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Question 53.
Father your blessing!
Must all people wishing to enter the Holy Orthodox Church through
baptism be baptised with a name of a Saint or derived from a holy event
or anything similar (e.g. Ευαγγελισμός - Εvangelos/Εvangelia and Σωτήρ -
Sotiris/Sotira)? I thought this was the case, and personally prefer it,
yet I know of an infant baptised into the Holy Orthodox Church with the
name Bella Mia.
With respect,
Evangelos
Answer to Question 53.
Dear Evangelos,
The rules on names rests with the decision of the Holy
Synod of each local Church or with the Metropolitan. Up to a few years
ago in Cyprus we insisted on names being derived from names of saints or
church calendar events as the examples you mentioned so that the person
would have a feast-day. This would be the ideal especially as in the
Orthodox world people celebrate their feast-day more than their birthday
and more than not, they identify with the saint whose name they share
and adopt him/her as their special saint. This is not always possible as
we also have a tradition of Ancient Greek names e.g. Amalia, Agamemnon,
Odysseus, Yvonne, Telemaxos, Paris, Persephone and others which have
been around for centuries and very often are names of grandparents which
tradition demands must be passed on to the grandchildren. The Church
recognizes these names and allows them to be used although this does
away with the argument that the person must have a feast-day to
celebrate.
Today we usually accept the name of a child as it is registered on the
birth certificate so that there would not be conflicting names between
the civil and church records. As the child is registered months before
the baptism, the Church has no control of the names parents choose for
their babies. Also with adults joining the Orthodox Church they have the
option of keeping their name as it is or being baptized with a Christian
name. This is often preferred with persons from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist
and other Eastern religions where the name is totally foreign to the
Christian world.
The narrow-minded argument to keep only to names in the Greek calendar
of saints and Ancient Greek names puts forth a very nationalistic
attitude and denies that Orthodoxy is universal with many saints from
other countries. Brendan, Brigid, Cadfan, Caidoc, Elwin and many many
other Irish, Scottish, Welsh or English names would seem very foreign
and unorthodox names to a Greek priest but they are names of saints
recognized as Orthodox saints because they existed before the Great
Schism of 1054. Another argument for Non Saint names is that we are all
called to be saints. By being baptized with an unusual name, the name
automatically becomes a Christian name and if the person is blessed with
salvation then it also becomes a Saint’s name.
With love in Christ
Fr. Christopher
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