Orthodoxy: The King & the Bishops

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Hanky-panky in high places has lately been striking the Greek Orthodox Church with disturbing frequency. In 1962 the new Archbishop of Athens resigned shortly after his election to that primatial office upon being exposed as a homosexual; two years later, Bishop Philippos of Drama was dethroned for adultery with his housemaid. Now a much more widespread scandal has shocked Greece. This time the fuss is not about sex but that other great fascinator: money.

A Greek bishopric can be a paying proposition. The country's bishops draw an average $4,000 tax-free salary a year, plus a residence and the right to import their cars without paying duty. Bishops get 3% of the income from all weddings, christenings and funerals in the churches in their dioceses, plus a handsome $1.33 for every marriage license, divorce decree and celibacy certificate (a document proving that a person is not married).

Fiscal inequality. The income of the Archbishop of Athens is estimated at $70,000 a year. Obviously, the bishop of an Aegean island with a few thousand fishermen and goatherds does not do nearly as well, and to make the fiscal inequality of it worse, the current law decrees that where a bishop is appointed, he stays until he dies.

For several years, therefore, the majority of Greece's bishops have been agitating for a new law to provide for bishops' transfer, and in the meantime their ruling body, the Assembly of Bishops, has been refusing to fill rich posts that fall vacant, hoping that if the law were changed they could get themselves transferred to these plums. In October they seemed to be making progress; Premier Stephanos Stephanopoulos' Cabinet authorized transfers in two of the 17 vacant dioceses.

Without waiting for this decision to be ratified by Parliament, the 51 bishops in the Assembly met in Athens and set about choosing prelates for all the vacant sees. Then a blow fell: at the prodding of upright Bishop Ambrosios of Elevtheroupolis, the Council of State ordered the bishops to stop filling the vacancies.

"Christ-Traders!" To make sure they obeyed, the government posted 700 policemen to keep the bishops out of the cathedral in Athens' Metropolis Square, where they had been carrying on their politicking, and a crowd turned out to jeer them. "Christ-traders! You want gold, not God!" someone shouted. The 36 most defiant bishops wheeled off to the Holy Synod Building a block away and went on with their balloting.

Stephanopoulos ordered them to stop in the name of the law, but they ignored him. Young King Constantine signed a decree terminating the Assembly, but one bishop contemptuously tore it off the synod gate. Shrugging off a warning from the Ministry of Justice that they were committing a crime by electing and transferring bishops, the Assembly last week kept on sending them off to churches to be consecrated in affluent new jobs. The attendant congregations, instead of greeting the prelates with the liturgical chant of "Worthy, worthy," shouted "Unworthy! Unworthy!" and exchanged kicks and blows with the bishops' partisans.