The St Kosmas Catechetical School is the name of the Wednesday night education program at St Sophia. This program is aimed at helping the parishioners and visitors of St Sophia understand the Orthodox Faith in a deeper manner by offering classes on specific topics in the Faith. Since beginning this program in December 2020, we've offered three series:

-The Trinity of Praxis: Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving
-Soul Cleansing: On the Mystery of Holy Confession
-The Desert, a City: The Lives and Sayings of Desert Ascetics

On the Wednesdays that classes are being offered, the program begins with Vespers at 6p in the church temple. Following Vespers, attendees gather in the parish hall for a small, lenten potluck with class sessions beginning around 7p. Classes typically last 45 minutes to 1 hour. 

Recordings from past classes can be found on the St Sophia Orthodox Church YouTube channel.

Our patron, who the class is dedicated to, is St Kosmas Aitolos. This Saint was a great missionary who spent his life dedicated to eduacting the Greek people who, due to the Ottoman oppression, were very ignorant of their own Orthodox Faith. It is our hope to imitate, even in the smallest of degrees, St Kosmas in furthering the education of the Orthodox people of today as he did in the past.

A Brief Life of St Kosmas Aitolos

Our holy Father Kosmas was from the town of Mega Dendron (Great Tree) of Aetolia. At the age of twenty, he went to study at the school of the Monastery of Vatopedi on the Holy Mountain. Later, he came to the Athonite Monastery of Philotheou where he was tonsured. With the blessing of his abbot, he departed for Constantinople where he learned the art of rhetoric, and thereafter, he began to preach throughout all the regions of northern Greece, the Ionian Islands, but especially in Albania, for the Christian people there were in great ignorance because of the oppression and cruelty of the Moslems. Finally, in 1776, after having greatly strengthened and enlightened the faithful, working many signs and wonders all the while, he was falsely accused by the leaders of the Jewish people and was executed by strangulation by the Moslem Turks in Albania.