The daily lives of billions of people around the world have been severely affected by the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak, what scientists are now calling a global pandemic. As in previous times of dire distress, the faithful have turned to prayer to the Almighty, for comfort and salvation from this menace.
On Tuesday evening, at precisely 10 p.m. local time, hierarchs, clerics, monks and Athonite Fathers in Greece joined their prayers with thousands of faithful, for a quarter of an hour, for delivery from the pandemic.
The Orthodoxia news agency and the online magazine Pemptousia have echoed the plea by the Holy Synod of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Greece for the 15-minute prayer intercession to be repeated each evening from 10 p.m. to 10.15 p.m. Athens time, or 20.00 to 20.15 GMT.
At the same time, some Orthodox clerics in Metropolises around the east Mediterranean country are holding Church services without the presence of worshippers, a development that is still in strict compliance with a decision by the Greek government, announced on Monday evening, to suspend public services of all religious faiths and denominations in the country until March 30.
The faithful are invited to follow Church services broadcast on television and radio, and transmitted over the Internet.
The wording of the joint ministerial decision, which was published in the Greek government gazette on Tuesday, notes that “…the holding of a religious service for the sole purpose of its national or regional broadcast by television or radio is allowed, with the presence of only the absolutely necessary personnel of the medium”.
Public broadcast of services
The Orthodoxia news agency contacted the Archdiocese of Athens on Wednesday, with an Archdiocese spokesman saying that Greece’s state television network, ERT, will broadcast the Salutations, or chairetismoi, afternoon services, live, during the ongoing Great Lent period.
The Orthodoxia news agency will transmit ecclesiastical services from the Metropolis of Piraeus’ Holy Trinity Cathedral on a daily basis.