Recent legislative changes that affect the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Greece were on the agenda of a government Cabinet meeting on Thursday in Athens, with the relevant education and religious affairs minister briefing other ministers over the resolution of a decades-old request by the Church that vacant clerical positions in the provinces be filled with salaried priests of the Church of Greece.
In a related statement, the Archbishop of Crete, His Eminence Evgenios, told local media that resolution of the issue vindicates the ordinary parish priest. He also called various claims of “new hirings” as mere disinformation.
Along those same lines, the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, His Beatitude Ieronymos, in a recent press interview, rejected any notion of a dilemma in terms of clerical positions in the country, stating characteristically, “…Greece deserves and needs respectable physicians, teachers and scientists. It also, however, needs respectable clerics, ones that will not need to beg for the self-evident, but who will be afforded the right to a respectable life, one where they will be able to raise their family.”