Forgive me Father…
So did Archbishop Christodoulos, during a church seminar, confirm that right-wing LAOS party voters are «good Christians,» thus implying that LAOS party leader Giorgos Karadzaferis is also a peerless believer? Also, did New Democracy’s prefectural candidates Thanos Vezyryiannis for Athens and Mary Tzanaki for Piraeus (now promoting themselves at the expense of their tarnished leader Yiannis Tzannetakos) visit Christodoulos to get his «blessing,» or did they have time to socialize ahead of this weekend’s second electoral round? Only God could know, we never will. But even if God was interested in some prefectural elections, somewhere in Greece, on a planet in some fourth-rate galaxy, it is unlikely that he would send an angel to inform us which lucky few he has chosen to protect on the basis of political criteria. It is not blasphemous and disrespectful to believe that God is indifferent to the second round of our elections; it is to bring God into party politics, to reduce him to our spin doctor. God is not a politician. People (both citizens and clerics) are, however, even to the detriment of a God they claim to praise. So the archbishop’s reassurance that «the Church does not intervene in politics» is untrue. Of course it intervenes. It has done since antiquity and it continues to intervene now, semiofficially or via church organizations that reward those politicians who support them.
