Your Royal Highness, Most Reverend holy brothers, Beloved friends,

We, as the canonical bishop of this holy monastery, welcome all of you with great joy and we extend to each and every one of you our paternal blessing, invoking the bountiful grace of the Lord upon the work of your assembly here.

Your Royal Highness’ presence among us during these days, and indeed here at this seminar, is not only a great honour for our Church, but also gives us all the precious opportunity to benefit spiritually from Your Royal Highness’ internationally recognized and deeply appreciated experience and contribution through the efforts You have made in the area of the protection of the natural environment. Indeed, Your Highness, few have contributed to this vital area as You have. As a church leader, it is our duty to recognize and pay tribute to this, by expressing here our own thanks and those of our Church.

The Orthodox Church has many reasons to consider the issue of the protection of the natural environment as exceptionally serious and urgent. Our late predecessor Patriarch Dimitrios had earlier stressed the urgency of this whole issue in his Message of September 1, 1989. Since then, the brother Primates of the holy Orthodox Churches, during their recent Synaxis or Gathering at the Phanar, officially expressed their full agreement on the position of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, proclaiming to all that the whole Orthodox Church adopts the initiative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in establishing the 1st of September of each year as a day of prayer for the protection of God’s creation. As we already have said in our address upon welcoming You to the Patriarchate, Your Highness, it is our hope that the other Christian Churches will wish to adopt this initiative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and that the 1st of September of each year will be established by all who believe in Christ as a time for prayers for the protection of the natural environment.

Specifically, in so far as our most holy Orthodox Church is concerned – as demonstrated, also, by the Inter-Orthodox Conference convened last November on Crete following the initiative of our Throne, which Your Royal Highness honoured with Your presence and active participation — the reasons for our very intense concern for the protection of the natural environment are most deeply-felt. They can be distinguished in two basic categories: theological reasons, that is, reasons of faith, and pastoral reasons, that is, reasons of sensitivity toward the world, and the mission and diakonia or service of the Church in it.

As to the first category, the theological reasons, it is known that the Fathers of the Church always perceived salvation in Christ as relating not only to man, but through man to all of creation. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the “recapitulation of all of creation, according to the wel1-known saying of St. Ireneos, Bishop of Lyons in the second century. St. Maximos the Confessor, the great 7th century theologian and Father of the Orthodox Church, was so insistent upon the importance of material creation in the whole Divine plan, that he saw man as a microcosm, and salvation in Christ as a “cosmic liturgy” in which all of material creation participates. Moreover, the fact is that it is indicative of the faith of the Orthodox Church that at the epicentre of her life lies the Divine Eucharist, which is nothing else than a “liturgy,” that is, a communal act of the people of God in which the faithful bring the gifts of creation, the bread and the wine, that they may be changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, and be offered to the Creator in thanksgiving. Orthodox Christians firmly believe that God not only created the material world, but that, through humans, it has as its destiny, participation in the glory and eternal life in Christ. Consequently, the final purpose of creation is not its use or abuse for man’s pleasure, but something more sublime and more sacred.

From these points, spring also the pastoral reasons for the Church’s concern for the natural environment. For us, every destruction of the natural environment caused by man constitutes an offense against the Creator and arouses grief; in relation to the degree to which people are responsible for their actions, metano ia-a radical change of course is demanded of us all. For this reason, each act by man which contributes to the destruction of the natural environment must be regarded as a most grievous s~n. We are talking about a renewed ethos which must be taught to our faithful. Our faithful must become sensitized to the seriousness of this sin and to espouse the corresponding ethos. People must cease regarding themselves as proprietors of nature and understand their mission as priests of creation who have as their duty the anaphora or offering up of the material world to the Creator. In this ethos the liturgical as well as the ascetic tradition of the Church can be of assistance to its faithful.

These are some general thoughts on the theme concerning our seminar. With great eagerness we await the words which His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, will be kind enough to address to us; and we invite him to speak at this time.