Fort Wayne News-Sentinel
BY BILL TAMMEUS
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT) - Now and then I want to take some people of faith and slap them around. What in God's name can they be thinking?
This angry thought occurred to me again recently as I read an account of what one writer called "a gaudy explosion of scandal" that has rocked the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens and Jerusalem in the last year or so. As an Athens newspaper said in an editorial, "The Greek public can only watch dumbfounded as the country's bishops humiliate themselves on television, tossing barbs at each other and trading accusations of forgery, blackmail, dissolute living, even drug trafficking."
If that's reality TV in Greece, it sounds more interesting than what America has.
One bishop in Greece has been charged with embezzling about $376,000 from a monastery. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the peers of the Greek Orthodox patriarch there have voted him out of office for unauthorized real estate dealings, but he has refused to leave. The church's synod were to meet in Jerusalem on Monday to elect a new patriarch. What a holy mess.
The Greeks, of course, are not alone in producing religious scandal. The Catholic church in America continues to struggle to find its sea legs after the disgusting scandal over priests sexually abusing children and the further outrage of some bishops covering that up at the expense of the victims.
It was a breathtaking example of a faith community's leaders losing their way and intentionally wounding the very people they were sworn to protect.