“Our Church embraces them all, loves them all and prays for them all. She does not have a faith meter nor our clergymen keep an ‘attendance record’ in the Holy Temples. Orthodox Christians live and act in the spirit of freedom of the person, while at the same time, they have a developed sense of both national and individual responsibility,” Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and all Greece underlined, inter alia, to ANA-MPA, regarding the spread of the coronavirus.
In more detail, the statement of the Primate of the Greek Church:
“The Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, with a sense of responsibility towards God and the Greek people, stood from the first moment alongside and supported the national effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, by informing citizens according to State guidelines. It also fully complied with the decisions of the responsible state authorities regarding the necessary measures to safeguard public health, which it implemented and still does.
Our Church embraces them all, loves them all and prays for them all. She does not have a faith meter nor our clergymen keep an “attendance record” in the Holy Temples. Orthodox Christians live and act in the spirit of freedom of the person, while at the same time, they have a developed sense of both national and individual responsibility. And for our Church, it is obvious that those who are anxious and fearful and who belong to vulnerable groups of the population are as faithful Christians as anyone else.
Our Church has never stood against Science and has never attempted to replace it. However, Science has never attempted to substitute the Church for matters of Faith either.
Nevertheless, the attempt of some supposedly elitist centers that ignore the essentials of Faith and the facts of Greek reality, to shift fraudulently and artificially the discussion to purely spiritual matters, for obviously they are self-dependent or they justify their existence by divisive rationales, which torpedo the very national consensus and unity that our Homeland so desperately needs at this time, cause unimaginable regret and profound bitterness.”