Benedict I of Jerusalem

Patriarch Benedict of Jerusalem, also Benediktos I of Jerusalem, born Vasileios Papadopoulos (, 1892 – December 10, 1980) was the Patriarch of Jerusalem of the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem from 1957 to 1980.

Biography Vasileios was born in 1892 in the village of Cesniero (Τσεσνειριω, modern Çeşnigir) in Bursa, of the Metropolis of Nicomedia, in northwestern Anatolia.

He went to Jerusalem in 1906 for his secondary education, graduating from the seminary there in 1914.

In February 1929 he was put in charge of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre in Athens. In October of the same year he was ordained priest, then advanced to the rank of Archimandrite. "When the Assembly met in December 1950, neither a Swedish resolution calling for functional internationalization nor a Belgian one calling for territorial internationalization was approved and that was the end of the Assembly's consideration of the Jerusalem issue until after the June War." |group=note

In March 1951 he was consecrated Archbishop of Tiberias in the Church of the Resurrection. The rules gave the Arab laity a role in the financial affairs of the Patriarchate, and required that the candidates for the offices of the patriarchate be citizens of Jordan, but the changes were discontinued after negotiation between the Patriarchate and the Jordanians.

Following his election, Benedict actively pursued a rehabilitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Starting in 1961, after undertaking a North American tour to raise funds, #tag:ref|"The presence of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Benedictos the I, in Toronto, if only briefly, is interpreted as a sign Christian shrines in the Holy Land are no longer in any real danger of exposure to Israeli-Jordanian crossfire. His Beatitude left here today after a two-day visit on the first stop of a North American tour. His purpose is to raise $3,000,000 to restore the crumbling shrines, among them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Other shrines were heavily damaged in shellfire exchanges in the Israeli-Arab war in 1948...It was the first time a Greek Orthodox Patriarch has visited Canada." The burial took place on December 14, 1980, at the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.

A kindly and courteous man, traditionalist in his theology, Patriarch Benedict was critical of the 'ecumenist' policies of Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, and in his later years was more reserved over questions of Christian unity than any other Orthodox church leader.

Patriarch Benedict I is listed as being a Mason according to the website of the Grand Lodge of Greece, of the lodge «Αδελφοποίησις».