domination of an uninhibitedly intolerant, nationalist and divisive speech during a whole decade was the actual turning point in the public presence of the Church. 4/ AT THE MEDIA FOREFRONT: THE ULTRA-RIGHT REBAPTIZATION (1998-2008) In 1998, Bishop of Dimitrias Christodoulos was elected Archbishop of Athens. The turn was immediate and obvious: silence and reticence gave place to secular extroversion. It has already been mentioned that during the Colonels’ Junta Christodoulos had been the secretary of the Holy Synod, and he became a bishop just a few days before the fall of the regime. Yet his relation with ultra-right circles did not end there. Before he was elected archbishop, he had been writing articles for the ultra-right newspaper Eletheros Kosmos and had close relations with the pro-junta newspaper Stochos, which kept praising and defending him ater he was elected to the archbishop’s oice. In fact, before his election, in 1997, Christodoulos and 45 other bishops took part in a conference of Stochos in Lidoriki. Christodoulos concluded his speech there by saying that resistance is needed, “resistance to all evil, all that is not Christian, not Orthodox, not Greek”, while he congratulated the paper’s publisher for his initiative and described him as “Hellenocentric” and “of a Hellenic soul’ (Vassilakis 2006: 79-80). Even ater his election, and despite the fact that, in some cases, his speech became less rough around the edges, he could not avoid revealing his old sympathies. In 2001, when he received the book of one of the ringleaders of the junta, S. Pattakos, Christodoulos replied to him in a personal letter in a particularly warm and heartfelt tone, talking about his genuine patriotic morale and his distinguished attributes and virtues, which had made history (Vassilakis 2006: 65). In every opportunity, Christodoulos constantly referred to the nation and its need for protection, in the “New Age” and in the “new globalized order”, against globalization, the West, the nation-nihilists, the phoney intellectuals, and a lot of other enemies. The peak of these attacks was the period of strain with the State on the issue of whether religion would be indicated on identity cards, when the Church organized two big protests in Athens and Thessaloniki and started collecting signatures in order to revoke the government’s decision. Α consequence of the Church’s clash with the government on the identities issue was also the informal support provided by the archbishop and the Church to the leader of the far-right political party LAOS, G. Karatzaferis, as a candidate for the Athens super-prefecture in the 2002 local election. This happened because New Democracy had supported Y. Tzanetakos, who was against the indication of religion and came from the let. In fact, when asked about it, Christodoulos replied that those who voted for Karatzaferis were not ultra-right supporters, just good Christians who reacted to Tzanetakos.123 123. See http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%93%CE%B5%CF%8E%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%B9 %CE%BF%CF%82_%CE%9A%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B6%CE%B1%C F%86%CE%AD%CF%81%CE%B7%CF%82. MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 85