|
|
Published by the New York
Daily News, July 31, 2004
FOR ORTHODOX, NOT
ALL GREEK
BY BILL BELL
AT A $50-A-PLATE
breakfast that kicked off the city's biggest
religious convention of the year, Mayor Bloomberg
got off a one-liner that seemed
uncannily appropriate to some diners.
"Kalimera," he said, using the Greek term for
"good morning" at the beginning of his welcoming
remarks to 1,720 delegates to the national
conference of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of
America. Then, switching to English, he joked,
"Now, since some of you don't speak Greek, I will
continue in English."
There were appreciative chuckles from his audience
at the Marriott Marquis
Hotel in Times Square, but at one table, there
also were a few tight smiles
and nods of a different kind of agreement.
"He [the mayor] didn't know it," a priest from a
Chicago suburb said, "but he just hit the nail on
the head."
The language issue is, in fact, only part of a
double-edged challenge that
confronts not only Greek Orthodox leaders but the
heads of all ethnic churches - from Albanian to
Ukrainian.
The challenge is to maintain cultural and communal
identities, which the Orthodox churches represent
as much as they do religious traditions, without
denying their flocks the rights and advantages of
full integration into American life. For the Greek
Orthodox church, whose 1.5 million members make it
the country's largest Orthodox body, it is an
especially sensitive issue.
It was something Archbishop Demetrios, primate of
the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,
included in a state-of-the-church address that
opened the five-day 37th Biennial Clergy-Laity
Congress, which ended yesterday.
"The Hellenism we are talking about is not a
nationalist, chauvinist entity," he said. "It is a
designation of a superb synthesis of language,
history and culture, an indispensable component in
building for a lasting future."
To educate Greek-Americans about such timeless
Hellenic principles as democracy and freedom, the
advancement of knowledge and science, and
cultivation of the beauty in art is to make them
both better Greeks and better Americans, he said.
Before the conference, Demetrios was asked what he
considered the main problem of the archdiocese,
which contains 550 parishes reaching from New
York, its administrative headquarters, to San
Francisco.
He said it was the struggle by immigrants to keep
their identity while, at the same time, adapting
to their new environment. A related issue, he
said, was combining the deep, elaborate
spirituality of Orthodoxy and the materialism and
technology of the secular society.
Thus, a dozen workshops and seminars were devoted
to dealing with various issues inspired by those
dilemmas, including one that promoted the idea of
teaching Greek in public schools and another that
explored the impact of pop culture on Orthodoxy.
But there were some ironies - Demetrios spoke in
English, and a 42-page proposed overhaul of rules
governing the organization and administration of
the archdiocese was printed in English, with a
footnote calling it the official language of the
text.
Another major concern came up in sessions devoted
to luring religious and cultural dropouts back
into church life.
"There are thousands of people, nominally Greek
Orthodox," Demetrios said, "who have been
disconnected, who have been lost in the turmoil of
modern life. . . . It is totally unthinkable and
unacceptable to have parishes with only 1,000
members when they are surrounded by thousands of
unchurched
Orthodox people."
The Clergy-Laity Congress is the church's highest
legislative body, with authority to debate and
decide everything from budgets to educational and
charitable priorities. The presiding officer is
the archbishop, and the only thing delegates
cannot change is dogma.
Demetrios, the sixth spiritual leader of the
American flock since the establishment of the
archdiocese in 1922, seemed at ease in his various
roles at the convention. He is 76, and has spent
nearly four decades coping with the secular
society and his own role in it. He was born in
Greece, but has worked mostly in the United States
since 1965, a year after his ordination. He was
installed as primate five years ago.
At the clergy-laity conference, he turned up at
all kinds of liturgical and social events and
conducted several religious services, two in the
hotel's Broadway Ballroom. One of them, before the
opening-day breakfast, kept Bloomberg waiting for
nearly 30 minutes.
"The mayor's lucky," a New Jersey delegate said.
"The service yesterday lasted three hours."
|
