The second day of the regular work of the Holy Synod of the Hierarchy of the Church of Greece was completed today with two presentations. The first from Metropolitan Didymoteichos, Orestiados and Soufliou Damascenes, on the subject of “Regulation “About recommendation, organization and operation of the Register of Clerks, Deacons, Preachers and Monks of the Church of Greece” (MEDIUM)» and the second from the Metropolitan of Ilios, Athenagoras of Acharnon and Petroupoles, with the theme "Participation of the popular element in the Church event".
After the suggestion of Metropolitan Didymoteichos, many high priests took the floor and in the end proceeded to pass the Regulation with legal and technical improvements.
The Metropolitan of Ilio Athenagoras, he mainly developed the meaning of the word "lay" in the Church, with reference to the mysteries of the Church and ecclesiastical society and extensively to how equality and homophobia are expressed in the ecclesiastical event.
The second part of the presentation included comments on a contemporary populist text. "It is to provoke and raise public sentiment, using misleading or incomplete, disparaging and fundamentally false and defamatory information about the person, the institution, the collective or the situation against which they act and thus constitute a contemporary intensive social problem, which does not exclusively concern the Church, but any space that is actively involved in public life and whose coordinated structure and interventions disturb circles or individuals tormented by a complex psychopathology", emphasized the rapporteur.
Then, after pointing out in detail the common characteristics of the texts that mostly call the people to wall off from the Church and disobedience to the Holy Synod, stated that a collective decision must be made on how to position ourselves against them. And he emphasized: "We, unmoved from our positions, have to choose between two practices:
– or to ignore them and let them continue to act unchecked inside and outside the Church, scandalizing the faithful and leading many of them into absolute error and into actions that involve multi-layered dangers
– or to design and implement a unified framework for the protection of Church leaders and our flock from the attacks of all kinds of demagogues, conspiracy theorists and abusers of our work and offer.
By numbly watching the attacks against us, just wishing the harm was small or keeping quiet giving way to the irrational or even worse self trapped and fearing an apparently inevitable conflict trying to appease the monster that slowly looms before us, we don't protect unity, nor do we perform any Christian imperative, we're just giving our pursuers room to expand, falsely presenting to society the image that either we are indifferent to the Church and its future or that we are afraid to try to avoid situations that would demonstrate our vulnerability to those who are methodically undermining the foundations of the Church".
The debate on the proposal will take place tomorrow, when the Holy Synod of the Hierarchy will resume its work.