The Holy Community of Mount Athos on Thursday expressed its strong reaction to a Tweet posted last week by Prof. Elias Mossialos and deemed sacrilegious by many faithful and Church hierarchs.
In a strongly worded statement, the Holy Community of the semi-autonomous monastic polity in northern Greece underlined that the Tweet by Prof. Mossialos, the deputy head of LSE’s department of health policy, is a direct affront to the Sacrament of the Divine Incarnation of the Son of God.
The impertinent social media quip by Mossialos generated a firestorm of criticism, given that he also serves as the Greek government’s representative to international organizations dealing with the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
“…we believe that amid an era when particular emphasis is ascribed to the protection of religious freedom, and, in fact, for religious minority groups, it is impudent and unacceptable to use the pandemic as an excuse to savagely and publicly insult the faith of the Orthodox Christian Greek people, the great majority of the population of our country, as well as the faith of millions of Orthodox believers and of Christianity around the world, during a time when we invoke the protection of our Most-Holy Mother, the Theotokos, amidst an escalation of a terrible pandemic.”
