I admit, I had to look it up...Paroxysm is from Greek paroxusmos, from paroxunein, "to irritate, provoke or excite (literally to sharpen excessively)," from para-, "beyond" + oxunein, "to sharpen, to provoke."
As reported here by the Greek paper Ekathimerini:
Dismissing the United Nations blueprint for the reunification of Cyprus as a bid to “de-Hellenize” the island, the head of Greece’s Orthodox Church on Sunday urged an Athens congregation to engage in frenzied prayers against the peace deal.Speaking in the church of Aghios Andreas in Patissia, central Athens, Archbishop Christodoulos said that under UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s plan, “Cypriots will have to forget Greece, their language and their flag, in order to submit to the world’s potentates.”
Christodoulos called on believers to join in a “paroxysm of prayer” against adoption of the blueprint, arguing that “politicians are under pressure to accept a solution which, deep down, they do not want.”
This is an Archbishop who sees "the forces of evil at work" when public opposition was succesfully mounted against the building of a church conference centre and percieves of Turks as “barbarians” who had no place in a predominately Christian European Union.
Perhaps the Archbishop has a viable alternative to the Annan Plan which would secure consent from Turkish Cypriots and simultaniously maintain the hellenic identity of the island. If such an alternative exists we really ought to be told.
An observer writing in Politis offers his own thoughts on the Archbishop's comments by evoking his love for Greece but also being clear as to what the object of his affections are:
(A) Greece that knows where it stands and where it is going, and not the other Greece of the “rebels” who preach in churches and universities about the revolutions, in which they never participated. The Greece that, loyal to its greatness, chooses not to close its eyes in front of reality, but, on the contrary, to shape it in the most positive way. Because, what is Greece, Your Beatitude? Is it a closed room from which any patriot looks back (selectively) in the past so as to appear in the evening news? Or is it a continuous force that knows to identify even a foreign element, to study it, to absorb it so as to turn it into culture at the end of the day?
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