For whom the church polls

The Church of Greece must forge a path to heaven through earthly achievements. Faith without works is dead

ONE OF the first lessons a politician should learn is never to cross the church on a matter of symbolism. For here is an institution that has elevated a Roman torturing device to a symbol of absolution for the world's sins. Before this symbol millions of people unveil their most tender feelings, or butcher an enemy.

Even if Greeks do not attend church every Sunday, the application of the church's symbolic power is daily. We call upon it to bless governments, boats, businesses and battalions.

In the seemingly perfunctory act of revamping state identity cards to exclude religious affiliation, the government invoked the wrath of an institution that knows it is losing a national monopoly, as church and state are wrenched apart.

The divorce is inevitable as Europe unites to encompass an array of faiths, races and languages. It must enforce rules that are acultural. The government could arguably have avoided the identity card crisis by simply waiting for a Euro-card to come into effect. But it wanted to show good marks in Euro-class by preparing the ground at the expense of what it thought would be an easy, non-political target. How wrong it was.

The awesome political weapon religious leaders hold is that they are not politicians. They invoke authorities even higher than the people: the people's ancestors, traditions and raison d'etre. Thus, Archbishop Christodoulos has fully immersed the church in an exercise that is entirely political in nature (a war against the ruling socialists with support from the conservatives) while declaring that the church "rejects any involvement in political and state activity".

Christodoulos must know that his chances of forcing a referendum on the ID cards are practically nil. (Party politics and referenda are mutually exclusive; ancient Athenians voted on individual issues, while we elect factions to keep the issues out of our hair). In the process, he has proven his ability to muster the support of millions of people against the government. The archbishop can also wield the authority of the church to blacken the government's image. The church is speaking out, Christodoulos said in a speech broadcast nationwide on August 28, because it is "the permanent and everlasting cohesive factor of this nation". It stands for the "preservation of our paternal heritage" and upholds Christian and democratic values of "individuality, choice and tolerance".

The implication, of course, is that those who stand in the church's way represent the opposites of these things.

Thus the government is an unChristian, unpatriotic and unaccountable star chamber of anaemic Brussels yesmen. The church is the honest, passionate and patriotic vessel of the nation's vital character through the ages ­ something approximating the haemoglobin of the Greeks. The point of this battle is not so much to reverse the government's fait accompli on ID cards. It is to warn politicians that they have much to lose by taking on the church in the materially important battles that lie ahead.

Europe's secularisation will deeply impact the church's pocket and power: Striking the country's priests off the government payroll, making civil marriage mandatory rather than alternative (recently mooted by Justice Minister Stathopoulos) and later perhaps applying the same to christenings and funerals are the next logical steps on the agenda. They will aim to transform the church from a cultural norm (Greeks are confirmed at baptism) to a consumer choice.

Beyond them lies the most controversial issue - land. The church is estimated to possess more than 300,000 acres of real estate in Greece. It claims that it has been cheated of much of this by individuals and the government, and Christodoulos hinted earlier this year that he wants the land back.

The trouble is that this war against secularisation brings the church into politics, a practice that yields dubious results at best.

Witness the church-fuelled delirium over the name "Macedonia" in 1992, which led to the marginalisation of the Greek point of view in international diplomatic circles and a Waterloo for the Mitsotakis government.

Witness the Christian Coalition's rendering of the Republican Party unelectable in the US throughout the 1990s, because it hijacked the party's political agenda with issues such as abortion, and did so in a hysterical and dogmatic way.

Witness the disastrous participation of Judaic parties in Benjamin Netanyahu's short-lived government, which kept the Israeli prime minister anchored to a religious-prophetic agenda of settling the Holy Land and helped lead to today's renewed intifada.

The ID crisis represents the ongoing battle between those who feel that what makes us Greek must be preserved at all costs, and those who feel that what keeps us poor must be eradicated at all costs. If Europe wants secular identity cards, the latter say, that is what we must have.

But this is a false dilemma. Countries can no more progress without prosperity than they can without identity. Greeks cannot be asked to leave behind either one. Church and state must stop pulling them in opposite directions, or they will create the kind of identity crisis we see in Turkey: a zealously secular state mechanism that feels threatened by a mild brand of Islam shared by 90 percent of its voters.

In the secular environment, that religion transmogrified into a political party, forcing the National Security Council controlled by the generals to prosecute it out of government in 1997, making a mockery of secular democracy in the process. The same has happened in the secular United States, where religious groups now assume political tactics, actively lobbying congressmen in Washington. The point is that if you try to stamp out religion, it will come back to haunt you in another guise.

So what should be the future position of the church in a secular Europe? The church should strengthen its social role, where it has been severely negligent ­ taking care of the poor and elderly, building and running hospitals and schools, setting aside some of its vast tracts of land for the protection of the environment. These are areas where Europe's governments will be facing constant crises in the coming decades.

The Church of Greece should continue to proselytise through the beauty of its ancient ceremony and the Gospels, but it must also forge a path to heaven through earthly achievements. Faith without works is dead.

