Monks Resist Greek Monastery Eviction
Fri Jan 17, 6:08 AM ET
By COSTAS KANTOURIS, Associated Press Writer
THESSALONIKI, Greece - 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.
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.
Methodius also vowed to appeal to a higher authority.
"We will fight with our prayer beads," he told a news conference Thursday in Thessaloniki, a port city about 80 miles west of Mount Athos, a peninsula home to some two dozen monasteries.
The monks were ordered expelled 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 Dec. 14 declared the ultraconservative monks at Esphigmenou as "schismatic." That decision allowed Mount Athos' Greek government administrator to order their forcible eviction by Jan. 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 Dec. 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
They should let the monastery be and live in peace. This makes me cry and saddened about Orthodoxy when I hear things like this.