ANTIMOS VII, Patriarch of CONSTANTINOPLE. —
Born at Giannina about 1835, died in 1913. After holding various sees, he was appointed Patriarch of Constantinople in January 1895. He remained in office only until September 1896. In September 1896 he issued his encyclical letter in reply to that of Pope Leo XIII, *Praeclara gratulationis* (20 June 1894). In it ANTIMOS reviews the so-called “novelties of the Roman Church,” adding to the usual charges the recently defined dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff.
BIBL.: The encyclical first appeared in Russian in the journal *Tserkoviya Viedomosti*, 6 (1894), pp. 1523-34, then in the original Greek in *Ἐκκλησιαστικὴ Ἀλήθεια*, 15 (1895), pp. 375 ff. On the encyclical and the controversy it aroused among Catholics and the separated Eastern Church see the articles: “La polemica religiosa in Oriente,” in *Bessarione*, 1-3 (1896-98), and L. Duchesne, *L’encyclique du Patriarche Anthime*, in *Églises séparées*, Paris 1896, pp. 59-112. Maurizio Gordillo