EDITOR’S NOTE (Nick Stamatakis): The timing of this post is impeccable!! While Matthew Namee had posted three parts of his extensive interview with Karloutsos last summer, suddenly, as the Ukraine disaster is unfolding and we are heading for an apparent defeat of the Deep State actors (and possible jail time for many of them as you can see in another of our today’s posts) voila! We have Karloutsos explaining what happened with the millions that were supposed to go to rebuild Saint Nicholas in Ground Zero!!
What is Karloutsos worried about? He worries about the $25 million paid to the Constantinople Patriarchate for Ukraine’s Cacocephaly, which was related to the funds raised for rebuilding Saint Nicholas! Who raised the money for Saint Nicholas? Karloutsos of couirse!! Please go to the last part of this article and you will see the futile “narrative” trying to cover Karloutsos’ behinds… There is no way to succeed!! Why? Because even without official evidence, the truth came out in November 2018, in a now-famous article by Helleniscope’s friend James George Jatras: “Whose Money Stoked Religious Strife in Ukraine – and Who Tried to Steal It?“(link here)
We are now waiting for any “official” information revealed by the three letter agencies regarding the official policies on Ukraine’s “cacocephaly” and how many bribes were needed for their implementation…
February 20, 2025, n.stamatakis@aol.com www.helleniscope.com
DISCLAIMER: The views and statements expressed in this article constitute constitutionally protected opinions of this author.
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The first lighting of St Nicholas Shrine, September 11, 2021. Fr Alex Karloutsos stands to the right of Archbishop Elpidophoros.
This article is the fourth in a series on Fr Alex Karloutsos, based on many hours’ worth of interviews I did with him in 2024. Here are the previous three installments:
The Father Alex Karloutsos Origin Story
Karloutsos and the Rise of Bartholomew
Father Alex and the Mother Church
By 2001, the brief tenure of Archbishop Spyridon had come to an end, and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America was now led by Archbishop Demetrios. Fr Alex Karloutsos was, by this point, a parish priest in the Hamptons, on Long Island. No longer an exile, he had returned to Archdiocesan work as Executive Director of Leadership 100, the major endowment fund of the Archdiocese and as the Archbishop’s representative to the White House and Congress.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Fr Karloutsos and his wife Xanthi were in his car driving to the Archdiocesan headquarters in New York City, when he got a call from his secretary who told him that a plane had just flown into one of the Twin Towers. Karloutsos immediately called Archbishop Demetrios and the Archdiocesan VP / billionaire Michael Jaharis, who were in Boston. “I said, ‘Don’t get on a plane.’ And then all communications broke down. I tried to get into the city, but I couldn’t, so we went to our son’s apartment in Astoria and saw Tower Two fall.” His next move was to organize a church service at his parish, to pray in the midst of the crisis. “I thought we’d get twenty people, but it was as if it was an Easter night. It was Pascha, but it felt more like Holy Friday than Holy Saturday.”
Returning home after the service, Karloutsos got a phone call: it was the Port Authority, for whom Fr Karloutsos served as a chaplain. They needed him to come in to help with the relief efforts, to comfort victims. Karloutsos wondered how he’d possibly get to the relief site, since all the roads were closed. He was told, “Go on the left side of the road and show your badge at every checkpoint.” So Karloutsos prepared to head out, and he let his wife Xanthi know he was leaving. “She said, ‘I’m going with you.’ I said, ‘You can’t come with me.’” But she insisted, and he agreed. “I had to listen to my wife,” he told me. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be the only guy with his wife near him!’ But I married a Greek from Northern Epiros, you know?”
Every ten miles of their drive, they had to stop at a checkpoint, and Fr Karloutsos showed his badge and was allowed to continue. “I’ve been in motorcades with Presidents of the United States, but this was different. This was sailing all the way through nothing – no one’s on the road. They cleared it; they closed everything down. We went down to where St Nicholas [Greek Orthodox Church] was [at Ground Zero], and it looked like a Godzilla or King Kong movie. FBI, CIA, all these different police kind of jackets, uniforms, fire trucks, everything smoking. We went to the Holland Tunnel, and there were these two very, very large garbage trucks. They were bigger than tanks. You could not get through. So I went to the Holland Tunnel and showed them my badge, and they opened up so I could drive through.”
George Tenet, CIA Director and Greek Orthodox Christian
They arrived at the makeshift relief site. “People were crying because we lost 37 policemen from the Port Authority. I said, ‘What do you want us to do?’ I was told, We don’t want you to do too much. Just look holy. Just help us. Pray for us, talk to us, touch us. We just need to feel good, that there’s hope.” So I went around, talked with people, did what I could, tried to comfort. I was shocked when I saw an Orthodox Jewish rabbi comforting the wife of the Superintendent of Police who had just died. She was Catholic, he was actually holding her. Love knew no bounds that night, and I witnessed humanity’s finest hour in the midst of the worst inhumanity imaginable.”
In the coming days, Fr Karloutsos helped Archbishop Demetrios and other Orthodox bishops visit the site – including the destroyed Greek Orthodox church of St Nicholas, which was the only house of worship destroyed on 9/11. Decades earlier, Fr Karloutsos’s own father – himself a priest – had served at that parish.
On September 14, President George W. Bush stood on the rubble at Ground Zero and famously declared, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Fr Karloutsos was there, just a few yards away from the President. Then, Bush and other dignitaries bowed their heads as Cardinal Egan offered a hope-filled prayer. After this, everyone drove down to Washington, DC for a reception of religious leaders. (“You could only drive, not fly,” Karloutsos explains.)
