During the ordination of a new member of the clergy at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Piraeus, His Beatitude the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece mentioned, among other things, the three roles of the Church.

Addressing the newly-ordained Deacon, His Beatitude said: “The first of these roles, is the religious and spiritual cultivation of our people”. “Today”, he stressed, “we live in a society in which these do not seem to play an important role. Other things are stressed, said and reiterated in our time, where mention is made of development, culture, viability”. “I wonder, is there any relationship between them and the Church? Or is the Church perhaps a bygone reality, which has no role to play in contemporary society”? “Neither culture, nor viability can exist, if there are no spiritual people in society, who have internal culture”. He stressed that “our Church is that which gives people a new dimension in their lives, It is what cultivates people and transforms personalities”. His Beatitude said that “the second role which the Church is called on to serve, is to achieve the coherence and unity of the Greek people”. “Coherence and unity cannot possibly exist”, he continued, “if there is no connecting link”. As we are talking about Greece and the Greeks, we must admit that the Church, religion, Orthodoxy, are bonds that unite people”. “Currently, mention is being made of multiculturalisms, multi-religiousness and multi-linguistics and other things, which are on their way and which we shall be called on to face”. “That which we must use for support”, he noted, “is our religious uniformity”. “The third role of the Church”, noted the Primate of the Greek Church, “is the preservation of our national and spiritual identity, because we live in an era in which the steamroller of multiculturalism threatens to obliterate the local traditions, history, and the moral and spiritual values of nations”. And he continued: “Europe, of which we are a part, betrayed Christianity, and that is why today it is facing the problem of essential survival, for it is face to face with the problem of identity”. “and it showed this when its political leaders refused to register Christianity in the European Constitution as one of the sources of European civilization”. “This means self-refutation, abandonment of the spiritual identity of the European nations. It is fortunate that this view is not shared by the majority of the people of Europe”, he noted characteristically. And he said: “Our nation truly knows its identity and we ought to cultivate it in order to ensure the continuation of Hellenism”. “We want Greeks to have an understanding of their identity and not to be flattened”, said His Beatitude. “We are neither racists nor chauvinists. But this does not mean that we must betray our identity and our roots, because then elimination from the arena of history awaits us”. “Recently”, the leader of the Muslim mosque in Geneva declared that de-Christianized Europe is ripe for Islam. This means that it has lost its identity and someone else will come and protect it”.

FROM THE PRESS OFFICE