By Patroclos
HAVING heard the news about the excommunication of celebrity theologian and former MEP Andreas Pitsillides by a committee of five bishops, I was wondering what a person had to do in order for the beards to excommunicate them.
Do you fill an application form, listing your worst sins, examples of moral weakness and calculated misinterpretations of the Bible? Do you have to behave very inappropriately during a church service or would a sacrilegious article in a newspaper suffice? What do you have to say or do to become eligible?
Excommunication is as rare as an admission of fallibility by a Cypriot politician – it never happened – which suggests that our Church is much more liberal and tolerant than most people think. Perhaps we are witnessing a change of business model, now that our Church has fallen on hard times and is facing severe liquidity problems.
It might hope the fear of excommunication would bring more people back to church and persuade Christian bankers to be more flexible when negotiating the restructuring of its NPLs so as to avoid suffering Pitsillides’ humiliation.
THE BEARDS in black included a whole list of theoretical sins committed by Pitsillides to justify his excommunication such as “calculated misrepresentations, mocking references to the faith, customs and traditions and disrespectful attitude towards the Holy Synod.”
He was also accused of exhibiting “vanity and self-regard”, which nobody could dispute – he is a bit narcissistic – but what were his real sins? It seems a bit harsh to excommunicate someone for a mistaken interpretation of the scriptures when convicted murderers, rapists and paedophiles remain in the Church and compulsive liars remain in politics.
Pits also spoke contemptuously about issues such as abortion, confession, divine thanks and homosexuality, said the committee. Half the population of the country is guilty of expressing such sentiments so why have we not been excommunicated? I am considering filing an application to the ECHR against the Church for violating my right to equal treatment. It cannot just excommunicate celebrity theologians and pretend the rest of us do not exist – it is very unchristian.
THE EXCOMMUNICATION was also very stupid, because Pits is very articulate, has an innocent look and is good on TV. It will be a piece of cake for him to turn public opinion against the beards.
On Friday he was on the Sigma TV news alleging the committee had lied to him – taking him to the meeting on false pretences – denying him the right of reply and repeatedly accusing the unlikeable Bishop of Paphos of fascistic behaviour during the proceedings.
Pits may be vain, he may misrepresent the scriptures, mock customs and traditions, but he was not kicked out of the Church for lying. If that was an excommunication offence, our Archbishop would have been working as an estate agent in Paphos a long time ago.
ANYONE feeling disappointed with our Church should tune into Mega TV’s Star Kypros 2015 show tonight, just after 9pm and feast your eyes on scantily-clad, Cypriot bimbos taking part in a studio beauty contest.
This is pure entertainment for heterosexual males of all ages, even though I felt sorry for the two young women, in micro bikinis, standing in front of the cameras, anxiously waiting to be told which one would be excommunicated by the show. This was the first scene of the wonderfully sleazy show I saw.
I admit being a bit shocked that the Church station was showing so much naked flesh that was bound to cause very sinful thoughts among its male viewers, even if they were devout Christians.
The titillation was stepped up, as the nubile participants then had to parade in incredibly sexy underwear. Some wore suspenders and stockings, others lace body-suits and some just a bra and panties (the thong type, fully exposing their shapely posterior). Sadly, no sinful thoughts entered my mind watching this sleazy flesh-fest, because I kept thinking how many members of the Holy Synod were watching the Church station’s effort to lead us not into temptation.
THE ONLY disappointing aspect of the show was the patronising and condescending attitude of the ‘critics’ towards the girls. The critics would ask each girl an idiotic question to maintain some pretence that it was not just their legs, bums and sex appeal that was being judged but also their intellectual powers.
It seems cruel and sadistic to expect these girls to display intelligence when everyone, apart from the judges it seems, knows they are on the show because they have not been blessed with great amounts of it. I am sounding as condescending as the judges now, but Star Kypros is a beauty contest so what is the point of testing the intelligence of the participants by asking dumb questions like, ‘what would you do if you were president for a day?’ and then haughtily telling them their opinion was unsatisfactory.
To the contestant that said, as president, she would fill planes with tourists and build hotels and clubs in a day, the self-important, female judge said: “I think we have much bigger problems than tourism.” Says who? Some sad loser who has nothing better to do than be a judge on a beauty contest?
IS THERE any other country in the world which takes a speech given by its head of state to the world talking shop that is the UN General Assembly as seriously as we do in Kyproulla? Although I have not conducted a survey of the UN member countries, I suspect there is not.
What makes our case one of the basket type variety is that our president has addressed the UN General Assembly every September for the last 41 years, saying more or less the same things every year – the only variation being the intensity of the attack on Turkey’s intransigence, depending on who is president – and our politicians and journalists still get excited about it.
That anyone could get worked up about meaningless speeches of zero consequence they have heard thousands of times before must be a reflection of the sad, empty and dull lives we lead on the sunshine isle. Sadder still was that the media tried to get people excited about this non-event in advance, solemnly forecasting that Prez Nik would be setting three ‘red lines’ in his speech, as if the red lines were a new concept in the Cyprob discourse.
