Athens, January 26, 2016
Commenting on his statement, “I feel like an immigrant in my native country”, in his interview with the Tahidromos newspaper, Metropolitan Paul (Pavlos) said, “The Greece that we have known and loved is gradually changing its face. We are altering our traditions and striving to impose anti-human values. I would ask myself: ‘Who is ruling over Greece?’ I do not mean that the government was not elected by the people; I put the question the different way: is Greece now governed by its authorities or by some outside forces?...
“A new way of life is being imposed, and the state recognizes and legalizes it in the status of law. Nobody can assert that a huge number of people with genetic deviations were born all of a sudden. The whole story with “The Free Cohabitation Law” was imposed from outside of Greece in order to prevail over us. We feel how the spiritual atmosphere is changing – the atmosphere in which our children are growing up.”
According to AgionOros, the metropolitan stressed that, while rejecting sodomy, the Church is not antagonistic to the sinners: “I received these people on many occasions and, to my great joy, I have helped some of them return to the right path. This fact demonstrates that homosexuality is not a genetic predisposition, but a state which is being deliberately implanted.”
Commenting on the possibility of cremating the departed, the hierarch said: “We regard man not as trash, but as a creation of God who is designed to become by grace what God is by nature. That is why the human body is holy, it is the temple of the Holy Spirit.”
Talking about the critics of the Church who claim that it should do more to help the needy during the economic crisis, Metropolitan Paul said, “According to one French academic, ‘those who have given nothing to people are talking the most about the Church’. This is what we see now: those who have not given a single euro to the needy are raising their voice. And as far as the Church is concerned, it has helped and helps not only during the crisis, but always.”
