995–2004)

Part II — The documented controversies (1999–2017)

5. The report of the five metropolitans (January 1999)
6. The case of former protopresbyter George Passias (1997–2015)
7. Protocol #95 (16 February 2005)
8. The KVOA Tucson reports (2006 and 2013)
9. The money: SXP Analytics and the Quantlab case
10. The MRC commission and the silence that followed (2010–2015)
11. The transparency requests of OCL (February 2017)
12. The “Ruth” letters, published in 2011
13. The death of Scott Nevins (11 June 2012)
14. Academic research: Frances Kostarelos (2011–2018)
15. The volume The Departure of the Soul (2017)

Part III — The last years (2014–2019)

16. May 2014: a recorded conversation
17. Summer 2014: Bishop Macarie of Northern Europe
18. Archimandrite Symeon Gagatik
19. Father Sergei Baranov
20. Ekaterina Malenchenko
21. Mihai Neșu
22. July 2017: Abbot Gregory Zaiens
23. January 2019: the article of Father Matei Vulcănescu
24. The conversation recounted by Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol
25. 7 December 2019: the repose

Part IV — After the repose

26. Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou: the three crowns
27. 11 December 2019: the funeral
28. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos
29. The case of Frank Atwood (2022)
30. The public image today

Conclusions — What is known · What is not known · What can be said

Principal sources

Official documents show what a body decided, not always what happened. A press report proves that certain statements were made, not that they are true. A personal testimony does not become an established fact because it was not contradicted in court, nor does it lose its value because it never reached one. For each episode, the article shows who makes the claim and what it rests on; where sources contradict each other, the contradiction is shown.

Two of the sites below — gotruthreform.org and culteducation.com — are campaigning sites, hostile to the monasteries. They are used here only for the documents and transcripts they host: the 1999 report, the “Ruth” letters, the KVOA reports. Their own commentary is not taken up as fact.

Institutional documents and sources

• The Elder’s official biography — St. Anthony’s Monastery
• Announcement concerning the death of Scott Nevins — Metropolis of San Francisco, 14 June 2012
• Announcement at the Elder’s repose — Metropolis of San Francisco, 10 December 2019
• The report of the five metropolitans to Patriarch Bartholomew, 12 January 1999 — full text, 15 pages (PDF), hosted on the presentation page
• Discourse of Michael Jaharis to the Archdiocesan Council, 18 October 2012 — full text
• The funeral eulogy of Abbot Paisios, December 2019
• The installation of the mosaic at the tomb, April 2023
• General Regulations for the Establishment and Operation of Holy Monasteries in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (Protocol #95, 16 February 2005) — goarch.org
• Resolutions Relating to Monasteries Adopted by Orthodox Christian Laity, February 2017
• The public testimony of Bill George Stotis concerning the MRC — ocl.org

Published testimonies

• Father of a Huge Family. The Memory of Elder Ephraim (Moraitis) — the collection of 17 December 2019 (Gagatik, Baranov, Malenchenko, Abbess Nikolaya)
• Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, December 2019 — Greek original · English version
• Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, account of 8 December 2019
• Bishop Macarie of Northern Europe, summer 2014 — doxologia.ro
• Gheron Iosif Isihastul. Simțirea iubirii dumnezeiești, Editura Bizantină — biographical extract published on crestinortodox.ro (the brotherhood at the Skete of St. Basil; Father Ephraim Karagiannis)
• The Elder’s biography in Greek — St. Anthony’s Monastery (the name of the spiritual father at Volos)
• The life of Gerontissa Makrina — Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos, Saxonburg
• Olga Rozhneva and Olga Zatushevskaya, A novice of her own son: on Gerontissa Theophano, the mother of Archimandrite Ephraim Philotheites, pravoslavie.ru, 11 November 2016 (testimonies gathered at the Monastery of the Archangel Michael on Thasos)
• The life of Gerontissa Taxiarchia — the monastery at Saxonburg
• The life of Gerontissa Makrina — St. Anthony’s Monastery (the departure of Father Ephraim Karagiannis from Volos, 1952)

Press

• KVOA Tucson, Monastery Mystery, 9 February 2006 — transcript
• KVOA Tucson, the re-investigation of February 2013
• The interview with John Pantanizopoulos, archived on culteducation.com
• A. P. Cromidas, Yes, Investigate the Monasteries — reproduces the National Herald report of 5–6 April 2003
• The interview of David Smith with Theodore Kalmoukos, republished in February 2013
• Theodore Kalmoukos, The National Herald, 23–29 June 2012 — the interview with Abbot Paisios and the announcement of Metropolitan Gerasimos (full issue, PDF)
• Theodore Kalmoukos, The National Herald — Parents of Suicide Monk Might Sue, 14 February 2013
• The comment attributed to Theodore Kalmoukos and to the year 1998, concerning the passage through ROCOR, is reproduced by A. P. Cromidas in Ephraim Goes PR; the original 1998 issue could not be consulted
• Greek Reporter, Death of St. Anthony’s Monk Questioned, 12 February 2013
• The Texas Lawbook, 4 July 2017 (the Quantlab case)
• Bradley Hope, High-Frequency Trading’s Fight Over Secret Code, The Wall Street Journal, April 2014
• Religioscope, 24 November 2011 (the Kostarelos research)
• A. P. Cromidas, Ephraim Goes PR, republished on ocl.org
• The text of Abbot Gregory Zaiens, thebaid.org, 11 July 2017
• Frank Atwood’s connection with Machairas Monastery
• Public tax filings of the World Assistance Foundation

Academic and theological

• Paul Ladouceur, Orthodox Theologies of the Afterlife: Review of “The Departure of the Soul”, 18 August 2017 — taken up in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 62.1 (2018), 51–72
• Stephen Shoemaker — review in the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 1.1 (2018), 109–111, doi:10.1353/joc.2018.0009; and Public Orthodoxy, 17 October 2017
• The publisher’s page for the volume, with the favourable reviews
• Frances Kostarelos — OCL Occasional Paper Series 8 (2018) and papers at the SSSR (Milwaukee 2011, Atlanta 2016, Washington 2017)

Judicial

• Quantlab Technologies Ltd. (BVI) v. Kuharsky & Mamalakis — opinion of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, 22 June 2017
• Quantlab Techs. Ltd. v. Godlevsky, 4:09-cv-4039, U.S. District Court, S.D. Texas (verdict May 2015)
• The report of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, June 2012 (cited in the KVOA and Greek Reporter accounts)