A spirit of disengagement?
When various «snipers» in the (primarily electronic) media were targeting Archbishop Christodoulos and other senior clerics with various accusations, they were doing so in the name of «purging» the Church. But what they actually accomplished was to erode the influence of a timeless pillar of the Greek nation, while also undermining, even if unintentionally, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. During these contentious weeks, the government has stubbornly assumed the role of observer and allowed these media snipers to create the current, depressing climate with the help of certain churchmen. Meanwhile, independent television channels ended up playing the role of critic. The government treated Christodoulos and the Holy Synod as «undesirables» – best left to their own devices. Education and Religious Affairs Minister Marietta Giannakou evidently did not deem it worthwhile to meet with the archbishop and the Holy Synod to acquire some first-hand insight into recent developments. The government simply relied on the revelations and commentaries of the mass media. It was President Karolos Papoulias who ended the isolation of the Church by attending a special service on the Sunday of Orthodoxy feast before hosting a dinner whose guests included the archbishop and members of the Holy Synod. Papoulias cannot be described as devout; he has never been involved in ecclesiastical affairs, nor does he belong to the conservative faction upon whose support the Church has relied. He simply showed respect for an institution at a time that its representatives are under heavy fire. Papoulias acted like a politician with a reverence for tradition – a fact acknowledged even by conservative citizens, who would have preferred Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis to have chosen a figure from the center-right for the post of president. Papoulias did his duty vis-a-vis a significant institution of Greek society; now it is time for the government exercised its authority. If Karamanlis or Giannakou object to the steps being taken to purge the Church of corruption then they should express their reservations directly to the archbishop and Holy Synod members, ask for explanations and cooperate to solve problems. The government’s passivity has created a power vacuum which has been filled, inevitably, by free agents of the press. A spirit of disengagement safeguards neither the influence of the government nor the PM’s image; it merely reveals an inability to govern effectively. For nearly two months, the police has been seeking a shady character believed to have carried out multifarious illegal activities in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem – an individual who was finally located by a journalist to whom he has purportedly revealed all. One wonders what exactly Public Order Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis has been doing. Many citizens have been waiting for years for a change in the political guard, for the restoration of a sense of legality, and for important institutions to be purged, not undermined. Greek citizens elected a government to improve the state and its bodies, not break them down.
