‘We are healing’: Greek Orthodox church working to renew community’s spirit in wake of priest’s arrest
BANGOR, Maine — Less than two months after their priest was arrested, members of St. George Greek Orthodox Church held hands and danced to the traditional music of Greece.
“We are healing,” Lambros Karris of Bangor, who joined the church in 1969, said recently.
The congregation’s annual fundraiser, held Nov. 7, was planned months ago, long before charges of possession of child pornography and violation of privacy were lodged on Sept. 15 against the Rev. Adam Metropoulos.
The dance, along with the recent installation of new windows at the more than 80-year-old Sanford Street church, have gone a long way toward renewing the spirit of the congregation, Lee Speronis, president of the St. George Parish Council, said Sunday.
“I’m the disseminator of information,” he said last month. “The hardest part for me was the first night when I had to call the other members of the council. People’s first reaction was they thought it was a joke.”
Metropoulos, 52, of Bangor had been the priest at St. George, the only Eastern Orthodox congregation north of Lewiston, since September 2001. He was suspended from ministry the day after his arrest. If convicted, he could be defrocked.
The congregation, founded in the 1920s, has survived many a financial crisis over the years, council members said last month. The church had just $23 in its coffers in 1929 when one of its founders convinced a man digging a foundation for a nearby house to dig one on the lot the congregation owned.
“I was born in ’58,” parish council Vice President George Brountas of Brewer said recently. “My father and grandfather were both presidents of the council. Our biggest concern has always been keeping doors open. This has been a different kind of test of the congregation.”
The congregation’s financial picture has brightened in recent years, according to Speronis. That’s at least in part because of the popularity of its Greek food booth at the American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront. St. George earns between 25 and 28 percent of its annual budget each August during the festival.
“We don’t worry week to week like we used to,” he said. “But this is an entirely different challenge because this shakes you to your core. You have internal questions that you can’t imagine. You question your beliefs or your faith system. You beat that down. That moment lasts for two seconds. I never questioned our support system. I never questioned the community of Bangor or the internal community.”
Metropolitan Methodios, head of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston, in whose jurisdiction St. George lies, and his staff have been very responsive to the crisis, Speronis said. A priest has been assigned to be in Bangor every Sunday to conduct Mass, and the congregation is working with Methodios on getting an interim priest to live in the parish house in Bangor over the winter months to lessen travel problems during bad weather.
Within two weeks of Metropoulos’ arrest, the bishop sent Philip Mamalakis, assistant professor of pastoral care at the Hellenic College of the Holy Cross in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Bangor, so that parishioners could receive counseling and talk about what had happened.
“You can’t stop darkness or sin; you can’t prevent them,” Mamalakis said last month. “The way church leaders respond makes all the difference in healing from trauma. My job is to help put people in better place after a trauma in their congregation.”
Mamalakis said that he facilitated a gathering of parishioners “to hear people out and to allow people to be heard in way that’s healthy, so the discussion does not slip into conflict with people taking sides.”
Karris, a native of Greece who came to Bangor and St. George in 1969, said that, going forward, it is important for the congregation to remember the Greek word “eklesia.”
“It means the church, but the people who are the church, not the priest,” Karris said. “The priest is a facilitator. Unfortunately, we did not have a healthy individual as our priest. Priests are human beings and they err like everybody else does, and they have the same complications and disabilities like everybody else does.”
Metropoulos has been held at the Penobscot County Jail in Bangor since his arrest, when he was charged with one count each of possession of sexually explicit material, a Class C crime, and violation of privacy, a Class D crime. He remained there Sunday night unable to post the $50,000 cash or $100,000 surety bail.
He has not entered pleas to the charges because he has not yet been indicted by the Penobscot County grand jury. The grand jury next convenes on Nov. 26. Metropoulos could face additional charges, according to the Penobscot County district attorney’s office.
Michael Roberts, deputy district attorney for Penobscot County, said after Metropoulos’ first court appearance in September that the high bail was warranted given the suspended priest’s 1983 conviction on a sex charge in Michigan and his admission to Bangor police that a few years ago, he “touched two 15-year-old boys inappropriately.”
Metropoulos was convicted in Michigan in 1983 of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor under the age of 13, according to Saginaw court records.
If convicted, Metropoulos faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000 on the possession of child pornography charge and up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $2,000 on the violation of privacy charge.