Archbishop Iakovos (Coucouzis)

Eight days after the beating of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Iakovos flew to Selma, Alabama, and stood beside Dr Martin Luther King Jr at the memorial service for the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister beaten to death in the street. The photograph of the two men together ran on the cover of Life on 26 March 1965.

It cost him. Letters came from parishioners telling him he had no business there; some withheld their giving. His own account of why he went is worth having in his words rather than paraphrase — he said he had gone because he had seen his own people persecuted, and could not look away from another people being persecuted in the country that had received him.

The image did something a hundred sermons could not: it placed an Orthodox archbishop, in his rason and his panagia, inside the central American moral argument of the century. For a Church still widely mistaken for a national club, that was the beginning of visibility.

The institutional record is long. He founded the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas in the year of his enthronement and led it until he retired — the first durable body through which the jurisdictions acted together. He reorganized Holy Cross seminary and founded Hellenic College beside it, and established the St Photios National Shrine at St Augustine, Florida, marking the first Greek settlement in the New World.

He was decorated by two countries and several presidents — the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Carter in 1980, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1986 — and was received at the White House by administrations of both parties. None of that was vanity: it was the same project as Selma, conducted in a quieter register.

In November 1994 the Orthodox bishops of North America met at Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and issued statements about their common life on this continent — including a rejection of the idea that they were a 'diaspora' whose real centre lay elsewhere. Iakovos presided.

The meeting was not welcomed at the Phanar. Within two years, on his eighty-fifth birthday in July 1996, Iakovos retired; the accounts agree that the retirement was pressed on him, and connect it to Ligonier and to a fear that he might move toward an American patriarchate. His relations with Patriarch Bartholomew had been strained for some time.

He had critics from the other direction too. His ecumenical involvement — the World Council of Churches, the meetings with popes — drew sharp public rebuke from traditionalists, most famously from Metropolitan Philaret of ROCOR in 1969. Both criticisms are part of the record and are set down here as such.

Archbishop Iakovos is the largest single figure in twentieth-century American Orthodoxy measured by public presence, and Selma is why. Before 1965 the Orthodox Church in the United States was, to most Americans, an ethnic institution they had no occasion to think about; the photograph on the cover of Life put an Orthodox bishop into the country's central moral argument, at cost to himself and against the wishes of many of his own people.

The rest of his record — SCOBA, Hellenic College, the shrine at St Augustine, Ligonier — is one long argument that the Church on this continent is native to it and not a colony of somewhere else. That argument is what ended his primacy. He is not glorified, and nothing here implies veneration; what it records is a bishop who spent thirty-seven years insisting that Orthodoxy in America was American.