Tomorrow begins voting for a new archbishop of Cyprus, the previous one, Chrysostomos II having died last month. The process is surprisingly democratic for a church which is in many ways extremely conservative. Referred to as universal suffrage and so it is, more or less. Registered Orthodox of all nationalities living in Cyprus for a year or longer, men and women, have a vote. True, this is the preliminary stage and the final decision is made by the Holy Synod, choosing from the three front runners in the people’s vote. Sort of the reverse of the way the British Conservative party chooses a leader, but that’s another story.
Info comes from Wikipedia. Not a surprising first source for basic info, and had actually only checked it to ascertain who was allowed to vote, but in this case it’s the provider of quite a lot of backroom gossip and even a little backbiting. So we learn that there are two main factions, pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian, mainly related to ecclesiastical and theological matters, but spilling over, understandably, into international politics. Accusations amongst the candidates of (financially) self-serving motives and pious denunciations of rivals engaging in electioneering before the previous archbishop was buried. Protestant is a common insult thrown at other contenders. And that’s without the truly bizarre, even allowing for possible losses in context or translation. For example am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that the sex reference below refers to legality of homosexuality or same sex marriage and not to pedophilia -
‘The Metropolitan of Morphou, meanwhile, is known for his many conspiratorial stances, claiming to find prophecies of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asterix [comics],[28][29] for example, or that anal sex leads to children becoming homosexuals.[30] He also supports the Russian invasion of Ukraine stating that "a war must be fought to purge the children of the devil".’