Our View: The monastery fiasco exposed Church failings

FOR the last ten days or so, the media has been full of stories and reports about the goings-on at the Osiou Avakoum monastery and the two monks who are now on trial before a Synod Court. Little has been reported about the church court proceedings, which began this week, but the media have had plenty of material to keep the story going, including CCTV footage of the monks, that was posted on websites and caused a bigger sensation than the many allegations of dubious dealings.

The Osiou Avakoum story had everything – sex between the celibate monks, staged miracles that generated big donations from the faithful, the accumulation of a large amount of cash, forced confessions, allegations of involvement of a bishop and claims he tried to cover up the scandal as well as links to the Elam leader Christos Christou. The parties tried to make something out of Christou’s presence during the counting of the €800,000 found in the monastery safe but he was there as a member of the bishopric’s committee.

It is not Elam that has been tarnished by this sordid affair but the Church. While it is very easy to blame everything on the two monks running the monastery, staging the miracles, and exhorting money from the faithful the Church hierarchy was not without culpability for allowing all this to take place in the last four years. Even if the archbishop was not aware of what was going on, the Bishop of Tamasos, Isaias, could not make such claims as the church and monastery in Fterikoudi was under his authority. In fact, the abbot claimed he was transferring money to the bishopric.

In the space of four years, the abbot Nektarios and his sidekick archimandrite Porfyrios had built a church and monastery with funds they had collected from the faithful. Did the bishop not wonder how this was possible in a rural church with a relatively small and not particularly wealthy congregation. Had he not heard that people from all over Cyprus were flocking to Osiou Avakoum because of the marketing of fake miracles and that the faithful as well as vulnerable were being taken advantage of by ruthless monks? Had he not heard of claims that cancer sufferers who visited the monastery were supposedly cured? Yet he did nothing about this scam, nor did anyone else in the Church hierarchy.

It was only because of the publicity that action was taken. If the story was kept out of the news, the two monks would have been defrocked through summary procedures, the money would have been put in the bank, and the matter forgotten. The publicity forced the Church hierarchy to set up a trial, behind closed doors, but the police are also investigating because criminal offences may have been committed. Staging miracles in order to secure cash donations is a case of taking money under false pretenses.

After all this publicity there is no going back now. There can be no cover-up and it was encouraging to hear Archbishop Georgios urging the police “to fully unravel the case.”