[ALBSA-Info] Event at BU

[Agron Alibali]

Archbishop Anastasios of Albania to deliver
Baccalaureate address

      

By                                David J. Craig  

              

          


 
          

 Archbishop Anastasios Photo by A. Emapatahe

      
      

The roughly 400,000 refugees who poured into Albania
in 1999 must have been shocked to find Orthodox
Christians there opening up their homes and offering
them food and clothes. Most of the refugees were
Muslim, after all, and had just escaped Kosovo, a
country ripped apart by ethnic fighting.
    
      

That Orthodox Christians, led by Archbishop
Anastasios, helped organize the nation’s historic
relief effort was remarkable also because 10 years
earlier the Albanian Orthodox Church didn’t exist.
Faith institutions in the country had been obliterated
during 45 years of hard-line communist rule, and they
began rebuilding in the early 1990s, when democratic
reforms took hold.

      

For his role in resurrecting the Orthodox Church and
protecting Kosovar refugees, Anastasios is considered
a living saint by many Albanians. A scholar with a
deep knowledge of Islam and a longtime proponent of
intercultural dialogue, he led Orthodox clerics in
raising more than $10 million from Western churches
for humanitarian aid to Kosovar refugees in 1999.

      

“We are called to go beyond the limits of our closed
communities, to transcend our prejudices, hesitations,
and fears, and to witness to the risen Christ as far
as we can, to go and meet our contemporaries and the
burning problems they have to deal with,” Anastasios
was quoted in the Australian newspaper The Advertiser
last year. “This means helping every human being to
attain freedom and dignity.”

      

Archbishop Anastasios will share his message of
tolerance, faith, and love at BU when he delivers the
University’s annual Baccalaureate address, entitled A
Quest for Wisdom and Freedom, on Sunday, May 16, at 9
a.m. at Marsh Chapel. Later that morning, he will be
presented with a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris
causa, at the All-University Commencement exercises.

      

Born Anastasios Yannoulatos in Piraeus, Greece, in
1929, Archbishop Anastasios devoted himself to
Orthodox Christianity as a teenager. As a young
theology student at Athens University in the 1950s, he
emerged as a leader in a movement calling for Orthodox
Christians worldwide to recommit themselves to the
Church’s forgotten missionary tradition. In 1959, he
founded Porefthendes (Go Ye), a journal devoted to
promoting the Orthodox mission. He was ordained a
priest and posted to Uganda in 1964, but was forced to
return to Europe after successive bouts of malaria.

      

After several years spent studying theology at the
Universities of Hamburg and Marburg in Germany,
Yannoulatos was elected to the faculty of Athens
University in 1972, and was ordained a bishop the same
year. By 1981 he had sufficiently recovered his health
to return to East Africa, where he served as
archbishop until he was named archbishop of Albania in
1991.

      

Anastasios took responsibility for rebuilding
Albania’s Orthodox Church at a time when the nation,
which is the poorest in Europe, was just emerging from
four and a half decades of international isolation
imposed by a xenophobic communist dictatorship.
Albania’s economy was backward by European standards,
its infrastructure was dilapidated, and organized
religion was almost nonexistent, as all religious
practice had been outlawed in 1967.

      

Under Anastasios’ leadership, churches have been
restored or rebuilt, a new generation of clergy is
being educated, and religious schools have been
opened. The newly reinvigorated Orthodox Church,
meanwhile, continues to work aggressively to address
poverty across the country.

      

“Archbishop Anastasios will find a friendly welcome at
Boston University because of our very close connection
with Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary and Hellenic
College,” says Rev. Robert Cummings Neville, who is
dean of Marsh Chapel and University Chaplain, as well
as an STH professor of philosophy, religion, and
theology. “Archbishop Methodios of the Orthodox area
in Boston is a graduate of Boston University, and I
have myself taught many Orthodox students in theology.
Archbishop Anastasios has been a missionary from one
war-ridden area of the world to another, and he
exemplifies the Christian principle of bearing the
sorrows and sharing the joys of people different from
oneself. The work he has done in Albania in recent
years gives hope for the rebuilding of that country,
and we have much to learn from him about the ways of
peacemaking.” 

    

 
 
 


	
		
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