The worst was still ahead. On Wednesday, the day after Nik sent the world to sleep, despite the excitingly original reference to the red lines, the opposition leaders attacked him mercilessly for his ‘tragic’ speech. I will not bore people by repeating their childish criticism here, because I think nobody apart from politicians and hacks gives a damn. If you do, my advice is, get a life or watch Star Kypros tonight, because the contestants will be asked what they thought about Nik’s UN speech.
LAWYERS representing the administrator of Laiki Bank submitted a compensation claim worth billions against the Greek government at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington on Wednesday, the deadline for such applications.
According to reports, the claimant is demanding compensation in the region of €4 billion from the Greek state because of the haircut of the government bonds (Laiki held bonds worth €2.8 billion) and the unfair treatment of its branches in Greece. A foreign law firm is handling the case.
Many in Cyprus would be rooting for Legacy Laiki, given the billions our banking system lost because of the Greek economic meltdown, but if it wins where would the Greek government find the billions to compensate it? Would Mrs Merkel be asked to pick up the bill?
SPEAKING of banks, as we had predicted two weeks ago, the attorney-general’s opinion about the dispute over managerial appointments at Hellenic Bank was a disaster for the union ETYK which had insisted it should have say.
The AG opined that the union violated the constitution by interfering in an employment agreement reached between the bank and an applicant for the job. ETYK has avoided commenting on the opinion, but accepted defeat and in its meeting with the bank’s top brass on Wednesday was ready to discuss a face-saving solution.
Hellenic’s head honchos offered a face-saving compromise – drafting a job description for any managerial vacancy and advertising it internally as well – which the union seized even though it would no longer have a say in the process. Hellenic even offered to make the deal public on Wednesday, as an honourable compromise.
ETYK’s representatives turned down this offer. They said they wanted to have another five or six meetings with the bank’s head honchos before the deal was announced. Presumably, this is so they could tell their members that they secured the deal after weeks of tough negotiations. So Hellenic’s head honchos have to keep their Wednesday mornings free for the next six week to take part in the union’s theatre.
THE POLICE last week returned the hard-drives it had confiscated from the office of the Central Bank Governor last May. The hard-drives were taken as part of the police investigation into the leaking of the list of deputies’ NPLs, after a complaint from loud-mouthed deputy Zacharias Koulias, claiming this was a violation of the protection of personal data.
Despite holding on to the hard-disks for exactly four months (an ECB official had to be present when the disks were checked because they contained classified information) police found nothing incriminating against Crystal. She was not the source of the leak. However the cops said their investigations into the leak would continue. It is not only the union bosses that like to engage in a bit of theatre.
THESE Akelites really have a nerve disparaging the government over high unemployment, considering it soared to its highest ever levels under the incompetent rule of comrade Tof.
The comrades laughed at the government for gloating over a one percentage point fall in the jobless rate in the second quarter of the year.
A columnist in the AKEL mouthpiece Haravghi cited Karl Marx, the “German philosopher of the 19th century who said that capitalism without high unemployment cannot exist.” The funny thing is that unemployment in Kyproulla was just 4 per cent when we elected our first communist president and when he left office, five years later, it was 15 per cent.
On a more philosophical point, why is AKEL constantly demanding that the government takes measures to reduce unemployment when it knows that “capitalism without high unemployment cannot exist”? Have the younger comrades not read Marx?
Premier perks from a very bad bank
Today our establishment is inaugurating a new feature – a guest column. This week’s guest writer is M.E.
WILL someone please tell me who was responsible for the Bank of Cyprus’ new ad and marketing campaign?
I am not sure if I want to smack them or take them out for coffee… and then smack them.
On the one hand the ads are not half bad, but (and it’s a big but) on the other they seem to have forgotten which bank they’re representing.
Let me remind this genius (or group of genii?) that it’s the bank that took people’s savings and then proceeded to hire a company of arrogant morons, whose only job is to hold a long list and call unsuspecting customers and very rudely ask them when they intend to pay their loans… and threaten them with a transfer to the ‘bad bank’ if they did not (to which a friend replied: but YOU are a very bad bank.)
It’s the same bank that froze people’s accounts and wouldn’t let anyone take what was left of their money because the whole economy would have collapsed if they did.
It’s the same bank that conned people into converting their hard-earned money into bonds which turned out to be worthless…
That bank is now trying to give people (me, for one) heart attacks by paying for spots on TV showing a man threatened by a loan shark (resembling The Godfather) who is then rescued by – yes – the BoC’s quick pay scheme. Seriously.
The second (of many) heart attack inducing moments, again courtesy of the BoC Marketing Department, came in the form of a beautiful envelope which an unsuspecting elderly relative (and survivor of the haircut) opened, only to find that they were a member of the BoC’s Premier Club. This is the bank’s scheme for customers it robbed blind but – wait for it – wanted to show its appreciation of by giving them free tickets to the Paphos opera.
Yes. Thank you. We stole your savings but please travel for an hour-and-a-half to Paphos and watch Cinderella. And while you’re at it, use our beautiful envelope to cut yourself and pour some lemon juice on the wound.
Send to Kindle
The post Tales from the Coffeeshop: Souls not sex concern the bearded men in black appeared first on Cyprus Mail.