Athens, February 12, 2024
Photo: Romfea
Thousands of Orthodox Christian came out for a rally yesterday against the Greek government’s plans to legalize gay marriage and adoption by gay couples.
The rally, organized by the Center for Patristic Studies in Marousi, Greece, was held on Syntagma Square in central Athens.
According to the announcement issued for the rally, the people thus express their opposition to the “sodomization of Greek society” and emphasize their desire “to prevent the adoption of orphaned children, who would constitute an illusion of the fruits of an unnatural and barren union,” reports Romfea.
Furthermore, they underline that they do not want to become “accomplices in this crime against innocent children.”
Rally speakers included Archimandrite Athanasios (Anastasiou), former abbot of the Monastery of the Great Meteora, who called for resistance against the bill, invoking divine law and the protection of the Orthodox faith, the family, and Greek society.
Fr. Athanasios stated passionately:
We are facing the storm of religious and national discoloration. The political system and the anti-Christ establishment, that governs us, attempts blatantly and shamelessly to uproot our roots, our history, our Orthodox faith, our Hellenic-Orthodox tradition. It attempts to tarnish any beauty, bravery, and valor that exists in our blessed land; to smear what continues to radiate; to kill what continues to vivify and to resurrect spiritually; what can offer support, hope, and progress. We are facing the storm of atheism, anti-theism, anthropotheism, the deification of science, corrupted rightsism, subjection, xenomania, rayah mentality, graeculus mentality, unbridled hedonism, luxury, all kinds of flesh worship, and mainly the unnatural lewdness, the abominable sin of homosexuality. The purpose, of course, is visible and preordained: The total subjugation of our homeland and our people to the designs of globalization, the New World Order, and the New Age.
Contrary to the lamentable course of the government, Fr. Athanasios proclaimed Greece’s true hope:
We have the Holy and Orthodox Church, the ark of our salvation, our good, wise, and loving Mother, who regenerates us with Holy Baptism and Holy Chrism and grafts us into Her heavenly Body, nurses us, educates us, pacifies us, comforts us, sanctifies us, leads us to Heaven, and ultimately grants us participation in the uncreated, glorified, and eternal Kingdom of our Triune God! Our homeland, therefore, is thrice blessed and destined by God to be the salt of the earth!
A speech by Metropolitan Demetrios of Goumenissa was also read. “I praise you with all my soul for your vigilant zeal (a critical identity element of our race, our culture, and our valiant history),” he told the rally attendees.
His address concluded with:
Our people—with all the antibodies of its ecclesiastical manliness―does not stigmatize people of vile passions and psychosomatic falls. It prays for them compassionately, grieves for their harmful choices of loss, sympathizes with them far more honorably (than the lawmakers) and much more humanly (than the legitimizers). But in the end, this people does not tolerate being led and carried away, nor does it consent to international choices of social absurdity that (indirectly or directly, it does not matter) ultimately target the healthy traditional family of father and mother, the natural and physiological childhood, as well as the manly social moral resistance, the genotype, and phenotype of our historical continuity. May the God of our saints and heroes free us from this scourge that has become an unbearable pain for the majority of our people.
Both the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church and the expanded Council of Bishops have issued condemnatory statements. State authorities have expressed their intention to move ahead with their plans, despite the voice of the Church.
Both the Sacred Community of Mt. Athos, and a double assembly of the Sacred Community with the 20 abbots have issued condemnatory statements.
Earlier this month, 140 Greek Orthodox associations also united in their opposition to the relevant bill.
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