GOA and AHEPA: Community Pillars or Pillagers?

ΕΑΝ ΠΡΟΤΙΜΑΤΕ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΠΑΤΗΣΤΕ ΤΗ ΣΗΜΑΙΑ ΣΤΟ ΚΑΤΩ ΜΕΡΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΟΘΟΝΗΣ

By Helleniscope’s Editorial Team

AHEPA and GOA are sponsoring a discussion tonight, Monday, at the St. Nicholas shrine at Ground Zero.  The discussion will be led by the GOA’s chancellor, Fr. Vythoulkas, and his AHEPA counterpart. Mr. Zenon Christoddoulou.  It will be on the topic of The Greek Orthodox Church & AHEPA: Two Pillars of the Greek-American Community.

The false claim these men assert crumbles in the face of evidence.

1. Abandoned in droves.

AHEPA does not become a pillar by lying about its membership strength.  AHEPA has only 15,000 members nationwide, and not all of them are Greek-Americans.  Our community, on the other hand, boasts 1.25 million people who identified as Greek Americans in the 2020 census.  That means AHEPA’s membership strength constitutes a mere 1% of our community’s population.  Furthermore, AHEPA’s membership is shrinking at an alarming rate of 3% per year.

You don’t need the seminar speakers’ doctorate degrees to know that 1% of our community is not a pillar.  It is not even a stub!

The church, on the other hand, was once a pillar – the pillar – of our community.  Unlike AHEPA, GOA was not founded by the Ku Klux Klan to pursue its white supremacy ideology of “pure and undefiled Americanism.”  The church was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of Greek immigrants who sacrificed everything they had to raise their families in the One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, the body of Christ.

But that era is gone. The syncretic ecumenists who usurped our churches and converted them into ecumenical shrines, complete with AHEPA masonic temples, cannot speak of the church of our fathers that we thirst for.

The fraud perpetrated by these “defenders of Hellenism” who refuse to raise the Greek flag in the church yard ensures they are not a “pillar” of my community.  They are nothing but pillagers!

Numbers do not lie.  Of the 1.25 million Americans identifying themselves as ethnically Greek in the 2020 census, only 85,000 were regular attendees of GOA churches, or 6.8 % of our community!  Similarly, of the 1 to 1.2 million Americans who identify as Orthodox Christians, the GOA’s 85,000 regular attendees constitute only 6.5 % of the Orthodox community.  Where is the pillar?

These are the figures from six years ago, before Elpidophoros destroyed what was left.  I challenge Dr. Vithoulkas and his AHEPA counterpart to provide updated data that supports their claim that GOA is a pillar of our community.  The numbers prove it is not!

As of six years ago, 93.2% of our community voted with their feet and left GOA in droves.  Nearly a quarter of them left between 2010 and 2020.  In the years since Elpidoktonos arrived, the decline has increased drastically.

AHEPA and GOA are not community “pillars.”  They are our community’s pillagers.

2. “Non-sectarian” means “non-Orthodox”.

Article 3 of AHEPA’s constitution states:  “[AHEPA] shall be non-partisan in politics and non-sectarian in religion.  All partisan political and all sectarian religious discussions are strictly prohibited in any official deliberations thereof.”  

By definition, non-sectarian means non-Orthodox.  There is no room for misinterpretation.

But AHEPA does not stop there.  It has its own religious pagan rituals, dogmas, and “chaplains” who lead the “initiates” in “prayers” to their “supreme deity.”  They bless each other with a heretical sign of the cross.  They immerse themselves in heretical initiation services and heretical funeral services that take priority over whatever religion its members happen to espouse.

Unlike our churches and parishes, which were founded by the blood, sweat, and tears of hard-working immigrants, AHEPA was founded by the Ku Klux Klan as a K.K.K. affiliate.  Its goal was not to foster the immigrants’ assimilation; it was to promote the K.K.K.’s White Protestant supremacy principles.

The Klan gave AHEPA its name.  It drafted AHEPA’s charter, constitution, bylaws, oaths, and rituals.  It made membership available only to White males who were not Catholic or Jewish.  It led AHEPA to disavow the use of the Greek language and Orthodox prayers at its meetings.  It led AHEPA to lobby for the banning of foreign-language newspapers and the closure of parochial schools.  It made AHEPA preach the Klan’s doctrine of “pure and undefiled Americanism.”

This is not ancient history.  AHEPA continues to lie about its history.  It continues to tell members of Congress that it was founded to defend Greek Americans from the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan.  It continues to be “non-sectarian” and non-political.  It continues to practice its heretical cult rituals and converts our churches into “AHEPA temples.”

As the Greek proverb says, «Έβαλαν τον λύκο να φυλάξει τα πρόβατα!»  They put the wolf to watch the sheep!

Through their heresies, Ahepans have cut themselves off from our church, which is the body of Christ.  If Dr. Vithoulkas is truly a priest, he must instruct the Ahepans he blesses tonight that the rituals they received from the K.K.K. are repulsive to the teachings of the Fathers of the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.  They are NOT an alternative way to achieving Nirvana.

3. AHEPA’s discrimination against women.

AHEPA’s problem lies not only in its numbers but also in its fraud and dishonesty.  It is also in its discrimination against half of our community’s population, our women!

Elpidophoros falsely declared in his encyclical that “AHEPA . . . fill[s] its ranks from all the members of our communities, regardless of background.”  Are women non-existent in our communities?

The constitution that AHEPA received at its founding from the Ku Klux Klan excluded Blacks from AHEPA membership.   AHEPA preserved that exclusion for nearly five decades, even as Archbishop Iakovos marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr.

AHEPA has since deleted the exclusion of Blacks from its constitution, but it continues to exclude women from full membership and leadership roles.  Instead, it relegates women to an inferior auxiliary organization, the Daughters of Penelope.  That inferior auxiliary is named after Penelope, Odysseus’ loyal wife, who waited for her husband for twenty years.

In AHEPA’s core ideology, women lack the necessary instruments that men have to lead!  An organization that numbers one percent of our community and consciously rejects half of its members on sexist grounds cannot honestly pretend to be a pillar of that community.

Jun 8, 2026,  www.helleniscope.com

DISCLAIMER: The views and statements expressed in this article constitute constitutionally protected opinions of this author.

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