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ATHENS (Reuters) - About a dozen Greek women violated a 1,000-year ban on the male-only monastic community of Mount Athos on Tuesday during a protest over disputed land, one of the demonstrators said on Wednesday..........

Read the remainder of the article here

The Holy Mountain is invaded [uk.reuters.com]

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There have been other females who trespassed, one was French reporter who wrote about it. The screening process to enter was pretty crude, having entrants line up and urinate to prove they were males. This woman used something like people use to fake drug tests to fake urinating as a male.

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Originally Posted by bergschlawiner
There have been other females who trespassed, one was French reporter who wrote about it. The screening process to enter was pretty crude, having entrants line up and urinate to prove they were males. This woman used something like people use to fake drug tests to fake urinating as a male.

eek sick!!!!


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As a woman I am very offended that these women have done this. Feminist women can't take the fact that they are not allowed there or any other place for that matter. When I visit my monk friends I don't go into the cloister. You don't see me mad about it. I am confident as a woman so I don't feel the need to go to monastery that doesn't want me there! This is about the Church not ordaining women I am sure of it. Feminist women think the Church looks at them as second class or something stupid like that. Grow up!

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They perceive a glass ceiling, but it's not sex discrimination. The injustice they claim which has been imposed on women for 1,000 years compleatly ridiclious. They have no natural right to join in with monks, they have no right to live with the monks, and they cannot unsex themselves.

Next feminists will be streaking at the Vatican.

Terry

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They may have already done it! crazy

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Good heavens what is the world comming to?
Stephanos I

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Originally Posted by Stephanos I
Good heavens what is the world comming to?
Stephanos I

Fr.:

Upside down!?

Amado

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If you read the story, you'd see the women stepped over the boundary fence to symbolically enter Mount Athos and break the ban. Their purpose was not to challenge the ban on women but to draw attention to their claims on lands on the Halkidiki peninsula. The women say the land is owned by local villages, the monks say they own the land. It's a land dispute. I never got the impression that the women wanted to really enter Athos.

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It has become immoral to be moral. Do these harpies seriously think that anyone at all is entitled to go anywhere at all? Is locking one's door at night somehow offensive? Has no one a right to privacy?

The monks are doing no one any conceivable harm. Neither are, e.g., the nuns at Kalymata - but I've heard nothing of men staging any sort of demonstration "protesting" their exclusion from the cloister of monasteries of women.

If some villages have a serious claim on bits of land now regarded as part of the Holy Mountain, Greece has courts which are competent to adjudicate such a dispute. I somehow suspect that the villagers would not be pleased if, say, 600 monks began staging demonstrations inside the private homes of the villagers at 3 AM on days randomly chosen by the monks (without, of course, even informing the villagers).

Fr. Serge

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It's a Greek thing. Unlike Native Americans who could not understand the concept of "land/earth" belonging to one or another person/family, for Greeks the land is the co-creator of the family. The earth that feeds you also holds the remains of the ancestors (it also has 'value' in terms of money).

If boundary land was at one time the patrimony of a village or a family, it doesn't matter if the monks 'got it' - it belongs to the village or the family.

Interestingly enough, in Greek law, the land is held by the family; if a woman marries, the pieces of the land that would be hers as an inheritance do NOT pass to her husband upon her death, but rather are given to her children. This avoids the 'marriage for gain' thing.

As for Athos, while the historical perspective is that the monastic area has been consecrated to monastic usage - sort of like a 'gated community', the idea that a woman's footfall or presence somehow 'desecrates' the land seems rather adolescent - sort of like the 6 year-old's "don't let the peas touch the mashed potatoes".

If a monk's consecration to celibacy and to chastity is so threatened by the mere physical presence of a female Greek Christian, there are some serious issues that need to be dealt with. This is not really Christian virtue, it's paranoia.

St. Benedict is going to pull a 0.38 on St. Scholastica (his sister) if she shows up on the monastery door step? St. Clare gets it between the eyes if she shows up at the Assisi garden of Francis' friary? St. Helen, discoverer of the True Cross and mother of St. Constantine, gets stoned by the monks of St. Catherine's monastery if she wanders into the neighborhood on Sinai?

