The Church of Greece hierarchs are due to meet this Friday and Saturday for the sole purpose of discussing how best to cope with the crisis swamping the institution, a spokesman said yesterday.

Archbishop Christodoulos’s proposal for an extraordinary meeting of the 81 bishops was accepted by the Holy Synod yesterday. The head of the Church last night continued a series of discussions with bishops ahead of the meeting, holding talks with five in total. According to sources, among the measures to be discussed will be regular inspections of bishopric and monastery finances and the inclusion of laypeople in churches’ administration.

Meanwhile, Apostolos Vavilis, a convicted drug dealer with alleged links to the Church and the State, was, until Christmas last year, a regular customer at an Italian restaurant in Athens’s northern suburbs, where he was known as Father Rafaelo, sources told Kathimerini.

And the president of the Supreme Court, Giorgos Kapos, yesterday asked the media and the public not to pre-judge investigations into alleged trial-fixing involving judges and churchmen. He also sought to dispel the notion that authorities had known of the existence of corrupt judicial officials for some time.