ATHENS, Feb 13 (AFP) - A majority of Greeks now favour a separation of church and state after a series of corruption scandals which have engulfed the Greek Orthodox church, according to two opinion polls published Sunday.
Six out of ten Greeks (64.7 percent) are in favour of such a separation while 29.6 percent said they were against and 5.7 percent did not respond, according a poll by the Kapa Research institute on February 10 from a sample of 1,250 people and published in the daily newspaper Te Vima.
A second poll found 48 percent in favour of a separation of church and state with 35 percent against, two percent undecided and 15 percent who did not respond.
It was conducted by the Institute VPRC from a sample of 604 people and published in the newspaper Eleftherotypia.
The polls represent a major increase in public opinion in favour of a separation of church and state from the 36 percent of people who held this view in 2000 when the church was running a strong campaign to keep religion on identity cards, Eleftherotypia said.
The Greek Orthodox Church, joined to the state by the constitution, enjoys a major influence in the country where 97 percent of the population are Orthodox.
The church's image has taken a battering in recent months with a spate of scandals concerning corruption of judges by priests, spreading as far as the Greek Orthodox Church's present leader Archbishop Christodoulos.
Christodoulos is under fire for writing a letter in 1996 appealing to a judge to support a request for a drug trafficker to be released from custody.
The scandals reached the point where the Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, whose conservative New Democracy party enjoys the support of senior clergy, called on the church to put its house in order.
In a speech on February 8 to the parliamentary group of his party Karamanlis called for a "total clean-up" of the Orthodox Church.
02/13/2005 16:45 GMT - AFP