PAPADOPOULOS, CRISOSTOMO. - Archbishop of Athens, born at Madytos in Thrace on 1 July 1868, died at Athens on 22 Oct. 1938.
He pursued ecclesiastical studies at the Seminary of Constantinople from 1884 to 1887; then, from 1887 to 1889, at the monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem and at the Evangelical School of Smyrna; from 1889 to 1891 at the Theological Faculty of Athens, and from 1891 to 1895 at the ecclesiastical Academies of Kiev and Petersburg. In 1895 he began teaching as a professor at the Theological School of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, where he was ordained priest and made metropolitan in 1900. In 1909 he was compelled to leave Jerusalem and resided in Alexandria for two years. In 1911 he is found in Athens, as professor at the Rizario Theological School from 1911 to 1923, and, from 1914 onwards, also as professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University.
On 8 March 1923 he was elected by the Holy Synod Archbishop of Athens and of all Greece, a position he retained until his death, never abandoning his historical studies. As archbishop, he exercised great influence in the politics of his homeland. In the religious sphere he distinguished himself as a friend of ecumenical movements and as an irreconcilable opponent of the Greeks united with the Roman Church.
Among his publications, the principal ones are: The Church of Jerusalem, Athens 1900; The Monastery of the Cross and its Theological School, Jerusalem 1905; Cyril Luharis, Trieste 1907, to be supplemented by another work on the same subject published in Alexandria (1913), and numerous articles; History of the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria 1910; The Church of Athens, Athens 1928; History of the Church of Alexandria, Alexandria 1935. The work The Primacy of the Bishop of Rome, Athens 1930, belongs to his anti-Roman polemics.