COMMEMORATION OF THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE SEVENTH ECUMENICAL COUNCIL (787). THE HOLY ICONS.
On the Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Church remembers the 350 holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicea II, under the holy Patriarch Tarasius.
The Holy Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils are honored by the Church because, based upon the preaching of the Apostles, they have established one faith for the Church. Guided by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and accepted by the Church, the Ecumenical Councils are the highest authority in the Church, infallible.
The Seventh Ecumenical Council, convoked by the Empress Irene and met at Nicaea from September 24 to October 13, 787. Patriarch Tarasios (commemorated February 25) presided. The council ended almost fifty years of iconoclast persecution and established the veneration of the holy icons as basic to the belief and spirituality of Christ’s Church. As the Synaxarion says, “It was not simply the veneration of the holy images that the Fathers defended in these terms but, in fact, the very reality of the Incarnation of the Son of God.”
“The second Council of Nicaea is the seventh and last Ecumenical Council recognized by the Orthodox Church. This does not mean that there may not be ecumenical Councils in the future although, in holding the seventh place, the Council of Nicaea has taken to itself the symbol of perfection and completion represented by this number in Holy Scripture (e.g. Gen. 2:1-3). It closes the era of the great dogmatic disputes which enabled the Church to describe, in definitions excluding all ambiguity, the bounds of the holy Orthodox Faith. From that time, every heresy that appears can be related to one or other of the errors that the Church, assembled in universal Councils, has anathematized from the first until the seventh Council of Nicaea.” Synaxarion
