Maximos V.

Maximos V. Vaportzis (born October 26, 1897 in Sinop , † January 1, 1972 in Switzerland ) was the 267th Patriarch of Constantinople from 1946 to 1948 .

He received his training first at the seminary on the prince island of Chalki ( Heybeliada ) in the Marmara Sea. In 1918 he became a deacon, then archdeacon and archimandrite. From 1930 to 1932 he was Metropolitan of Philadelphia , from 1932 to 1946 Metropolitan of Chalcedon . In 1946 he finally became Patriarch of Constantinople (after losing to his predecessor Benjamin I in the 1936 election ). His forced resignation - which was officially justified with a nervous problem - after only two years of pontificate came after massive political pressure against the background of the Cold War . His opponents accused him of having contacts with left-wing circles in Greece and with the anti-British resistance in Cyprus . Influential circles of the Greek diaspora in the USA, with the support of President Harry Truman, forced the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of North and South America, Athinagoras , to take over the Ecumenical Patriarchate, who was granted Turkish citizenship for this purpose in an extraordinary process. According to Washington's wishes, Athinagoras was supposed to counteract the Moscow Patriarchate's claims to power in world orthodoxy, which were controlled by Soviet diplomacy.

Maximos V reached public attention in 1964 when he advocated the liberalization of Catholic sexual morality in Rome :

"Do we not have the right to ask whether certain attitudes are not the product of outdated ideas and perhaps a bachelor psychosis of people who are not familiar with this part of life?"

Maximos V warned against the denial of a cardinal virtue, prudence, by which all morality is to be measured. He saw the gap between the official teaching of the Catholic Church and the contrary practice of the overwhelming majority of Christian couples and, like Catholic Cardinals Paul-Émile Léger from Canada and Léon-Joseph Suenens from Belgium, regretted that the faithful would find themselves forced into conflict with to live the law of the Church, cut off from the sacraments .

Web links

• Maximos V in the list of Patriarchs of Constantinople (Greek)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Demetrius Kiminas: The Ecumenical Patriarchate. Wildside Press LLC, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4344-5876-6 , p. 91 ( limited preview in Google book search).
2. ↑ Demetrius Kiminas: The Ecumenical Patriarchate. Wildside Press LLC, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4344-5876-6 , p. 74 ( limited preview in Google book search).
3. ↑ Gernot Facius: Religion and Contraception: How the topic of sex divided the church. In: Die Welt July 25, 2008.

predecessor	Office	successor
Benjamin I.	Patriarch of Constantinople 1946–1948	Athinagoras