Christodoulos presided over one of the more tumultuous decades of the Orthodox Church of Greece. Elected at 59, he was the youngest archbishop to lead the church. Often outspoken and always at ease with television and the internet, he did much to reinvigorate that unwieldy and somewhat conservative institution.

One of his much publicised achievements was to ease relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, in the process eliciting from Pope John Paul II an apology for presumed sins committed by Rome against the Greeks in the crusades.

A formidable priest, Christodoulos spared no efforts to combat what he perceived to be Greek Orthodoxy's foes. Secularism, Roman Catholicism, the Turks, the Americans, the Jews, the leftwing intelligentsia, even non-Greek Orthodox - all at times came under the lash of his emotional oratory. Once elected to lead the Greek church, in 1998, he tried to use his power to revive the old tradition of ethnarch, or spiritual-cum-political leader, a model which had administered the Christian populations of the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire, and whose most effective recent exemplar had been Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus.

Although Christodoulos did not win many of the battles he waged, he was popular, outpolling even the best-liked politicians simply because he was very good at being outspoken.

He was born Christodoulos (meaning Servant of Christ) Paraskevaides in Xanthi, a northern Greek town with a large Muslim minority. He attended a Catholic college in Athens, but exposure to other faiths, paradoxically, seemed to make him more conservative. During the Colonels' regime of 1967-74, Christodoulos served as secretary of the Holy Synod, apparently in accord with the hardline nationalist and anti-communist ideology propagated by the Colonels.

Christodoulos suddenly came to the public's attention in 1987, when the socialist Government of Andreas Papandreou attempted to confiscate part of the Church's extensive land holdings. As the Bishop of Volos, he was invited to argue the Church's case on national television. He proved himself to be a well-informed, skilled and confident debater, unlike the usual Orthodox clergy, and managed to force the Government to abandon its scheme.

For some time Christodoulos had been toying with a plan to turn the autonomous Greek church more towards the Protestant model, which he saw as affording it greater power in secular affairs. His chance came with the death of Archbishop Seraphim in April 1998. Mustering his allies in an organisation named Chrysopigi (golden spring), he got himself elected Seraphim's successor by the Holy Synod.

In a sharp break with his quietist predecessors, Christodoulos took to the media with gusto. He told cheering spiky-haired and earringed youths that he was one of them at heart. In his inaugural speech he wept when he reflected how Greek youth had been let down by their elders and betters.

The adulation he received girded him for his first big battle, with secularism. In 2000 the socialist Government of Kostas Simitis announced plans to remove religious affiliation from new identity cards, in line with EU rules. Christodoulos addressed huge protest rallies against the “godless secularists” who seemed intent on eradicating the ancient faith that had kept the Greek nation alive through centuries of Muslim domination. Having learnt the effectiveness of television from his 1987 debates, he now proved himself to be the first media-savvy Orthodox prelate of the digital age. Although the Simitis Government stuck to its guns, and Christodoulos had eventually to back off, his fighting spirit was undimmed.

When, in 2001, Pope John Paul II paid the first papal visit to a Greek country since 1054, Christodoulos undiplomatically demanded an apology for alleged massacres committed by the Latins against the Greeks during the Crusades. The pontiff, already old and ailing, obliged, and both prelates could get on with celebrating a mass for Saint Paul on the Areopagus Hill in Athens. Christodoulos later went out of his way to cultivate the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI, even at the risk of alienating church hardliners.

The events of 9/11 drew from Christodoulos the comment that the root cause was “the desperation caused by the policies of the great powers”, an interpretation that no doubt raised his standing in the Muslim world. Yet he did not hesitate to call the Turks

“barbarians” who have no place in Europe, and he excoriated the effects of globalisation.

Most recently he clashed with Bartholomew I, the spiritual head of 250 million Eastern Orthodox, over disputed ecclesiastical territories in northern Greece. His fierce nationalism was at odds with Bartholomew's milder and more internationalist approach to Greek-Turkish relations. Christodoulos was also believed to have been trying to secure the support of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy as a counterweight to the worldwide influence wielded by Bartholomew.

Critics also accused Christodoulos of meddling in the complex spiritual world of the Middle East. He engineered the election of Patriarch Eirinaios of Jerusalem by means that are still unclear. When Eirinaios was toppled for selling some of the Greek church's considerable property holdings in Jerusalem to Israeli business interests, Christodoulos was forced to abandon that battlefield as well.

In 2005 a series of sexual and financial scandals dented the Greek Church's credibility. Christodoulos himself, though personally untainted, was found to have been associated with several key offenders. The humiliation damped a good deal of his outspokenness and moved him to partly clean up the church administrative structure. His final illness, and a failed liver transplant in summer 2007, effectively put an end to his crusading spirit.

Christodoulos was against many things, but few people knew what he was for. What may be said with certainty, however, is that he propounded a conflation of Orthodoxy and Greekness as supreme values, and a patriarchal form of rule that appealed to the peasantry and the working classes. He has rightly been credited with reviving the appeal of the church in a secular age, especially among young people.

His Holiness Christodoulos, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, leader of the Orthodox Church of Greece, was born on January 17, 1939. He died of cancer on January 28, 2008, aged 69