The limit of the law

THE HOLY Synod of the Church of Greece made the following statement on June 7: "The Orthodox Church is absolutely opposed to the idea that Woman has the right to decide unilaterally whether, when and how many children she will bear."

"'Whether'," the church statement explains, "refers directly to abortion." It could also refer to contraception. Greek Orthodoxy, to its credit, does not join Catholicism in explicitly banning contraception. It recognises the need for defence against the spread of Aids and other venereal diseases. But a woman's rights over her womb are what spearhead the church's position, and there it almost aligns itself with the Vatican.

The Synod explained it was reacting to a proposed ruling by the European Parliament's Committee for Women's rights and Equal Opportunities, which reads: "The European Parliament... condemns any control over women's fertility in the name of religion, race, culture or ethnicity; it considers that women have the right to decide when or whether they shall bear children, and how many."

According to a report by the Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki, Greek women undergo an estimated 200,000 abortions a year ­ twice the annual number of live births. Some researchers put the figure even higher, at 300,000. At these phenomenal levels, abortion is effectively being used in lieu of contraception.
Gynaecologist and professor Vasilis Tarladzis, who helped draft the report, says that Greek women are mistrustful of contraceptive pills. Although they are inexpensive and ubiquitous in Greece, the view has gained wide currency among young women that the pills may cause uterine cancer (in fact they help prevent it), make them gain weight and lower their libido. Some women may also fear damage to their reputation if they become regular buyers of contraceptive pills. A pharmacist might talk carelessly, especially in a small town.

Many Greek women see abortion, legalised in 1986, as a relatively safe and easy safety net, and one that will not damage their reputation. (The vast majority of abortions are discreetly disguised as "minor surgery" in private and public hospital reports, hence the health ministry's ridiculously low abortion statistics ­ 3,848 for 1997, the last year for which figures are available).

The strongest arguments against abortion are religious. The religious, and generally spiritual, debate about whether abortion constitutes murder is based on when one believes a soul to enter a body. The Catholic Church's emphatic stand against abortion dates back only to 1869, when Pope Pius IX declared that ensoulment occurs at the moment of conception. The Greek Orthodox Church agrees.

The trouble is that the churches stretch tenuous Biblical evidence to support their view that God opposes abortion. "Thou shalt not kill, " often cited to attack abortion, presupposes that the embryo is a human being, hence the need to declare ensoulment at conception. God's instruction to Adam and Eve in Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply", was good advice back then, but not with humanity passing the 6-billion mark.

Classical literary and archaeological evidence indicate that before Christianity, abortion was neither a religious issue nor, until Roman times, a legal one. But we do know that abortion was widely practised.

The most popular abortifacient ever recorded in antiquity came from the sap of a plant called silphion, (photo), a distant relative of the sunflower, which grew around the Greek colony of Kyrenaica in north Africa. Balls of silphion resin became Kyrenaica's champion export, especially to Rome. Overharvesting drove silphion to extinction (it resisted any attempts at transplanting) some time in the first century AD.

The open discussion of abortion methods in mainstream medical journals also suggests that the practice was not secret or stigmatised. The Greek doctors Hippocrates, Galen and Soranos all propose methods of abortion, including vigorous exercise after conception, violent jumping and riding a cart over a rocky road to dislodge the foetus from the uterus. They propose spicy and pungent foods, rubbing the body with olive oil, and a variety of suppositories.

This does not mean that the ancients were more liberal than we are. Most Greek societies and early Roman society were extremely patriarchal. Athenian fathers typically had no contact with their children for the first few years of their lives, perhaps to defer paternal recognition until the child's facial features became distinct. The liberal playwright Euripides makes Jason tell Medea: "If men could find a way to bear children, we would have no need of you at all."

But the ancients displayed wisdom in keeping abortion outside the legal code, perhaps in recognition of the facts of nature. The knowledge of conception is a woman's exclusive province until she chooses to share it with a man. If a woman does decide to share the knowledge with a husband or lover, this is at her own discretion. Nature thus gave woman the first veto in childbirth. This is not a political or religious reality. It is an unalterable fact of natural design.

Nor is abortion an unnatural thing. Long before the first induced-abortion methods, nature empowered the female body to prevent conception or trigger miscarriages effectively abortions ­ if conditions are not ideal for childbearing. Stress, undernourishment, exposure to the elements, even emotional distress, have all been shown to prevent or end pregnancy.

But the natural design also carries a terrible burden: along with exclusive knowledge and the veto, nature gave women exclusive responsibility. A man can walk away from a pregnant woman. Society can turn its back on her. Women are likely to want the support of a family and society, and usually make consensual decisions with their partner.

To involve the law, religious or secular, in such a personal decision is to destroy the family and replace it with the church or the state. Such intrusion is, simply, an attempt to control society too closely. The law should not determine whether a child is brought into this world loved or unloved. That should be the decision of those whose responsibility it will be to rear the child ­ unless we adopt a social model like Plato's Republic, where children are reared by special instructors and the family is dissolved.

