Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia was the Eastern Orthodox Church’s most familiar voice in the English-speaking world for six decades. His death at the age of 87 has deprived the Catholic Church of a constant yet critical (and thus true) friend on the path to recovering the unity between the churches.

Born to an Anglican family in Bath in 1934, Timothy Richard Ware received his education at Westminster School before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his studies in Classics garnered him a double first. He encountered the Russian Orthodox Church in its exile while still at school; at Oxford, where he also read Theology, he was influenced by figures from pre-revolutionary Russia, notably Nicolas Zernov and Archimandrite Nicholas Gibbes, the former tutor to the children of the last Tsar. Ware’s brilliance in Greek took him deep into the Church Fathers and early ascetics, notably the fifth-century St Mark the Monk, on whom he wrote his doctoral thesis.