Kyrillos Loukaris, born in Candia in 1572,…

Kyrillos Loukaris, born in Candia in 1572, when Crete was part of the Venetian Republic's maritime empire, had in his youth traveled through Europe, studying at Venice and Padua, and at Geneva where he had come under the influence of the reformed faith as represented by John Calvin.

Lucaris had pursued theological studies in Venice and Padua, Wittenberg and Geneva where he had come under the influence of Calvinism and developed strong antipathy for Roman Catholicism.

Lucaris had been sent to Poland In 1596 by Meletios Pegas, Patriarch of Alexandria, to lead the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, which had proposed a union of Kiev with Rome.

Lucaris served for six years as professor of the Orthodox academy in Vilnius (now in Lithuania).

He is now the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria as Cyril III and Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as Cyril I.

Due to Turkish oppression combined with the proselytization of the Orthodox faithful by Jesuit missionaries, there is a shortage of schools which teach the Orthodox Faith and the Greek language.

Roman Catholic schools are set up and Catholic churches are built next to Orthodox ones, and since Orthodox priests are in short supply, his first act had been to found a theological seminary in Mount Athos, the Athoniada school.

However his ultimate aim is to reform the Orthodox Church along Calvinistic lines, and to this end he has sent many young Greek theologians to the universities of Switzerland, the northern Netherlands and England.

He had in 1629 published his famous Confessio (Calvinistic doctrine), but as far as possible accommodated to the language and creeds of the Orthodox Church.

It had appeared the same year in two Latin editions, four French, one German and one English, and in the Eastern Church started a controversy which will culminate in 1672 with the convocation by Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, of the Synod of Jerusalem by which the Calvinistic doctrines are condemned.

Cyril is also particularly well disposed towards the Anglican Church, and his correspondence with the Archbishops of Canterbury is extremely interesting.

It is in his time that Mitrophanes Kritopoulos—later to become Patriarch of Alexandria from 1636 to 1639, had been sent to England to study.

Both Lucaris and Kritopoulos are lovers of books and manuscripts, and many of the items in the collections of books and these two Patriarchs acquire manuscripts that today adorn the Patriarchal Library.

Luoikaris has been several times temporarily deposed and banished at the instigation of both his Orthodox opponents and the Jesuits, who are his bitterest enemies.

Finally, when the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV is about to set out for the Persian War, the patriarch is accused of a design to stir up the Cossacks, and to avoid trouble during his absence the Sultan has him deposed for high treason and on June 27, 1638, strangled by the Janissaries aboard a ship in the Bosporus.

His body is thrown into the sea, but it is recovered and buried at a distance from the capital by his friends, and will be brought back to Constantinople only after many years.

The orthodoxy of Lucaris himself will continue to be a matter of debate in the Eastern Church.