Antimonastic spirit

Question from the audience:

Many people think that we laypeople should keep a distance from the monasteries [talking about the antimonastic spirit and when it prevailed].

Answer by Fr. Savvas:

Yes, this is totally wrong!

This is what I have been already telling you, the antimonastic spirit in Greece has been established since 1800, just after the Greek liberation from the Ottoman occupation. Until that moment, people used to embrace the monasteries and respect monastic life.

Wherever monastic life did not face hostility, for example in Romania, we can watch mothers leading their own children to the monasteries. Mothers lead their daughters to the monasteries, to become nuns!

People might say “What is this?”

We miss out on ll, this is Orthodoxy.

Whenever a mother realized her child’s ability and will for monastic life, she led it herself there!

In Greece we experience a weird phenomenon, mothers or fathers cannot tolerate the idea of their son or daughter having the will to go to a monastery…

This is exactly because of the western spirit, which, I repeat, came across by Korais and the Bavarians, and, unfortunately, we are the ones who mold it. Initially they brought it over and imposed it and then we absorbed it.