Testimony of His Eminence Metropolitan Euthymios of Acheloos (+ 2019)
September 17, 2002
September 17, 2002
During the decade 1955-1965 I served as General Secretary of the SYNDESMOS - the World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth. The year I was a deacon (1962-1963) I visited the Hospital for Infectious Diseases, in Agia Varvara, where I served at the Divine Liturgy.
After the Divine Liturgy, I was led to a small room, where the Monk Nikephoros lived, who was leprous, blind and bedridden. I did not know him nor did he know me. It was the first and only time we met.
We easily opened a spiritual discussion. I was impressed that the leprous and blind monk participated with great interest and vivacity in the discussion and that he was the one who talked the most. I remember that the spiritual discussion did not tire him at all.
During the discussion, the following detail particularly surprised me (and that is why I remember it after so many years): Due to my capacity as General Secretary of the SYNDESMOS Brotherhood, as I mentioned above, I was in communication with the Ecumenical Patriarch, His All-Holiness Athenagoras, as well as with other patriarchs, hierarchs and dignitaries of Orthodoxy. We did not discuss this issue with Nikephoros, but perhaps he was informed of my capacity. I do not know.
In a moment and completely spontaneously, the leper Monk expressed the following thought:
"Some clerics imagine that they will become patriarchs!"
These words of the Monk made me feel astonishment. And this because it was as if he were reading an obsessive thought of mine that I do not remember for what reason was slithering like a worm inside me at that time…
This incident made me believe that the leper Nikephoros, in the darkness of his long and painful ordeal, had received from the Holy Spirit the gift of insight.
I ask for his prayers and intercessions now too!
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
