church of greece

From Kathimerini:

The Church of Greece’s finances are in rude health, according to a report handed to Archbishop Ieronymos this week, which indicated that the church made more than 7 million euros profit in 2008.

According to the internal report, which was seen by Kathimerini, almost 20 million euros of revenue flowed into the church’s coffers last year, mostly from the renting out of church property. It also earned some 4.5 million euros from investments.

During 2008, the church spent almost 12.5 million euros. The biggest outlay, just over 4 million euros, was for sponsoring events. Almost 4 million was spent on salaries.

Last year, the robust state of the church’s finances also allowed it to buy 1.6 million shares in the National Bank, taking its stake in the lender up to 7.7 million shares.

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.”

(Ecumenical News International) — A group of Orthodox clergy in Greece, led by three senior archbishops, have published a manifesto pledging to resist all ecumenical ties with Roman Catholics and Protestants.

“The only way our communion with heretics can be restored is if they renounce their fallacy and repent,” the group said in a “Confession of Faith against Ecumenism” that they circulated recently.

“The Orthodox church is not merely the true church; she is the only church. She alone has remained faithful to the Gospel, the synods and the fathers, and consequently she alone represents the true catholic church of Christ,” says the document.

The signatories say they wish to preserve “irremovably and without alteration” the Orthodox faith that the Early Church had “demarcated and entrenched,” and to shun communication “with those who innovate on matters of the faith”.

The list of clerics backing the manifesto is said to include six metropolitans (Panteleimon of Antinoes, Seraphim of Kythira and Antikythira, Kosmas of Etolia and Akarnania, Seraphim of Piraeus, Jeremiah of Gortyno and Megalopolis, and Artemios of Raskas and Prizrenis, Kossovo and Metohia), as well as 49 archimandrites, 22 hieromonks, and 30 nuns and abbesses, as well as many other priests and church elders.

The signatories note that many Orthodox patriarchs and bishops have, “essentially placed themselves outside the church” by abandoning its “uniform, steady and unswerving stance,” and attempting to impose a “new dogma and ecclesiology” that all denominations formed part of the church. Continue reading →

A really interesting passage from “The legacy of the French Revolution: Orthodoxy and nationalism,” an essay by Paschalis Kitromilides, which explains, among other things, the historical process by which the Church of Greece was granted autocephaly.

While the Enlightenment confronted the church with a secular universalist ideology, which, questions of doctrine aside, could in some instances complement and even sustain its own ecumenical values, nationalism gave rise to a conflict, where the issues not only were on the level of secular versus transcendental values but also set the ecumenicity of Christian ideals against the parochialism of nationalism. The history of this conflict turned out to be identical with the history of the Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century.

Ultimately, writes Kitromilides, “the ecumenical patriarchate, once its own formal requirements were satisfied, supplied the canonical sanction for turning regional churches into instruments of secular authority. The latter in turn used the churches for the enhancement of its own power by enlisting them in a leading role in nationalist projects.” The essay is reproduced in the Cambridge History of Christianity (Vol. 5, Eastern Christianity) published in 2008.

Excerpt:

Greece’s first head of state, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was a devout Orthodox, deeply concerned with the restoration of religious order and Christian morals in the fledgling state emerging from the war of independence. This was reflected in the pertinent initiatives of his administration. One of his main concerns had to do with the preservation of the administrative links between the Orthodox Church in the new Greek state and the ecumenical patriarchate, because Kapodistrias was convinced that the doctrinal communion between the two branches of Greek Orthodoxy might be upset if the administrative links were severed.

The president’s good intentions, however, were not much helped when in May 1828 Patriarch Agathangelos dispatched a mission of four very senior prelates from the patriarchal synod to Greece bringing letters addressed to ‘the clergy and notables of the Peloponnese and the Aegean Islands’, whereby they were asked to resubmit to the Sublime Porte. In respectful and entirely conciliatory letter, Kapodistrias rejected the patriarch’s admonition, pointing out that it was totally impossible for the people of Greece to give up the freedom they had won with so many sacrifices. In contrast to Agathangelos, his successor Konstantios I sent his good wishes and his blessings to the Greek state in August 1830 but expressed his concern about news of Calvinist infiltration among the Orthodox of Greece. Kapodistrias reassured the patriarch about Greece’s devotion to Orthodoxy and to the Great Church. This in turn gave Konstantios the opportunity to insist on the complete re-establishment of administrative unity between the church in the territories of the Greek state and the Great Church of Constantinople. Continue reading →