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Long before Philoptochos had a name, its work started with a knock on a door.
In the closing years of the 1800s, waves of immigrants from Greece, Asia Minor, and Constantinople arrived in American port cities carrying little more than the Orthodox faith, the Greek language, and imbedded social customs that sustained them for generations. The women who journeyed across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic formed small clubs inside their new parishes. These clubs welcomed newcomers and strangers alike, helped families navigate an unfamiliar country, and instilled their faith and their Hellenic identity in future generations. Long before Philoptochos had bylaws and a national board, this instinct to uphold the Orthodox faith and the Hellenic experience through hospitality, service, and community building was and remains its founding principle.
It took until 1931 for that instinct to become an institution. That November, in the middle of the Great Depression, Archbishop Athenagoras, who would later become Ecumenical Patriarch, brought more than 300 existing women’s philanthropic chapters under one national structure. In doing so, Archbishop Athenagoras called the National Ladies Philoptochos Society to undertake a mission much larger than that of a charity or foundation; he encouraged the Philoptochos chapters to organize gatherings, educational programs, and aid efforts that brought the deeply Orthodox and Hellenic ethos of hospitality and service to the American experience. Even the fundraising pledge in 1931 reflected this fusion: vasilopita, the New Year’s bread honoring Saint Basil, was auctioned off to raise funds for the care of the community’s orphans. It was an ambitious ask for a difficult period in the country’s history, and the women said yes anyway.
No matter the size or scope of the initiative, the Philoptochos chapters in parishes throughout the country embraced the call to serve diligently and faithfully. This dynamic of generosity and care can be encapsulated in one story from the early 1930s. A woman in Brooklyn, after finding her husband hospitalized right before Christmas, found herself unable to provide for her children during the holiday season. On Christmas Eve, the woman received three unexpected visitors at her door: three Philoptochos members bearing bags filled with groceries and gifts. It is in this story that we encounter the very core of the work of Philoptochos: not a program on paper, but a knock on a door at exactly the right moment. It is in such acts that we come to know Christ, Who calls us to seek out (cf. John 20:19-20, cf. Matt.7:7-8) and receive our neighbor (cf. John 21:9-13, cf. Rev.3:20) as a sign of His consolation.
With such acts of generosity and hospitality, the Ladies Philoptochos Society established itself as a reliable philanthropic ministry that only grew with the needs of the people it served. During World War II, chapters shipped food and supplies to a starving Greece and sold war bonds to assist the war effort. In 1944, the Ladies Philoptochos purchased what became Saint Basil Academy and went on to build its first Department of Social Services, organize relief for Cyprus after Turkey’s 1974 invasion, fund children’s clinics in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, and serve as a first responder after Hurricane Katrina.
None of these efforts happened by accident. The same instinct that sent three women to a Brooklyn doorstep in the 1930s never waned. Only new doors were found at which to knock and new generations of committed Philoptochos members were mentored and empowered.
Today, Philoptochos is the largest Orthodox Christian women’s philanthropic organization in the country, with more than 400 chapters and 26,000 members active in classrooms, hospitals, disaster zones, and parish halls. For most of its history, the work of the National Ladies Philoptochos ran out of borrowed space, inside the Archdiocese Headquarters or the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. In 2012, under President Aphrodite Skeadas, Philoptochos purchased its first permanent home: a historic brownstone at 126 East 37th Street in Manhattan, now the Philoptochos Center of Philanthropy. Chapters nationwide funded it leaf by leaf on a giving tree and paid off the mortgage within eighteen months. Archbishop Demetrios blessed the building in 2016, presenting an icon of the organization’s patron saints: the physician Saints Cosmos and Damianos, the Holy Unmercenaries.
This is the story Philoptochos offers to America, 250 years after our nation’s founding. It is not a story of quiet immigration or and assimilation. It is a story of how immigrant women came to practice their faithand uphold their Hellenic identity in a new and unfamiliar country by building something distinctly American: a mutual aid network so enduring it spans nearly a century, rooted in a two-thousand-year-old faith at home in a 250-year-old nation. Every chapter meeting, every new member sworn, and every act of generous service given in faith and love is an act of inheritance, a legacy passed from immigrant grandmothers to the Greek American and Orthodox Christian women knocking on the door today. Throughout its entire history, Philoptochos never stopped asking the same fundamental question: How can we help?
It is this spirit of charity and hospitality that has inspired many to marvel at the dynamism of Philoptochos. Archbishop Demetrios once said Philoptochos had grown beyond being merely a group committed to being friends of the poor to also being friends of God, friends of neighbors, friends of humanity, and friends of strangers. His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America has gone even further, calling Philoptochos members an ‘Army of Agape,’ who as the Church’s spiritual mothers carry a particular closeness to the Theotokos in their works of charity and service that heals both children and adults alike that effects a good in the world no one, but God can measure. In many ways, Philoptochos’s story, from a handful of church basement clubs to an ‘Army of Agape,’ is itself a truly American story that just happens to be told in Greek. Carried forward, chapter by chapter, generation by generation, it is a story of women who have embraced the Christian call to encounter Christ with a knock on a door.
The post Philoptochos: Friends of the poor, mothers of a new homeland appeared first on Orthodox Observer.
