Remote Greek monks resist eviction
Friday,
January 17, 2003 Posted: 7:44 AM EST (1244 GMT)
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) --Power and water have been
cut, authorities have halted supplies of food and medicine, and a deadline for
forcible eviction looms.
For
now, though, more than 100 Greek Orthodox monks are resisting efforts to force
them from their 1,000-year-old monastery on a remote peninsula in the Aegean
Sea as punishment for their bitter opposition to reconciliation between
orthodox Christians and the Roman Catholic church.
Methodius:
monks will challenge eviction in court
For
now, though, more than 100 Greek Orthodox monks are resisting efforts to force
them from their 1,000-year-old monastery on a remote peninsula in the Aegean
Sea as punishment for their bitter opposition to reconciliation between
orthodox Christians and the Roman Catholic church.
Holding
up a knotted rope rosary, the monastery's abbot, who goes by the name
Methodius, said the monks of the Esphigmenou Monastery would challenge the
eviction order in Greece's highest administrative court.
"We
will fight with our prayer beads," he told a news conference on Thursday
in Thessaloniki, a port city about 80 miles west of Mount Athos, a peninsula
home to some two dozen monasteries.
The
expulsion was ordered for rejecting the authority of Eastern Orthodox
leadership. Members of the monastery condemned church leaders for holding
talks with Roman Catholics as part of a long-running effort to reconcile the
two main branches of Christianity.
Mount
Athos, known as the Holy Mountain, is considered a spiritual cradle of
Orthodox Christianity, and its conservative monks are widely perceived as
being guardians of the faith.
The
inhabitants of Esphigmenou are considered the most doctrinal of all the 2,000
or so monks living on Athos.
For
decades, the monks have shown their opposition to any reconciliation with
Catholics by adorning their monastery with black flags and a giant banner
reading "Orthodoxy or death." They have referred to the pope as a
heretic.
Orthodox
Christian Churches and the Roman Catholic Church have been separated since the
Great Schism of 1054 in a dispute over papal authority and interpretation of
their creed.
Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, on
December 14 declared the ultraconservative monks at Esphigmenou as
"schismatic." That decision allowed Mount Athos' Greek government
administrator to order their forcible eviction by January 28.
It
would be the largest-ever known eviction of monks from Mount Athos since the
community was founded more than 1,000 years ago.
The
last eviction, for the same reasons, took place a decade ago and involved five
monks living in an isolated hermitage.
Since
the eviction order was issued on December 14, authorities have cut electricity
to the monastery and prevented the supply of food, heating oil and medical
supplies, Methodius said.
A
legal adviser to the monks, Ifigenia Kamtsidou, said the men were not given an
opportunity to respond to the charges before the eviction order was issued.
"Constitutional
procedures were not upheld," Kamtsidou said.
The
monastery's first serious falling out with the ecumenical patriarchate came in
the mid-1960's, after Catholic and Orthodox leaders withdrew a series of
anathemas -- or damnations -- issued in 1054.
Dialogue
between the Orthodox and Catholics began in earnest when Bartholomew was
elected patriarch in 1991. Travels by Pope John Paul II have also helped
promote contact between the churches.
"Our
battle is for truth and the true orthodox way of life, which the patriarch is
attempting to silence," Methodius said.
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