Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos

Saint Chrysostomos Papasarantopoulos, also called Chrysostomos the Missionary, was a Greek archimandrite who at the age of fifty-⁠seven, in poor health and with no support, set out to preach the Gospel in Africa. For twelve years he laboured in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, baptised great numbers of people, built churches and opened the way for modern Orthodox mission on the African continent. He reposed at Kananga in Congo in 1972.

He was the second Greek missionary in Africa, after Archimandrite Nikodimos Sarikas (1876-1941) of Asia Minor. The Patriarchate of Alexandria numbered him among the saints in 2025, and his memory is kept on 29 December, the day of his repose.

Childhood and first steps in monasticism

He was born in 1903 in the village of Vasilitsi in Messenia, Greece, and was baptised Christos. His parents, Theodoros Papasarantopoulos, whose family came from Tripoli in Arcadia, and Stavroula, born Trigourea, were poor herders but devout; he was their seventh child. From childhood he gave his life to Christ. At ten he lost his father and had to leave school, in the third year of primary school, to work.

At fifteen, thirsting for learning and stillness, he left home in secret and settled at the monastery of Koroni. His relatives, however, kept visiting and begging him to return to the family, so he soon left that monastery.

He then went to Kalamata, to the hermitage of Panagoulakis, the Monastery of the Annunciation, known at the time for its very severe asceticism. There he became a monk with the name Chrysostomos. The excesses of the abbot and the extremely hard life of the hermitage broke his health, however, and left him with an illness that stayed with him all his life.

Abbot and confessor in Greece

From 1920 to 1929 he lived at the Gardiki monastery in Messenia. After his discharge from the army he was ordained priest on 4 May 1926 and appointed abbot of the monastery. There he tonsured his mother as a nun with the name Sebastiani (some sources speak of his sister). For years he served the surrounding villages as their priest, and at the same time he completed the primary school curriculum by studying at home and began to learn French.

When the Gardiki monastery was dissolved for lack of monks, he was transferred to the dependency of the Voulkano monastery at Chrysokellaria, near Koroni. He was then abbot of the Phaneromeni monastery on Salamis, where he remained until 1941.

Afterwards he came to Athens and joined the brotherhood of the Petraki monastery, where he served above all as a confessor to people of every age and walk of life, who came to love and respect him. During the occupation he was in Edessa as general vicar and protosyncellus of the metropolis; he then served in Kozani and Thessaloniki, where from 1947 to 1949 he was parish priest of Saint Paraskevi in Nea Krini, a parish of refugees from Asia Minor. In Athens, again by studying on his own, he obtained his secondary school diploma.

Back at the Petraki monastery he decided to enrol in the Theological School of the University of Athens. In 1958, at fifty-⁠five, he received the degree he had longed for.

The call of Africa

During his studies he met several African fellow students from Uganda, the first Ugandan Orthodox to receive a formal theological education. One of them, Theodore Nankyamas, would become one of the first Orthodox bishops in East Africa, and another, Demetrios Mumbale, the first Orthodox physician in Uganda and founder of an Orthodox clinic there. From these encounters the thought of mission was born in him, felt as a true call like that of the Macedonian in the vision of the Apostle Paul.

At fifty-⁠seven he resolved to go. The archbishop of the day and all his acquaintances tried to dissuade him, pointing to his age and health. On a journey to the Holy Land, however, he met Patriarch Christophoros II of Alexandria, who gave him his blessing, and he went on to Africa.

Uganda

In 1960 he arrived in Kampala, Uganda. The Orthodox Church there was in a precarious state after years of pressure from the British colonial authorities and hostile propaganda. In his letters he described the lack of houses, churches and clergy, the few Greek families living miles apart, and the African faithful scattered over tens and hundreds of miles in every direction, with local priests poorly trained and disheartened.

He then began a wide correspondence with friends, relatives and acquaintances who might help. Little by little aid began to arrive from Greece, Europe and America: parcels of clothing, cheques, utensils and other goods. On 22 March 1961 the small church of the mission was consecrated. He had not yet learned Luganda, but he had learned Swahili fairly well, which he spoke mixed with English and made himself understood.

Learning a new language at his age was not easy, yet within a year of his arrival he could preach in Swahili. He catechised, taught, served the Divine Liturgy and baptised a great number of local people. Those who were suitable he prepared and guided toward the priesthood. Through his letters he also encouraged others to give themselves to mission, among them Makarios (Tillyrides), later a hierarch in Kenya. In 1963 he became the spiritual founder of the missionary society The Friends of Uganda, which continues its work today from Thessaloniki.

Kenya, Tanzania and Congo

He then extended the mission to neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania. In Nairobi he founded another mission station, writing that the work was progressing and Orthodoxy was spreading. He translated the Divine Liturgy and various prayers into Swahili. He constantly appealed for help in letters to Greece and invited people to join him, but received no response. Though advanced in years, he preached unceasingly.

After ten years in East Africa he wished to bring the Gospel also to the country now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire. In 1970 he moved there and stayed for the rest of his life. The local people received him even more warmly, but he lacked almost entirely both material help and co-⁠workers. He also learned French, and he called his niece, Olga Papasarandou, from Greece; she came to Congo, worked alongside him and, after his death, remained for a time the only Orthodox missionary in the region.

A month before his death he wrote that he loved the Africans and was fully convinced that the Lord had brought him there; that he wished to spend the few remaining days of his old age preaching and teaching in Kananga, a large city in the centre of the country whose people were eager to know Orthodoxy; that he was old and alone and his strength was small, but the Lord would show him the way as He always had, and he asked to be remembered in prayer.

Repose

On 13 December 1972, while travelling from Kananga, he was seized by a heavy nosebleed that would not stop. He returned to Kananga, served the Divine Liturgy on Christmas Day and reposed on 29 December 1972 in the Kananga hospital, aged sixty-⁠nine. He was buried in the city cemetery. By July 1973 the mission at Kananga had been taken up by his old friend and fellow worker, Archimandrite Chariton (Pneumatikakis) (1908-1998). On 21 December 1996 his remains were exhumed and reburied in the garden of the church of Saint Andrew at the Kananga mission centre.

The fruit of his labours

Father Chrysostomos set out alone, without material or moral support, overcoming his own illness and many obstacles: racial barriers, unknown languages, very hard living conditions, lack of funds, restrictions imposed by his superiors and poor food. He was not easily discouraged and would say that he had managed everything with God's help. His life was a continual round of travel, preaching, baptising, planting churches and celebrating the Liturgy.

The work he began was continued with great fruit; today there is an Orthodox metropolis in Kinshasa, and Orthodoxy in Congo has been built on the foundations he laid. His letters also kindled zeal for mission in Greece: soon after his departure, in 1961, the Inter-⁠Orthodox Missionary Centre was founded in Athens under the aegis of the Syndesmos youth movement, together with the journal Porefthentes (Go Ye), edited by Anastasios Yannoulatos, later a bishop and professor at the University of Athens. Missionary societies followed in Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras, where none had existed in modern Greece before him, and his work had a similar echo in the United States.

Veneration

On 29 December 1985 the Metropolis of Messenia raised a bust in his honour, and on 29 December 1987 the Academy of Athens awarded him its silver medal posthumously.

On 8 October 2025 the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria numbered him among the saints, and a service to him was published in Greek. On 22 March 2026, in Kananga, Patriarch Theodoros II of Alexandria, with hierarchs and clergy of the Patriarchate, solemnly uncovered the relics of Saint Chrysostomos the Missionary. His feast is kept on 29 December.