Month: August 2009

Aug 24, 2009 | Protocol 63/09 | September 1, 2009

Day for the Protection of our Natural Environment

To the Most Reverend Hierarchs, the Reverend Priests and Deacons, the Monks and Nuns, the Presidents and Members of the Parish Councils of the Greek Orthodox Communities, the Distinguished Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Day, Afternoon, and Church Schools, the Philoptochos Sisterhoods, the Youth, the Hellenic Organizations, and the entire Greek Orthodox Family in America.

Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

We give thanks to God for the beginning of this Ecclesiastical New Year and for His abundant blessings, which fill our hearts with gratitude, deepen our faith, and strengthen our souls. The date of September 1 on our calendars marks the beginning of many things in our lives. For some, it presents the beginning of another academic year filled with worthy goals and challenges. For others, it is the return from summer vacation with refreshed bodies and minds, and renewed commitment to vocation and responsibilities. For those who work in agriculture, this date marks the beginning of the agrarian year and the tasks of planting, nurturing, and harvesting.

For Orthodox Christians, September 1 begins a new liturgical year in which we participate in the life of the Holy Church through Her divine services. September 1 is also the date that has been designated by our Holy Ecumenical Patriarchate as the Day for the Protection of our Natural Environment. For more than one reason, the joining of our observance of this Day with the beginning of the Ecclesiastical New Year, is significant, as it guides us in understanding the important relationship between our world created by God and our Orthodox Christian faith.

First, as human beings, it is within our world that we experience communion with God through our worship in the divine services of the Church. Our natural environment calls us to be in communion with God and with others. God brought the natural world into existence out of nothingness and He then created humankind within the natural environment for a harmonious coexistence and fellowship. While this harmony was interrupted through the sin and disobedience of man, our God, out of His great love for us, entered into His creation as flesh and blood in order to redeem us and all that is under the bondage of sin and death, restoring the harmonious fellowhip.

Second, through the liturgical life of the Church we are not only strenghthened in our journey of life but we also become aware of the great spiritual significance of our natural environment. This happens through the usage of purely material elements, as the bread and the wine, in the most holy Mystery of the Divine Eucharist which as the Body and Blood of Christ unites us with God Himself. Here, the spiritual and physical relationship is significant. We are both physical and spiritual beings, created for life, and blessed with the ability, unique only to human beings, to worship our Creator within a natural environment that not only provides for our basic physical needs, but also enables us to exprerience perfect communion with God.

Finally, our liturgical life and our life in the world cannot be considered as separate spheres of existence, but as one realm of living and relationship. In the services of the Church, we are called to liturgy, to a collective work as a people that will be our vocation for eternity. Within the Church, we strive for deeper communion with God, and we nurture our relationships of faith and love with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our natural environment is also dependent upon our faith inspired work as a people, specifically as stewards of what God has created. We have been called to oversee and protect the natural environment. This requires cooperation with others in a spirit of love and fellowhsip. It also requires that we appreciate the impact of our actions and inactions, and that we cherish the beauty, function, and purpose of all that God has created, consistent with the manner by which we invoke His holy name in our worship of Him.

Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

It is on this day of the inauguration of this Ecclesiastical New Year, it is at this time, that all of us are called to think seriously about what St. Paul said to the Corinthians: behold, now is the happily acceptable time, behold now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). Let us then, hear this apostolic saying as a call to an enhanced participation in the liturgical life of our Church, to a renewed relationship to our natural environment, and to a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the time given to us by our God and Creator.

With paternal love in Christ,

† D E M E T R I O S
Archbishop of America

From the National Herald [Ethnikos Kirikas]:

GOA Priest’s Salaries Reach New Heights

By Theodore Kalmoukos
Special to The National Herald

BOSTON – The salaries of the priests of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America have reached unprecedented heights. Base salaries have been reported at the levels of $150-170,000 and at least one priest receives $200,000 per year. The salaries of priests are among the two largest expenses in the annual budgets of parishes, along with the annual monetary allocation to the Archdiocese.

