Thessaloniki’s Mayor Yiannis Boutaris, during a reception hosted by the city for 8th Academic Meeting Dialogue between Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, said that, “I don’t go to church, but I deeply believe in God” without elaborating on the reason.
He even confided that through some extremely difficult time of his life that he and his wife, who was ill, began to read the Bible. She died six years ago from an incurable disease. He said that in Thessaloniki and in crisis-stricken Greece the ecumenical vision which puts the protection of the weak first collides with the racist attitude that goes after the weak.
Metropolitan Emmanuel of France highlighted that feature of the meeting, held for the first time back in 1977, is “the willingness to listen to each other’s voice in times of agreement and disagreement,” and stressed that the Orthodox spirit was opposed to racism, anti-Semitism and injustice, a thinly-veiled swipe at the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.
The dialogue was organized by the Office of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for Inter-religious and Intercultural Issues as well as the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Dialogue and was to finish on June 6.
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