Greece: Money and power

The Greek Orthodox Church is an epitome of a church intimately bonded with national identity, which does not mean it lives without controversy or always in comfortable relations with the government in Athens.

The church is unquestionably wealthy and powerful. Its books state it as having made more than seven million euro in profit in 2008. It spent four million euro on salaries, four million in sponsoring events, and last year bought 1.6 million shares in the National Bank, upping its share to 7.7 million. Apart from 4.5 million brought in from investments, 20 million in revenue came mainly from renting out church property.

It is, in fact, when it comes to property and money that most controversy has surrounded the church. Reports that much of a 1.2 million euro sum donated by worshippers at more than 100 churches had gone not to charities but to expenses compounded controversy that rocked the Greek polity in what came to  be known as the Vatopedi Monastery scandal, which involved an exchange of land with the state through which, it was alleged, taxpayers lost out.

With this already in the headlines for months, February 2009 saw controversy around a state donation to the church to build a home for the elderly, which in fact turned out to have been turned into a plan to build a hospital. June saw prosecutors beginning to look into a church-state land swop involving prime land on the island of Skyros and the purchase by the state of land owned by Mount Athos monastery allegedly at an excessive price.

This, in turn, is on top of continuing reports on the saga of Panteleimon, former bishop of Attica, serving six years in jail for embezzling 195 000 euro from a monastery, a conviction he continues to fight in court.

These controversies continued against a background of an opinion survey at the end of 2008 that showed that the church had plunged in public trust, from 15th to 22nd place in a rating of confidence in institutions, indicating that about half of those surveyed had no trust in the church as an institution.

Matters worsened for the church leadership, in the person of Archbishop Ieronymous, who had called on the state to give back assets and land expropriated in the past to help the church meet its huge expenses – as, instead, the new government under George Papandreou moved ahead with the plan it announced in its election campaign to not exempt the church from a one-off property levy to raise a billion euro in the face of the financial crisis.

Owning property worth 700 million euro, the church faces a hefty levy, ironically precisely because it is categorised as a charity. Leading Greek daily Kathimerini quoted Bishop Theoklitos of Ioannina, head of the church’s financial committee, as saying: "It is misleading for the government to say that it is taking from the church to give to the needy. They are taking from the needy to give it to the needy".

Romania: Power and the past
Across Bulgaria’s northern border, the Romanian Orthodox Church is seen as influential, but this is not without its complications.

Whatever portrayal of fraternity there may be, there have been desultory clashes with the Russian Orthodox Church precisely over questions of influence, including in neighbouring Moldova – again, an illustration of the dynamics of regional politics being reflected in church matters, and a further difficult issue is the continuing question of properties seized in the former era from the Roman Catholic Church and given to the Romanian Orthodox Church, which Rome’s church wants back.


Examination of Romania’s communist-era past has also exposed at least one senior clergyman, a bishop, as having been formally involved with the Securitate.
More recently, the church was drawn into another scandal, when a team from Libera newspaper posed as priests and secretly videotaped an Archbishop allegedly agreeing to sell them preferment in the priesthood, with positions given according to sums paid on a sliding scale.