N.Z. missionary sentenced to jail

Press, 26 December 1984, Page 5

N.Z. missionary sentenced to jail

NZPA-AP Athens A New Zealander was one of three Protestant missionaries sentenced in Athens to 3Vz years jail for proselytising (trying to convert). The men said they had only befriended a lonely Greek teenager and talked about their faith. Don Stephens, aged 39, of Los Angeles, and Alan Williams, aged 51, a British and New Zealand citizen who lived in Mangere until 1979, both employees of the interdenominational organisation, Youth with a Mission, appealed against the sentences issued on Sunday jnd were freed pending a hearing in a higher court. A Greek, Constantine Makris, aged 45, the president of the Hellenic Missionary Union, was also released pending the appeal hearing. “This is a horrifying thing at Christmas... why is Greece the only

western European country that doesn't give freedom of religion?” Mr Stephens said. The hearing in a packed Athens courtroom ended early on Sunday after 15 hours of bitter theological argument between the three judges, witnesses and lawyers. The three missionaries were accused of seizing and proselytising Constantine Kotopoulos, aged 16, a high school student from Megara, an industrial town near Athens, in late 1981. All but about 2 per cent of Greeks are members of the Eastern Orthodox faith, the country’s official religion under the 1975 Constitution. Youth with a Mission, an American-based group with offices in 65 countries, runs famine relief and medical missions in disaster-hit regions around the world. Constantine Kotopoulos told the court he - ap-

proached the group of his own accord while they were in Greece supervising the conversion of an 11,500tonne passenger liner into a relief ship at shipyards near Megara. “I got to know the missionaries and their families so I could improve my English. Then they told me about their faith and I discovered something that became very important to me,” he said. The missionaries denied that they had tried to persuade the boy to give up his Greek Orthodox faith. “We met a lonely, hurting boy from a broken home. We can’t say we didn’t talk about God, but everyone must choose his own faith,” Mr Stephens said. He said the group had asked the boy to stay away from the ship and to stop visiting the bungalow resort where the missionaries lived after the boy’s mother. Katerina Douka, objected.