Another College For Loudoun
Orthodox Christian College To Be Built
By Martin Casey
11/ 05,/2009
Category: File News (November 2009)
The St. Sophia Foundation, an affiliate of the Orthodox Christian faith, has plans to purchase a 47-acre tract of land in Loudoun County on which to build an Orthodox Christian College. The foundation is based in Manassas.
An announcement from the foundation Saturday, Oct. 31, reported a four-year effort to establish the new college “may finally be within reach.”
A Greek Orthodox parish was formed in September 2006, in Ashburn, and was formally blessed in February 2008 by His Eminence Metropolitan Evangelos, the spiritual leader of the mid-Atlantic region in the U.S., which then included 56 parishes.
Father Nectarios Trevino, chairman of St. Sophia Foundation, traveled to New York City, met with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and presented him with a letter from Metropolitan Nicholas, ruling hierarch of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, proposing the establishment of Hagia Sophia Institute and The College of St. George the Trophy-bearer “in the Washington area.”
St. Sophia Foundation expects to purchase the Loudoun County site “for the purposes of establishing an Orthodox Christian cemetery, a monastery, an Orthodox Christian institute of learning [the Hagia Sophia Institute], and a micro-college – The College of St. George the Trophy-bearer,” according to the announcement. There are an estimated 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide, he reported.
Subdeacon Michael Sivy, president of the St. Sophia Foundation, said, “The merit of our proposal is evident in its endorsement by the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas, Patriarch Theophilus of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and Archbishop Nourhan of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.”
Next month, Nectarios will go to Constantinople to make a presentation to the Ecumenical Patriarchate on the St. Sophia Foundation proposal and seek his approval.
