Mt. Athos, August 2, 2024
vimaorthodoxias.gr
The Sacred Community of Mt. Athos has not met to discuss the police request to storm Esphigmenou Monastery.
The Sacred Community is the spiritual authority representing the Holy Mountain, consisting of one representative from each of the 20 ruling monasteries.
Last month, the Greek police appealed to the Sacred Community for permission to launch a large-scale operation with significant forces and vehicles to evict the 118 monks of Esphigmenou, who are in schism from the rest of the Holy Mountain and the Orthodox Church.
And despite various media reports, the Sacred Community announced yesterday that it did not hold an emergency session to address the police request. The Athonite statement is published by Vima Orthodoxias.
“The Sacred Community of Mount Athos has categorically denied recent reports that spoke of convening an extraordinary assembly and voting regarding the entry of police forces and heavy vehicles to carry out an eviction operation from areas of the Athonite State, specifically at the Esphigmenou Monastery,” the outlet writes.
The Sacred Community emphasized that there is much media misinformation regarding this issue.
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Esphigmenou has been in schism from the rest of the Holy Mountain, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the rest of the Orthodox World for many years, in protest against the ecumenistic activity of the Patriarch of Constantinople and other Local Churches with the Catholic Church and other bodies.
While the Athonite monasteries have protested such activity by ceasing to commemorate the Patriarch in the Divine services several times in recent decades, the Esphigmenou brotherhood has gone further by joining a schismatic, Old Calendarist jurisdiction.
The constitution and statutes of the Holy Mountain prohibit monastic cohabitation with the heterodox or schismatics, thus there have been several attempts to evict the monks, including a 2013 incident in which Abbot Methodios and other monks threw Molotov cocktails at the police.
The abbot and another monk initially received 20-year sentences in 2017, with 6 others receiving sentences of 10 years and 4 months, though those sentences were reduced to 17 years and 9 years and 5 months respectively in 2019, and again to 5.5 years and 2 years and 9 months respectively in 2021.
In July 2020, Greek courts ordered the schismatic brotherhood to hand over all territories both on and outside of Mt. Athos to the New Esphigmenou Brotherhood created by Patriarch Bartholomew in 2005, which has been living in the Athonite capital of Karyes. Authorities began evicting monks from the monastery’s properties in Greece later that month.
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