Chapter 6 — Western Europe was Orthodox

As you may or may or may know, the Eastern Orthodox Church was formed when the Patriarch of Constantinople entered into schism from the Roman Catholic Church in 1054 AD. There were temporary schisms between the Roman and Greek churches prior to this, and multiple short-lived reunions afterward, but 1054 is the officially-accepted date for the permanent schism between Rome and Constantinople.

With the mass immigration of Orthodox peoples — especially Greeks — to countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States in the 20th century, a massive wave of historical revisionism has been unleashed, targeting and attacking Western European history in the Middle Ages. This Eastern Orthodox revisionism first of all touches the religious sphere, though not only: given the very close and inseparable links between religion and society, especially in the Middle Ages, this revisionism naturally touches the secular/political sphere as well, and in very significant ways.

In the first place, the entire history of the Catholic Church in Western Europe has been usurped by Eastern Orthodox revisionists. According to them, everyone who lived before 1054 (i.e. before the Great Schism) was actually Eastern Orthodox: kings, queens, emperors, popes, bishops, saints, monks, missionaries, theologians... All of them were Eastern Orthodox — not Catholic.

One of the most commonly-promoted claims among these Orthodox revisionists is that England was Orthodox prior to the Norman conquest of England (1066 AD), and that it was the Normans who transformed England into a Roman Catholic country.

(Even though it was Pope Gregory, bishop of Rome, who led the Gregorian Mission which already converted the Saxons to Christianity nearly 500 years before the Normans, but anyway...)

One of the main websites promoting this claim is called Orthodox England. The very name of the website illustrates its revisionist nature. It is the official site of an Orthodox parish in the UK, under the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. However, it also hosts a large quantity of historical revisionist content. One of the primary aims of the website is to convert the English people to Eastern Orthodoxy by convincing them that England was an Orthodox country prior to the Norman conquest, and that therefore England should “return to its Orthodox faith”.

The same or similar content can also be found on Orthodox parish websites in the US. And of course, all of these revisionist writings are also filled with vitriolic anti-Catholic propaganda.

They have even gone so far as to literally copy an entire Roman Catholic book filled with short biographies of hundreds of Catholic saints, but just claim that all those saints were actually Orthodox rather than Catholic. These saints are for the most part men and women whom the Eastern Orthodox Church never venerated, never recognized, and never even heard of; they are found only in Latin sources and historically are venerated only in the Catholic Church. Eastern Orthodox immigrants, however, are appropriating these saints in order to incorporate and assimilate Catholic history into an imaginary Orthodox history, in the hopes of converting Westerners to Orthodoxy.

Another proponent of the “Western Europe used to be Orthodox” theory is the previously-mentioned Orthodox priest John Romanides — the same man who claimed that the ancient Romans were Greek and that Latin is a Greek language. Romanides and his disciples also claim that Robin Hood was an Orthodox hero. They have reached a point, therefore, where they are stealing even legendary figures.