Memory Eternal: Metropolitan Moses (Görgün) of Germany Reposes in the Lord
ALTENBERGEN, GERMANY — News was received last week of the falling asleep in the Lord of His Eminence, Metropolitan Moses (Görgün) of Germany, a hierarch of the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece (under Archbishop Makarios of Athens). Metropolitan Moses passed away on August 14 at the age of 43, following an extended struggle with serious illness.
Born on June 5, 1981, into the Syriac community in Germany, he dedicated his life to religious service from his early youth. Between 1998 and 2000, he studied theology at the Syrian Orthodox theological school at the Monastery of St. Jacob of Sarug in Warburg, Germany, before entering the Monastery of St. Ephrem the Syrian in the year 2000. He pursued further philosophical and theological studies in Germany and Switzerland, completing advanced work in 2006 at the Benedictine Abbey of Maria Einsiedeln.
Initially serving within the Oriental communion, he broke with the Syriac Patriarchate in 2006 and aligned with the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, which consecrated him as a bishop in India for Europe in 2007. During this era, he founded the Monastery of St. Gabriel the Archangel in Altenbergen (near Georgenthal, Thuringia), building it into an active spiritual center in central Germany.
Over time, an honest and rigorous re-examination of dogmatic theology compelled him to confront the Christological errors of non-Chalcedonianism. In 2016, choosing conscience over institutional comfort, he publicly renounced Monophysitism/Miaphysitism, openly proclaiming that it was not the true Church of Christ and affirming the ancient, diophysite, Chalcedonian confession of the Holy Fathers.
Entering the True Orthodox Church, he was initially received under the Holy Synod of the Patristic Calendar (the Avlona Synod) under Metropolitan Angelos, which established an archdiocese for Germany centered at St. Gabriel’s Monastery. Seeking regularized canonical order under an established hierarchy, he and his flock were received in August 2023 into full communion with the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece under Archbishop Makarios of Athens, where he served as a full member of the Holy Synod.
Metropolitan Moses’s public defense of the true faith drew bitter opposition from his former co-religionists, but his conviction led hundreds of individuals of Syriac heritage out of non-Chalcedonian separation and into the canonical fullness of the Orthodox Church.
A notable figure of recent church history, Metropolitan Moses was an articulate theologian fluent in classical Syriac, modern Aramaic, German, and English, with working knowledge of Arabic. He leaves behind a legacy of uncompromising adherence to patristic dogma, having sacrificed position, ethnic insularity, and ecclesiastical comfort to embrace the True Faith.
May his memory be eternal.
