On May 9, the Holy Synod unanimously voted for Metropolitan Makarios of Christoupolis to be the new Archbishop of Australia.
Makarios was born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1973. He studied at the Higher Ecclesiastical School of Athens and the Theological School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has a Master of Sacred Theology from the University of Boston, a Master of Arts in History of Science from Harvard and a Master of Bioethics from Monash University.
Since 2003 he has been teaching at the Higher Ecclesiastical Academy of Heraklion and has occasionally taught courses at various universities, including Hellenic College, the Medical Schools of the Universities of Crete, Thessaly, and Athens.
In May 2015 he was elected First Dean of the Theological Seminar of the Autonomous Church of Estonia.
After many years in priestly positions, on the Easter Sunday of 2008, the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew appointed him Archimandrite of the Ecumenical Throne at the Phanar. Makarios served in many senior positions in the Holy Archdiocese of Crete until he was elected bishop.
The newly appointed Archbishop of Australia founded and runs the Publishing Series “All About Bioethics”, which is under the auspices of the Church Mother of Constantinople.
On April 27, 2015, he was unanimously elected Bishop of Christoupolis by the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and attended the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church of Crete in 2016 as a counselor to the Ecumenical Patriarchate Delegation.
During his acceptance speech directed towards His All Holiness, Patriarch Bartholemew, the new Archbishop Makarios said, “You are sending me, as successor of the great previous hierarchy, Archbishop Stylianos, to what is now one of the most dynamic eparchs of the Ecumenical Throne, with its beautiful and distinctive St. Basil’s Homes, with its Theological College, with its many and organised parishes, with its righteous holy monasteries, with its good and worthy brother assistant hierarchs, and with a flock of hundreds of thousands of faithful who, although they belong to the fourth generation, speak the Greek language flawlessly, and have not lost even one of the sacred and righteous traditions of our faith and genus.
At this holy moment, I promise that I will not only preserve what I receive, but I will also increase and multiply these graces, breathing into the Holy Archdiocese of Australia the blessed and singular spirit of our Ecumenical Patriarchate.”