TONIGHT’S EASTER service should be one of the few times in the year that village churches islandwide are packed to overflowing, but instead some churches will stand empty.
And no, it’s not dwindling congregations that will cause some villages to remain eerily quiet tonight but falling numbers of priests.
Residents are often forced to travel to neighbouring villages to attend church while other villages are sharing priests and have to wait until he has finished a service in one community before he comes to conduct one in theirs.
The problem is more acute in the Paphos district, and the bishopric there has been forced to try and make up for the shortfall by employing priests from abroad.
“We do have shortages of priests in Paphos and it becomes even clearer when festive seasons are approaching,” a spokesman for the bishopric told the Cyprus Mail.
He said the bishopric is doing its best, “but there aren’t enough priests anymore. Unfortunately, people are pulling back from the church.”
Bishop of Paphos Georgios explained that there were currently five or six villages that were without a priest in his district. “For the Easter season, the residents will either be transferred to another village, or a priest will be sent to carry out a second service,” he said.
The bishopric has looked abroad for answers and brought in Orthodox priests from eastern Europe and the Middle East.
“We now have three priests from Romania and two Arabs,” said the Bishop. “But this is a solution out of need; they can preach the sermon but they are not Greek. To teach Greek Orthodox Christianity you should ideally be Greek, because we have a double role as clerics: the national and the religious. A foreigner will be orthodox Christian, will do whatever it takes to teach our faith, but he won’t be able to teach our Hellenism.”
The bishop said he hadn’t really noticed a reduction in numbers choosing to study theology compared to a decade ago and pointed out that there are actually more theological schools operating now. “So I’m hopeful that we could actually start seeing an increase in priests soon,” he said.
But the secretary of the Archbishopric’s Apostolos Varnavas Priest School, Ioannis Koutsos, is less sanguine.
“We have a problem with this issue islandwide,” Koutsos explained. “If you take into consideration that there are over 800 churches and we are educating 30 pupils, you understand how asphyxiating the needs are. We are like a drop in the ocean.”
And the fact that there are more theology schools to choose from doesn’t necessarily mean there will be an increase number of priests, he pointed out.
“It is not just a matter of increasing the numbers [of students], but finding the suitable people,” Koutsos explained. “Just because someone has studied theology doesn’t necessarily mean he can become a priest. You can’t just look at it academically. He would need to have a clean criminal record, not have been with a woman and a series of other ethical matters.
“A priest goes through a sieve before being considered suitable for the role. There are very strict regulations.”
Goudi near Polis is one village that knows what it means for its faithful to worship without a resident priest. When their elderly village priest died a few years ago, there was no one to replace him and villagers forced to go back and forth to other villages to attend church. It was particularly hard on the elderly women who make up the bulk of regular churchgoers in any village.
Then a couple of years ago, Goudi’s mukhtar – Savvas Christofi – put pressure on the Bishopric to bring a priest from Romania. Christofi admits there were reservations from some villagers at first, but the priest has now been accepted by villagers.
According to Christofi, the priest is now an active part of the community, which funds his rent and even provides him with fresh fruit and vegetables.
“I asked for him personally,” said Christofi. “When our priest died, I demanded another priest and we were sent a Romanian. At first he couldn’t speak Greek and it was difficult to understand him, but now we all get on great; he delivers a great sermon.”
Christofi admitted it wasn’t easy at first though. “But I hired a private teacher and paid for him to get private lessons, which improved his Greek dramatically.”
He added: “There are problems with finding priests now. People are no longer interested in the church. We are very lucky to have our priest; he’s a very nice man.”
Theology student sticks to academia
Christos Agathocleous is an ecclesiastical history graduate, currently finishing off his post-grad degree at the Aristotelian University of Thessalonica.
For Agathocleous, the choice to follow theology was directly related to his rejection of society’s current lack of values.
He believes that the falling numbers of priests is due to the growing chasm between materialistic and spiritual values. “It is a result of the psychological crisis that affects the Cypriot and the different, materialistic approach the world takes nowadays; the lack of originality, confused spirituality that is projected by the media,” he said.
But while saddened by society’s loosening ties with religion he does not, at the moment at least, intend to become a priest.
“The choice to become a priest is a pastoral choice, a decision the same as whether to marry,” said Agathocleous. “I personally belong to the academic theology sector.”
