Greece’s Archbishop Ieronymos is adamant that said that the Church cannot remain indifferent to the ‘Macedonia’ name dispute.
“It is a national issue that cannot leave the Church of Greece indifferent,” Ieronymos told the Board of the Holy Synod that was summoned last night (local time) with the participation of four Bishops from Northern Greece, all opposing to the inclusion of any term that related to the ‘Macedonia’ name in the new FYROM title.
The Church of Greece rejects the term ‘Macedonia’ inclusion in the new name of the Former Yugoslavic Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) referring to pre-existing decisions of the hierarchy of the Church of Greece (i.e. Macedonian Archbishopric of Ohrid) while stressing the area’s ethnological history.
The Churches stance has since 1992 been that FYROM is “appropriating and claiming what it does not own, that is, the Greek name of Macedonia, and thus injuring the Greek dignity and the historic reality.”
“We are uncompromising to the word Macedonia,” the Holy Synod unanimously stated on Wednesday. “The issue touches us, we follow it with agony and emotion. It is not only national and political, it is also ecclesiastical,” Archbishop Ieronymos stressed.