Over and above their salary, Archdiocesan priests receive generous benefits: housing and car allowances, medical insurance, social security payments, pension plans, conference expenses, including those associated with the biennial Clergy-Laity Congress and the retreats and meetings of the local Metropolis.

It is widely known that the Greek Orthodox clergy in the United States earn the highest salaries in the Orthodox Church worldwide, including the Church of Greece.

According to the official Clergy Compensation Plan for 2009, for priests with service up to:

five years the salary range is $47,232 – $63,960;
from six -10 years, $63,960 – $71,280;
11-15 years, $71,280 – $81,672;
16-20 years, $81,672 – $90,792.
21-25 years, $90,792 – $97,224.
26-30 years, $97,224 – $103,464.
31-35 years, $103,464 – $109,464.
For more than 35 years the range is $109.464 – $115,512.

The Plan also provides that: “a) The annual minimum increase in a clergyman’s remuneration must include an annual cost of living increase beginning January 1 of each year. When using these remuneration ranges, the Parish Council should factor in the relative cost of living for its geographic area,” and “b) In the event a parish provides housing by making available a parish-owned home, then an equitable and reasonable deduction adjustment should be made from the Salary and Housing Allowance figures above, based on the local fair market rental value of the home being provided.”

The plan also provides that “in addition to the above, the parish must provide: Continue reading →

From the Telegraph:

Around 1,000 firefighters and soldiers were able to take advantage of a lull in strong winds that had fanned the blaze for four days to bring some of the areas under control.

The high winds were expected to ease further on Tuesday, Greece’s National Weather Service said, although the risk of flare-ups remained.

The government faced accusations that its handling of the wild fires, which broke out on Friday and swept through suburbs on the capital’s northern and eastern flank, was “criminal negligence”.

Terrified homeowners described how they had begged for help from firefighters and local authorities but were forced to flee their houses when no assistance arrived.

Many were reduced to fighting the blazes with garden hoses and even tree branches.

But the government defended its handling of the fires, blaming extremely strong winds for their intensity.

A spokesman said firefighters’ efforts had been “extraordinary” and that it was a tribute to their hard work that there was no loss of life or serious injury.

But its handling of the crisis was attacked by opposition parties and the press.

The mayors of more than a dozen towns and villages angrily demanded more aerial support, while many residents complained of being left to fight the flames alone.

The mayor of the town of Marathon, Spyros Zagaris, said he had “begged” the government to send water-dumping aircraft but to no avail.

A dozen nuns were evacuated from a convent near the village of Nea Makri, north of Athens, as flames raced down a mountainside towards the ancient building.

“The flames were 30 metres (100 feet) high,” said one of the sisters, wearing a black habit and a surgical mask to ward off the smoke. “Thankfully they came and rescued us.”

Water-bombing planes and helicopters from Greece, Italy, Cyprus and France repeatedly doused the flames, swooping low over burnt out woodland and olive groves.

“The intensity of the fire is weakening and the area under our control is growing,” said a fire department spokesman, Yiannis Kapakis.

The battle against the fire will be crucial to Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, whose government is clinging to a one-seat majority.

It is not yet clear how the conflagration started but hundreds of forest fires affect Greece every summer and many are lit intentionally often by unscrupulous land developers or farmers seeking to expand their grazing land.

The head of the environmental group WWF said the government had failed to crack down on rogue developers who build homes illegally in burnt forest areas.

“A compete overhaul is required in the way we deal with forest fires. There is no sign the (government) is moving in the right direction,” said Dimitris Karavellas.

