Greece: When will the Catholic Church be accorded juridical personality? “80% of Greek Catholics today are immigrants. They are a significant presence of witness in the country. They come to Greece not to visit our islands, but to find a better life. The crisis we are now experiencing in Greece is one from which they in particular are suffering”, says the Apostolic Exarch for Catholics of Byzantine rite in Greece, Dimitrios Salachas, speaking on the fringes of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East now underway in the Vatican, describing in this way the difficult condition of the majority of Catholics in the country. “Many of them – he explains – have sold their land or their home to go into emigration and this means it’s unlikely they will return to their country of origin. For our part we are making constant appeals for hospitality”, also in the light of the precarious conditions to which many of them are now reduced. “In front of the offices of Caritas – declares the exarch – many stand in line from the earliest hours of the morning in order to get something to eat. We also try to give them legal and medical assistance, thanks to the help of many volunteers who are physicians, nurses and lawyers. But we can’t do everything. The Catholic Church in Greece, in contrast to the Orthodox Church, does not receive subsidies from the State. Our resources are very limited and insufficient to meet the requests for aid precipitated by this crisis. Nonetheless, in the field of charity I have to recognize that cooperation with the Orthodox Church works well; together with them we have also established an inter-ritual and ecumenical Caritas”. Such cooperation would work much better, adds Dimitrios, if “the Catholic Church, now to be considered a separate body, were to enjoy legal recognition. That’s something we’ve been negotiating with the State about for some 50 years. Each time we reach a formulation, the government or minister changes, and we have to start from scratch all over again. It is, in any case, a question that needs to be resolved. Juridical personality would enable us to exercise freedom of worship in full; we would be able to give ourselves an organization that would permit us to create parishes and other ecclesial structures necessary to perform our mission. Participation in the European Union commits Greece to regulate this question. As a Church we don’t ask for privileges”. According to a briefing given to SirEurope by Mgr. Francesco Papamanolis, Bishop of Syros, Santorini and Crete and chairman of the Greek bishops, “over the last ten years Catholics in Greece have increased by 700%, rising from 50,000 to 350,000. The cause is to be sought in the wave of immigration subsequent to the fall of Communism in the case of Poles, Romanians and Albanians, the entry of Greece into the EU, political instability in the Middle East in the case of Lebanese and Iraqis, and the elasticity of the government in granting residence permits in the case of Philippinos, Africans and Indians. Poland: bishops reject test tube babies “In vitro fertilization is the little sister of eugenics”, pointed out the Polish bishops to the politicians who are about to debate in Parliament the law on assisted procreation that is still absent from the Polish legal code. In a letter of 18 October, signed by the chairman of the Polish Bishops’ Conference (KEP) Archbishop Jozef Michalik, by the chairmen of the KEO Council for the Family and the KEP Group of experts for bioethics, respectively Mgr. Kazimierz Gorny and Mgr. Henryk Hoser, and sent to the highest officeholders of the State, the bishops recall that “every recourse to conception outside the mother’s womb presupposes the selection of foetuses and implies the killing” of those judged the weakest. Apart from “selective eugenics”, the negative effects of the proposed law which would admit recourse to artificial insemination would include, say the bishops, the decoupling of the act of procreation from that of marriage, which would have particularly pernicious consequences for children “who would come into the world thanks to the participation of third parties”. Moreover the admission of procedures of in vitro fertilization, warn the bishops “would inevitably determine the need to redefine the concept of paternity, maternity and conjugal fidelity, leading to imbalances in family relations and helping to undermine the very foundations of social life”. The bishops stress that the technologies used for in vitro fertilization are no cure for infertility and that those who use such methods remain infertile or sick. They also reaffirm the need to activate programmes of prophylaxis and the treatment of infertility. The Archbishop of Warsaw and future cardinal Kazimierz Nycz explained that the letter “was written not because the Polish Parliament will shortly begin its debate on bills that regard assisted procreation, but because those who would like to render admissible the test-tube method of procreation are hiding the consequences from those who will have to decide whether to approve it”. “There are limits that man cannot presume to overstep”, warned the prelate, convinced that “the Church shall never change her position” on this matter. Mgr. Henryk Hoser for his part recalled that anyone who votes consciously in favour of the law that admits recourse to in vitro fertilization and the selection of embryos “will automatically find himself outside the ecclesial community”.
