c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ The new leader of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America said Friday (Sept. 17) his first task would be to heal the deep divisions in his church that grew out of the actions of his ousted predecessor.”The first thing to be done is for the people to feel that they are members of a church that cares, that has a vision for action aiming at supporting human beings,”Archbishop Demetrios, a 71-year-old Greek-born New Testament scholar, said on his first full day of work at the church’s Manhattan offices.

Demetrios arrived here from Greece on Thursday evening and will be formally installed as archbishop in a ceremony scheduled for Saturday morning at Holy Trinity Cathedral, just blocks from his Upper East Side office. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is among the religious and political dignitaries set to attend.

Demetrios takes over a 1.5 million-member church battered by controversy and internal revolt during the three-year reign of Archbishop Spyridon, the church’s first American-born leader, who was viewed by his critics as autocratic and fiscally irresponsible.

Spyridon’s actions prompted influential church lay leaders to work for his ouster, motivated parishes to withhold financial contributions from the archdiocese and turned the church’s regional metropolitans (bishops) and many of its priests against him.

Finally, in August, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based international Orthodox Christian leader with final authority over the American church, ended his support of Spyridon and demanded his resignation.

With the backing of his bishops in Istanbul, Bartholomew then named Demetrios to lead the American church. His selection was widely praised by those who had opposed Spyridon.

Since his departure, the archdiocese has revealed Spyridon, 54, left behind a $2.5 million deficit and a secret television monitoring system that allowed him to spy on church office activities from his home on Long Island.

Demetrios acknowledged in an interview that expectations within the church are high that he will somehow erase the three years of pain and restore the church’s tarnished reputation in Orthodox and interfaith circles.”I think that these expectations are beyond real human possibilities,”said Demetrios, who speaks six languages and taught at both Harvard University Divinity School and the church’s seminary in Brookline, Mass., from 1983 to 1993.

But Demetrios _ a short, slim, balding man with a long gray beard who exudes a warmth the chain-smoking Spyridon lacked _ said such expectations are understandable and, although they weigh”heavy”on him, he would”somehow respond with the help of God.” He promised to lead with”as open a mind as possible.””To take advantage of all the best qualities that people have … you have to have the doors and windows open for this kind of input,”he said.

Demetrios also said he would seek to extend his church’s involvement in the problems of society at large.”If we are trapped in a condition of taking care only of ourselves, we are not exactly in the better path,”he said.

Among the currents in the American church is a demand among some for autocephaly. This call for full administrative independence grew among some church activists angry at Bartholomew for his reluctance over a period of years to remove Spyridon.

Autocephaly _ such as that of the Orthodox Church of Greece _ would reduce the ecumenical patriarch’s authority to spiritual matters alone.

However, rather than administrative independence, Demetrios said he favored rebuilding the relationship between the ecumenical patriarchate and the American church _ which he called”a two-way phenomenon.””If there is a relationship of mutual trust, of mutual love, then there is a relationship of progress, not of disturbance or upsetting situations. It has to do with how you operate on a day-to-day basis,”he said.

There has also been agitation among some in the American Greek church for greater unity among the various ethnically derived Orthodox denominations in the United States. Among those churches are ones with Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Syrian, Serbian and other European and Middle Eastern roots.

Here again, Demetrios sought to defuse the issue while leaving the door open for serious consideration at some future time.

Orthodox unity, he said, extends beyond administrative confines and is based in shared beliefs, liturgy and history represented by the ecumenical patriarch, whose see in Istanbul _ the Constantinople of the Byzantine church _ is traditionally regarded as the first-among-equals by Orthodoxy’s other branches.”I don’t think things are ready,”Demetrios responded when asked if the nation’s estimated 5 million Orthodox believers should move now toward forming one pan-Orthodox denomination.”I have the handicap of being a historian and I know that … sometimes forced history produces monsters. … We have to be careful. If this is something that belongs to the will of God and God wants all the people to be one … it will happen,”he said.

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Demetrios served as an official in the Church of Greece prior to his appointment as archbishop. He is the author of three major books about Orthodox theology. In 1968, he refused a high post in the Greek church to express his opposition to the military junta that then ruled Greece.

DEA END RIFKIN