Writing in History Today, Catherine Merridale examines “competing versions of Russia’s troubled past in the light of present politics.” The excerpt below from “Haunted by Stalin” discusses the decline of interest in the Soviet past, and especially the work of Memorial, the research organization dedicated to keeping the memory of Communism’s victims alive. For some Russians, Merridale observes, “the steady flow of soul-searching and criticism began to smell of treachery.” In her conclusion, she writes that, “Stalin’s ghost still walks, in other words, and, though it is easy to condemn the Kremlin’s new occupants for invoking it in their pursuit of power and wealth, the strategy could work only because a large proportion of Russia’s people was ready to welcome the old villain home with open arms.”

Memorial … was reporting increasing harassment. The St Petersburg branch was raided in December 2008 and electronic data from its archive seized. Although the raid was later condemned, it seemed as if that taint of treachery had stuck. Part of the explanation for this, and also for the bleak spectacle of Stalin’s unofficial rehabilitation, lies with the current government, with its desire to build a statist, patriotic politics, a new authoritarianism. The fact that many government officials, including Putin himself, began their careers in the Soviet security force, the KGB, is also relevant, for Memorial is the nemesis of every secret police force since the days of Lenin’s Cheka, run by the aristocratic Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinskii. Underlying Memorial’s unpopularity, however, and feeding the current enthusiasm for strong, centrist, managerial rule, is a kind of amnesia, a false memory of Stalinism. The key here was Russia’s failure to deal decisively with the criminal aspects of its Communist decades when there was still a chance. As The Economist’s Arkady Ostrovsky put it in 2008, the publications of the glasnost years seem to have been swallowed without being digested.

The country’s rapid collapse in the 1990s was part of the problem. Another was the accompanying failure of collective nerve. Yeltsin put the Communist Party as an institution on trial, but criminal charges were never brought against the many living interrogators, torturers, embezzlers, bullies and rapists. Russia, unlike South Africa, had no Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The moment when such a thing might have happened – some time in 1992 or 1993 – coincided with a time of deep uncertainty and many argued that self-flagellation was a poor method of crisis management. The deeper truth, however, was that people feared to look so piercingly at themselves. Almost every family had its secret. As a result, the real crooks, many of whom remained in their influential administrative roles, never faced justice. More seriously still, the case against Stalinist methods, Communism’s legacy and even against Stalin personally, remained moot. Such an omission was bound to influence understandings of history and it left the door open for today’s revival of popular chauvinism. When Putin reintroduced the Stalinist national anthem, with all its associations, in 2000, a majority of Russian citizens supported him.

That interaction between Russia’s people and its increasingly manipulative government is the key to understanding how history has changed in the past decade. It is the Kremlin’s view that Russia needs a coherent story and that the tale should not only encourage romantic patriotism but that it should, in the process, justify the kind of centralised government that Putin and his aides desire. In return, a significant portion of Russia’s people seem drawn to escapism and epic; swashbuckling, after all, is much more fun than repentance. At first, the war took the lion’s share of the nation’s commemorative energy but, in a major break with the Soviet era, Russia no longer concentrates its focus entirely on the years since 1917. The fall of Communism led to a major reconsideration of the alternative and hagiographic accounts of Nicholas II’s reign soon followed. In 1998 the bones of the last tsar were reburied in the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul in St Petersburg. The act lent much-needed splendour to Yeltsin’s ailing presidency, but it also seemed to meet a public need. Russians had missed the sense of mission that Soviet power gave. Now they could dream of empire and of greatness once again.

From Kathimerini:

The Church of Greece is hoping that the government will take seriously the request it made this week for help in making best use of some of the thousands of properties it owns so it can fund a number of charity projects.

Sources told Kathimerini yesterday that the Church is hopeful that Public Works Minister Giorgos Souflias, who met with Archbishop Ieronymos on Wednesday, will respond favorably to the request. The Church wants the government to help it develop some of the properties in Athens, including one in the upmarket neighborhood of Kolonaki, as part of a plan to build rehabilitation centers for drug addicts, old people’s homes and care centers for cancer sufferers and autistic children.

After Wednesday’s meeting, Souflias acknowledged the archbishop’s “burning desire to make a contribution to society but which requires work and funds for which he has requested our support.”