Statement by Archbishop Iakovos on the Fifth Anniversary of the Assasination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The fifth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. serves each of us with a mandate to commit ourselves to one of the most sacred tasks to labor, to toil, and to even suffer for our fellow men still in captivity, still unfreed from fear, justice and abuse.

It furthermore trumpets to the world the need for a spiritual reawakening and a moral resurrection if we are truly fearful of being caught in the action of betraying Jesus, Who offered His very life for the redemption of enslaved man and his world. Martin Luther King, Jr. the dreamer and the prophet, the fearless and the challenger of all social evils and even death, the visionary and the reformer, will never be silenced either by sophisticated pseudo-oratory or by the hypocritical society of our times.

Christ's call to make all things new obliges us to recapture the true meaning of Christianity and to dedicate ourselves to the further development and promotion of the Christian precept that demands that we become the keepers and not the killers of one another.