Give me a break! "Male and female He created them" - we're all part of God's creation and the Lord Jesus made it real clear - "love one another". Trying to avoid temptation is fine, but it's an interior and spiritual struggle and a dedication to working for the kingdom unrestricted by a marriage bond, that is the essence of a religious/monastic vocation, and problems should be resolved with prayer. If one is so totally blown away by the presence of the opposite gender, then perhaps one's vocation lies elsewhere.

I am reminded of a nun colleague of mine whose 'congregational virtue', mandated by the Mother Foundress, required the sisters to never eat in the presence of 'externs'. So at her father's funeral, when dinner had been prepared, she had to take her meal into a closed kitchen to eat alone while the rest of the family ate in the dining room. Is there some virtue here? Or is it just a psychological quirk of the foundress that got 'sanctified' into the Holy Rule? Is the absolute exclusion of women or men from the area around a religious house a virtue in itself? (I'm not talking about 'externs' wandering about inside a cloister.) Or is it just a quirk that has become 'sanctified'?

My condo complex has a huge number of Moslem residents. We had a fire in the South building and the Resident Management and the firefighters were appalled by the number of Moslem women who did not evacuate because there were no male family members present to accompany them in the evacuation. (Saudi Arabs). Is it more 'holy' to get burned to death in a fire or die of smoke-inhalation than to leave your unit unaccompanied? When the building is on fire, the alarm bells are raging and there's smoke through all the hallways, if some imam or religious policeman thinks that some male is looking at some portly, veiled, senior citizen lady 'with lust', then they're nuts. Rational people want OUT!

(I won't even mention the Indonesian girls who were forced back into a burning school by the religious police because they didn't have their headscarves on, and who ultimately died in the flames.)

Christians are supposed to be characterized by love and a willingness to sacrifice one's own life for the sake of one's neighbor. St. Paul spoke of the "wonder of the freedom of the Children of God" who are freed from 'laws' in order to do whatever is best for one's neighbor - a scary proposition for traditional Jews of His time. The love that the Father shows for us by keeping us alive and living is the model that we must show for our neighbors -- Christ said so.

Again the Scripture: "Behold these Christians, see how they love one another!"

And if we do anything less, whether to men or women, to old or young, to the sick or the hale and hearty, to fellow Christians or to those who would persecute us, we dishonor the Christ who willingly bore the humiliation and pain of His condemnation and heinous death upon the Cross. To tell a man/woman the he/she is violating God's law by their mere presence near me 'on my land' isn't 'holiness', it's arrogance. Normal - real Greeks - would do the traditional offering of a glass of fresh, cold water and a spoonful of fruit preserves as a sign of Christian Orthodox welcome.

We can do no less than what the Lord commands if we still try to claim the name: Christ-ian.

Blessings and forebearance! And get out there and scare the living daylights out of 'them' by how kind and loving we can be.

Dr John -
still worried about "the awesome Judgement Seat of Christ"

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The Holy Mountain is the Garden of the Mother of God, and She is the only woman to have access to it for 1000 years. The very soil is dedicated to her, and there isn't so much as a female cat or even a chicken on the mountain.

Very few things can get me to the point where I can become uncharitable, but those who can refer to the Holy Monks of Athos as "paranoid" can easily push my buttons to do so.

So Dr John, "Give me a break". Learn something about the Holy Mountain of the Theotokos before rushing to diagnose paranoia on the part of the monks, lest others rush with a retort diagnosis of ignorance on your behalf.

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Is shameful and disobedient what did those women. Disobedience is the key for hell.

Quote
The Holy Mountain is the Garden of the Mother of God, and She is the only woman to have access to it for 1000 years.

Panagia Theotoke, soson imas!

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Quote;
(She is the only woman to have access to it for 1000 years. The very soil is dedicated to her, and there isn't so much as a female cat or even a chicken on the mountain.) What's up with this?
I guess all females with the exception of the Blessed Mother have the koodies? eek
crazy
(Is shameful and disobedient what did those women. Disobedience is the key for hell).?
ahhh. Lighten up. The article seems to point to the women wanting the land back, and could care less about the monks who live there.
I also think its hilarious
laugh

Deanna

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I'm glad that you find this hilarious. Some of us do not. Women are not permitted on the Holy Mountain for the very same reason that they are not permitted in the Altar. Just another example of the ignorant and malicious attempting to defile one of the last holy places on earth.

And please don't tell us to lighten up. How about showing some respect for that which is dedicated to the Mother of God?

Alexandr

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