Greece's Other Coup

Through the centuries, the Orthodox Church of Greece has learned to live with many kinds of political power. So when the monarchy was abolished in June, Archbishop leronymos of Athens, for 18 years a chaplain at the royal palace, dutifully sent his bishops an order to eliminate prayers for the royal family from all church services. Such outward meekness has masked considerable turmoil of another kinda struggle over power and reform within the bishops' own ranks.

When the junta of right-wing army colonels seized power in Greece in 1967, they promised, with characteristic fervor, a regime of "Christian reform and purity." At the time, few things in Greece seemed to need reform and purity more than the Greek Orthodox Church itself, which encompasses--at least nominally--97% of the population. Churches, schools and chaplaincies were some 3,000 priests short. The available ones, most of whom had never gone past the sixth grade, were paid as little as $33 a month. The conservative and antiquated hierarchy--most bishops were over 70 --paid little attention to either social ills or the disaffected young. In addition, some of the supposedly celibate bishops had been named in scandals involving sexual misconduct as well as gambling.

To remedy all this, the colonels ousted Chrysostomos, Primate of Greece, by applying a retirement age of 80 to the Archbishop (Chrysostomos was 87). In his place as Archbishop of Athens they installed Palace Chaplain Ieronymos Kotsonis, a gray-bearded stripling then 61. A professor of canon law and author of more than 90 published works, Ieronymos started out with all the zeal of a theologian newly armed with power. He ordered special drives to aid the poor and sick, revamped the church welfare system, rented hundreds of "homes of tranquillity" for the aged. He raised clerical salaries substantially. He drafted a new charter for the church that set 72 as the retirement age for bishops, broadened participation by the laity, and gave the church more responsibility for religious education, which has long been shared with the state.

Impressive as they were, Ieronymos' aggressive reforms still had a dictatorial side. He got the government to authorize kangaroo courts in which clergy men could be dismissed simply for having a bad reputation, and on the basis of hearsay evidence alone. The fate of an accused churchman, Ieronymos himself admitted, depended not on whether the charges were true or false but on "the effect that these charges have on a reputation." Ieronymos got rid of two bishops by trial and forced seven more to resign under threat of prosecution. He went after not only bishops reputed to be immoral but also those who criticized him and his policies.

His harsh tactics caught up with Ieronymos last November, when the full Greek church hierarchy met for the first time since 1969. At issue was the selection of a new ten-member Synod to run the church. Among the obscure complexities of the Greek Orthodox Church is the fact that just over half of it owes obedience solely to the Church of Greece. The rest, some 33 dioceses in the "new lands" of northern Greece, which the Greeks won from the Turks more than a half-century ago, still owes a residual loyalty to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Demetrios I. Following tradition, Demetrios wanted the usual quota of Northern representatives in the Synod, picked on the basis of seniority. Instead, Ieronymos engineered the election of younger "men of merit" who backed his own policies, and he ignored geographical criteria for distributing Synod seats.

Canon Law. Ieronymos' effort to pack the Synod provoked a counterattack. Bishop Ambrosios, Metropolitan of Eleutheroupolis, called Ieronymos a despot; the Primate thereupon suspended Ambrosios for three days. "You are violating canon law, Your Beatitude!" cried Ambrosios. "You are afraid of the light, Your Beatitude!"

His Beatitude retired to his native island of Tinos for rest and contemplation after the protracted arguments. Upon returning, he announced to the Synod that, "after much thought and prayer," he was resigning. The Synod rejected his resignation, just as Ieronymos had apparently expected. What he did not expect was that dissident bishops would go to court and, on a technicality, get. the whole Synod declared illegal. The bishops thereupon elected a new Synod in May. It went back to the old geographical arrangements and reduced Ieronymos' supporters to a minority of three out of ten.

For the time being, at least, that appears to settle the matter, putting an end to Ieronymos' autocratic rule and restoring the antique system of checks and balances that has kept power in the Greek Church divided among an episcopal oligarchy. Though a few of Ieronymos' supporters have asked a Greek court to declare the second Synod illegal, they stand little chance of success. Moderates now hope that the Church of Greece can get back to constructive work, which progresses slowly enough in the best of times and has been all but paralyzed since last year by the internecine warfare.

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