To the Editor:

We live in chaotic times. Two examples are the recent mass shooting at Santa Fe High School and the state of the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, the NRA’s position that more guns will make us safer, and President Trump’s insistence that armed schoolteachers will keep children safer in class will do nothing to curb gun violence and will create more chaos.

The Santa Fe killings brought the Greek-American community directly into this mess.

Your editorial “A Tragic Father’s Words” (May 26) on the subject was the most poignant, touching editorial I ever read. At age 90, I was emotionally choked up by the father’s words; I could not hold back my tears. Tears for the victims, their families, for the father, and even for his son.

As far as the Archdiocese goes, the financial chaos, including the bumbled finances for the St. Nicholas National Shrine rebuilding, has affected all of us and in particular puts a heavy damper on the Church becoming autocephalous in America. I have long called for that to happen, but this is not the time. The Patriarchate needs to be more stable and safer in its historic place in Constantinople than it is under the regressive President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and the Archdiocese of America has to exhibit stability, not chaos.

The conditions under which autocephaly would have been more successful were years ago, under Archbishop Iakovos than they are now under Archbishop Demetrios.

Why have we not progressed? Unfortunately, this is where hierarchical ineptitude and financial chaos have brought us.

Vasilios (William) Vafakos
Brooklyn, NY