Greek Orthodox Church, Bitter About Law, Vows to Defy the Socialist Government

The Greek Orthodox Church, locked in a bitter dispute with the Socialist government, has pledged to defy a recent law that allows laymen to control church administration and finances.

Archbishop Seraphim of Athens, the white-bearded primate of Greece, says the church will contest the legislation as unconstitutional in Greek courts and, if necessary, in the European Court and the World Court at The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Greece’s 78 Orthodox bishops threaten to bypass the law by declaring allegiance to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide.

“You render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but church administration is for spiritual authorities, not party politicians,” the Rev. Stefanos Avramides, head of the church foreign relations department, said in an interview.

Protests Rejected

Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, whose government eventually wants to cut constitutional ties between church and state, rejects the bishops’ protests as exaggerated.

“I don’t believe there’s any substantive extension of the state’s role in church affairs because of these reforms. We have carefully respected the Orthodox tradition,” the prime minister recently told legislators who are members of his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK).

The law, which takes effect in October, transfers ownership of more than 350,000 acres of forests and farmland from Greece’s 370 monasteries and convents to Socialist-run farm cooperatives.

It also gives laymen control of parish and bishopric councils and of the Organization for Administering Church Property (ODEP), which handles lucrative marble quarries and urban real estate owned by the church.

$1 Billion in Land

City and countryside holdings together are valued at more than $1 billion.

The government maintains that the clergy should spend more time on spiritual tasks and less on business administration.

“We don’t have any objection to losing the monastic lands,” said the Rev. Dionysios Mandalos, assistant bishop of the North Sporades Islands. “But they should go to poor villagers and farmers with large families, not to cooperatives controlled by a political party.

“But the church, not government-appointed laymen, must have the deciding voice in disposing of income from the city properties.”

Debated in Parliament

Backed by the Holy Synod, the church’s governing body of bishops, Orthodox supporters organized noisy demonstrations in Greek cities as the legislation was debated in Parliament.

Tens of thousands of protesters shouted “hands off the church” and brandished gold-and-black Byzantine flags, recalling the church’s role in keeping the Greek language and culture alive during 400 years of Ottoman Turkish rule.

The church was given vast estates for playing a major part in a seven-year revolutionary war that brought Greece independence in 1830. Even after handing over four-fifths of its holdings to the state in 1952, it remained Greece’s biggest landowner.

In return, the church received the city properties and the country’s 9,000 Orthodox priests became civil servants, paid by the state.

Influence Has Faded

Under the 1975 constitution, Eastern Orthodoxy is Greece’s official religion and 97% of its 10 million residents are baptized church members.

More than 3 million Greek emigrants have kept their faith, founding Greek Orthodox churches in the United States and Australia.

In Greece, less than 10% of the population are regular churchgoers, according to surveys.