Bishops do not take a religious oath
A quarter of a century ago, in June 1998, the sixth section of the Council of State was examining a seemingly paradoxical case: The Theological School of the University of Athens was refusing to award a degree to one of its graduates because he refused to take the established religious oath. The graduate, who probably knew the Scriptures, the sacred canons and modern Greek history better than his professors, had appealed to justice.
He was neither an atheist nor a Bolshevik. He invoked his own Christian conscience. His main argument was based on the third Commandment (“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain”) and the words of Jesus, “But I tell you not to swear at all.” The Council of State found in his favor, declared the act of the Theological School illegal and decided that the graduate could swear on his honor and conscience, without any invocation of the divine.
As legend has it, Greece is a secular state. Indeed for decades now it has been methodically fighting to achieve its separation from the Church. Religious oath is also an aspect of this “war,” even if the fans of Greek scholar Adamantios Korais do not understand it, and want everything enlightened, despite the fact that we have just entered the third century of independence.
Why did the entire new cabinet of New Democracy (with the exception of Deputy Minister for Social Insurance Panos Tsakloglou) and the vast majority of the new parliamentarians take the religious oath? Not of course because their constant struggle for votes and their populism requires public shows of religiosity, but to expose the religious hierarchy as inconsistent with its very faith. As is known, neither the new metropolitans nor the current archbishop have taken a religious oath, so as not to offend the sacred rules. So how do they insist on religious swearing-in ceremonies for politicians, knowing that, for them, lying is a professional virtue? Don’t they cancel their own beliefs in plain sight? So, this is the plan: We expose the clerics and achieve separation of Church and state. How satanic!
At the end of December 2008, Archbishop Ieronymos had said in an interview with Kathimerini that “the abolition of the religious oath does not create a problem for the Church.” On what had he based this opinion? On the same line that the graduate of the Theological School based it: “But I tell you not to swear at all.” But the years passed, and the religious oath, a ceremony of mutual hypocrisy, counts more and more believers.
