Members of the Church of Greece’s permanent Holy Synod will convene on Tuesday, some 10 days after the Church essentially froze negotiations with the current government over the latter’s proposals to change Church-state relations. As previously reported by the Orthodoxia news agency, the Tsipras government is now examining three options.
– Firstly, to try and find common ground in order to continue the dialogue, and in the best-case scenario, arrive at a mutually acceptable draft bill that will be tabled in Parliament for ratification.
– A second option is to ignore the Church and unilaterally table a draft bill in Parliament, based on the original framework, one agreed to by the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, His Beatitude Ieronymos, and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Such an action, however, risks creating a major clash with the influential Church of Greece amid an election year.
– A third option is to merely “freeze” the entire process and wait for the next Parliament, and whatever government arises from a general election.
An ecclesiastical source close to the Archbishop of Greece said the latter’s very terse statement last Wednesday, namely, that “life continues”, indicates that the dialogue and related issues have been “put on ice”.
In other news, Archbishop Ieronymos on Monday received the Orthodox Metropolitan of France, His Eminence Emmanuel, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Metropolitan of Adrianopolis, His Eminence Amphilochios. According to reports, the meeting comes amid efforts to warm relations between the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Greece. Several major issues in inter-Orthodox relations have arisen over the recent period, including the current Greek government’s insistence on modifying Church-state relations and the granting of the Tomos of autocephaly by the Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of the Ukraine, among others.