Athens archbishop says Pope’s Greece visit a ‘sign of hope’

by Chantal Valery

Pope Francis visiting majority-Orthodox Greece next week is a “sign of hope” in a country with a strong anti-papal tradition, the Catholic archbishop of Athens has said.

The Catholic pontiff is to visit Greece from December 4 to 6, making the first papal trip to the capital Athens in 20 years and returning to the island of Lesbos, a focal point of the migration crisis.

The trip comes just five months after the Argentine pontiff, who turns 85 in December, was hospitalised following surgery on his colon.

“His visit is a step towards the Orthodox Church,” the Catholic Archbishop of Athens, Theodore Kodidis, told AFP in an interview.

“For the Catholics of Greece, it is a moment of unity, an opportunity to come together around the figure of the Pope,” he said.

Kodidis said the Catholic community in Greece represents around one percent of the faithful — “maybe two percent” counting recently arrived migrants.

It is a “multicoloured community” that includes Poles, Filipinos, Africans and South Americans, he said.

“Unifying this community is a beautiful thing, but it is also a challenge.”

In April 2016, the pope joined Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens in visiting Lesbos, for many years a key entry point into Europe for migrants and asylum seekers.

He paid a trip to Moria, the continent’s largest migrant camp until it was destroyed by fire last year.

His Lesbos visit culminated with him taking three Syrian families back to the Vatican.

Kodidis said the pope in Lesbos this year would want to “send a message… to the whole world that we have to pay attention to this reality, to these poor people leaving their homes and changing countries.”

Josif Printezis, the Catholic archbishop for Greek islands in the Aegean, has said the pope was expected to “make a humanitarian statement, that the Church and all European peoples care about refugees, and that the weight borne by Greece should be recognised by the other European countries”.

– ‘Only positive consequences’ –
Orthodox hardliners in Greece blame the Pope for the 1054 schism between Byzantium and Rome, as well as the Fourth Crusade that sacked the Byzantine Empire capital of Constantinople in 1204.

When Pope John Paul II visited Athens in 2001, hundreds of monks protested in Athens ahead of his arrival. Even today, some Greek bishops are opposed to the visit.

“Welcoming a pope to Athens may seem like a paradox… because there is anti-papist sentiment in Greece traditionally, but (most sides) accepting the meeting is a sign of hope and progress,” said Kodidis.

“Twenty years ago it was very different, it was the first time that a pope came to Greece. Reluctance and resistance were much stronger.”

“Today, there are some hostile voices but it’s very marginal.”

During his 2001 visit, John Paul II prayed on a hill where Saint Paul preached to the Athenians almost 2,000 years ago, and asked Orthodox believers to forgive the errors of the Roman Catholic church.

This time round, Kodidis says, Greece’s Orthodox leaders will welcome the pope “with kindness”, but also seek to “maintain equilibrium” within their own church.

“I see only positive consequences to a better understanding between both churches and both traditions, especially since we are very close faith-wise,” he said.

Agence France-Presse

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