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There is no justification for the personal opinion that "Consequently these Fathers' condemnation may extend to all contraceptive methods." I strongly object. --[[User:Fr Lev|Fr Lev]] ([[User talk:Fr Lev|talk]]) 15:16, June 22, 2018 (UTC)

== The 1937 Decision by the Church of Greece ==

The one local Church to condemn birth control that I know of was the Church of Greece in 1937. There is a story to that. In his book, ''Orthodoxy and the West'', [[Christos Yannaras]] attributes the decision to the influence of Seraphim Papakostas (1972-1954), writing that Papakostas's books are characterized by "legalistic moralism, spiritual self-interest centered on the individual, and a reliance on a guilt-ransom-justification scheme of salvation.... he wrote like a Protestant pietist. In his book The Question of Conception, Papakostas faithfully follows Anglican and Roman Catholic opinions about contraception, presented as a quintessentially Orthodox view" [229-230). In footnote no. 386, he adds: "The misleading nature of Papakostas's book has been demonstrated by Stavropolous (1977). Papakostas's insidious influence even extended to the official publications of the hierarchy. A Church of Greece encyclical of October 1937 borrowed Papkostas's heterodox theses verbatim." The reference is to Alexandros Stavropolous, ''To provlima tis teknogonias kai i enkyklios tis Ekklisias tis Ellados'' [The Problem of Contraception and the Encyclical of the Church of Greece], Athens, 1977.