Meeting Between Venizelos and Archbishop Demetrios

On Monday, September 22, Archbishop Demetrios of America met with Evangelos Venizelos, Greece’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Topics of discussion included the issue of providing protection to the Christian population in conflict zones– especially in the volatile Middle East region – as well as matters relating to the Greek Diaspora.

After the meeting, Venizelos stated that Archbishop Demetrios shed light for him on the major activities of the Archdiocese, the parishes, and the dioceses. For his part, Venizelos was able to inform the Archbishop about his discussions during the ministerial week of the UN General Assembly.

“I spoke with him about my meeting with the UN Secretary General, my upcoming meeting with President Anastasiades, the latest developments in all national issues and of course about the major problems that are affecting the Christian communities of the Middle East and North Africa,” said Venizelos.

Archbishop Demetrios expressed his delight after the meeting, noting that it was a great honor to welcome Venizelos to the United States. “As always, we had the opportunity to exchange some thoughts and ideas, a substantial part of which was related to the Middle East,” he remarked. “The Middle East is an important topic today, which shows terrible problems and creates substance and existence dilemmas related to the future, on many cultural levels. We also had the opportunity to talk about the Greek Diaspora here, which is alive, vivacious, dynamic and progressive, as always.”

Finally, Demetrios stressed that “we also talked about Greece, which as we can see is slowly exiting this difficult international phase, because Greece wasn’t the only one. As we always said and will continue to say, a population that has a history of at least 6,000-7,000 years is not going to bend before any kind of difficulty or any form of complex problem.”