What Athens Has To Do With Jerusalem
Pokrov Note: This article appeared in the Spring, 2005, edition of “Religion in the News.”
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“The cassock does not make the priest” is an old Greek proverb that has been confirmed in spades during a year marked by a gaudy explosion of scandal in the Greek Orthodox Church. “Holygate,” as some Athens journalists have called it, has rocked the church in Greece as well as the Holy Land, where Orthodox Christianity has had a strong presence for at least 1,500 years.
Since February, the head-lines in Greece have been dominated by reports of shady secret land deals, the system-atic bribery of judges, polymorphous sexual misconduct, drug-dealing, and an almost infinite variety of embezzlements by very senior bishops and priests. Indeed, one Greek commentator estimated on May 26 that about half of the Greek state church’s 86 diocesan bishops stand accused of crimes or breaches of ecclesiastical discipline of one degree or another.
The scandals caused the dismissal of the Patriarch of Jerusalem and may yet claim the Archbishop of Athens. They have certainly damaged the standing of what had been Europe’s most entrenched and privileged state church.
“The Greek public can only watch dumbfounded as the country’s bishops humiliate themselves on television, tossing barbs at each other and trading accusations of forgery, blackmail, dissolute living, even drug trafficking,” Kathimerini (The Daily), the conservative Athens daily that is Greece’s closest approach to a newspaper of record, editorialized on February 1.
About 95 percent of Greeks are baptized Orthodox Christians and, hitherto, few Greeks thought it possible or desirable to disentangle the twin strands of Hellenism and Orthodoxy.
“Not even the most passionate anti-clerical type could have imagined what our eyes are seeing and our ears are hearing,” Thanassis Georgopoulous, a columnist for Ta Nea (The News), a mass-market, leftist newspaper in Athens, wrote during the early stages of the crisis. “Not even the most fanatical enemy of the church could have planned such a deep and painful crisis.”
The Greek scandal broke late in January, when an Athens radio station broadcast tapes of alleged telephone conversations in which Metropolitan Panteleimon of Attica, a large diocese covering much of suburban Athens, boasted that he had the power to influence judicial decisions in court cases involving the church and in criminal matters.
Other tapes were soon broadcast in which Panteleimon made “love talk” to young men. Further investigation produced charges that the metropolitan also controlled a relative’s 4 million Euro bank account, which he administered as a mutual fund, and he was soon accused of skimming the receipts of collection boxes in several monasteries in Attica.
At about the same moment, Greek prosecutors arrested a priest named Iakovos Yiosakis and charged him with operating an in-fluence peddling ring that may have bribed up to 30 Greek judges to obtain favorable rulings in matters ranging from civil lawsuits to criminal charges against drug dealers. Yiosakis, who had also been involved in the 1990s in a scandal over homosexuality at a monastery on the island Kythera, was soon charged with illegally exporting historic icons, and charged in the United States with embezzling money from a small Greek Orthodox parish in Chicago where he had taken a pastor position in the middle 1990s.
Newspapers then carried reports that Metropolitan Theokletos of Thessaly had been arrested the previous year during a police drug raid on a gay bar in Central Greece. Theokletos had been dressed in civilian clothes and was accompanied by a high official of the national church’s central administration. Theokletos, who was also charged by rivals with dealing drugs and running a male brothel, happened to be a prot