The law should not determine whether a man becomes a father or a woman a mother, for that is to place a fertilised egg above the status of full-fledged adults, effectively turning the man into a slave and the woman into a child-bearing unit with no autonomy over her body.

Europe should look at the US, where the abortion issue has become a tug-of-war between over-reaching secular law and a self-righteous brand of puritanism. The result is divisiveness, fanaticism, intimidation of women and the murder of doctors and nurses in fertility clinics. This is a disaster we do not need in Europe, and it comes from trying to over-regulate society.

It should be clear that abortion does not admit of legislation. It may not be regulated or ruled upon. Society's only contribution can be to allow it but not encourage it. Greece does indeed have a rate of abortion that is far too high. The problem should be addressed through education, not the law, and the decisions left to individuals.

The water wars

This editorial appeared in the Athens News in March 2001. 

MARK Twain once quipped that "whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting about". Our own word "rival" comes from the Latin rivalis, meaning "using the same brook".

In Athens, a water consumption and supply graph for the 1990s looks like a pair of crossed swords. Marathon, Yliki and Mornos, the three lakes that supply the city, held 1.2 billion tonnes in 1990. In 2001 they held just over half that amount - 700 million tonnes. Consumption is speeding up, too. In 2000 alone Athenians used up 385 million tonnes.

Certainly, consumption can be checked at relatively short notice. In 1992, a price hike, hose pipe ban and stiff fines for exceeding household quotas brought consumption down by more than a quarter within a year. Athenians flushed the toilet with laundry water but there was no real suffering.

The truly worrying part of the equation is supply. When it comes to water, our technology is not a day ahead of the Sumerians'. We depend entirely on rain.

Throughout the 1990's Athens' reservoirs received 400-800 million tonnes of rainwater a year. Global warming reduced that to an estimated 140 million tonnes in 2001, with some tens of millions of tonnes of that sacrificed to evaporation.

Even the diversion of the river Evinos, which started supplying 200 million tonnes a year in 2002, cannot cover the deficit. The water company's final option will be to pump groundwater, a disastrous resort in the long term.

If Athens' situation makes depressing reading, the outlook for the rest of Greece is lacrimal. Cities use little over 10 percent of Greece's water supply. A whopping 83 percent goes to agriculture. Greece's breadbasket, Thessaly, is emblematic of the general problem.

Spurred on by the Common Agricultural Policy's promise to buy anything they grew at set prices, throughout the 1980's and 1990's Thessaly farmers produced two or three crops a year by intensive irrigation farming. They equipped themselves with the so-called 'cannon', a high-pressure spout that sends water soaring, then sprinkling as artificial rain. They also dug thousands of illegal wells to avoid paying for the water they used.

Socialist governments, in power throughout the 1980s and from 1993 to 2004 largely thanks to the farmers' vote, avoided the political cost of clamping down on the wells. Criminally, they never helped farmers adopt better irrigation methods. The 'cannon' loses up to sixty percent of water to evaporation.

But it was a time of plenty. The European Union was paying. And people are never prudent on someone else's bill.

Today, Thessaly's aquifer is so depleted that farms several miles from the sea are pumping brine. Soon, the salt will render them desert, and many families will lose their livelihood. Even inland, farmers know time is running out. The Pinios river that runs through Larissa is reduced to a poisonous trickle of agricultural runoff during summer.

Shortage has led to further folly. The old socialist promise to farmers, one that Thessalians have had preached to them so often they hold it up as a sort of Testament, emerged as the diversion of the Acheloos river - Greece's last, great untapped supply of sweet water.

The brainchild of a Greek engineer educated in the Soviet Union, the scheme would divert more than 2 billion tonnes of water to Thessaly via a tunnel through the Pindos mountains. The European Union disqualified the project for funds on environmental grounds, and Greece began construction alone. Today the tunnel and dams remain half-complete, frozen by a lack of funds.

If completed, the project would help perpetuate, not wash away, the mistakes of the past. Thessalians, like all Greek farmers, need to concentrate on water conservation and better crop management.

Drip irrigation, consisting of a network of perforated tubes sitting on or just below the soil surface, is one of the most effective new irrigation technologies. Experiments in the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District in Texas found the system to be 37 percent more water-efficient than furrows. It is gradually being promoted in Greece, but too slowly and perhaps too late.

Farmers need to choose crops according to the suitability of their terrain. Thessalians insist on cotton, a cash crop that guzzles water and nutrients. Kruschev's disastrous 'cottonification' of Uzbekistan in the 1960's turned Asia's fruitbowl into a dustbowl. It did the same to the American South in the 1930's. Eventually, it will do the same to Thessaly.

In all these improvements to the ways in which we farm and use water, the European Union must take a lead. Greek governments have shown a weak character when environmental planning pits itself against the popular vote.

Realistically, however, people can be trusted to exploit all they can before beginning to conserve it. Schemes such as the Acheloos diversion are likely to proliferate.

According to myth, Herakles fought the Acheloos for the hand of Dianeira. She turned out to be a disastrous prize, killing the hero by accident. Subsequent wrestlers should take note.