Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called on the Greek Orthodox Church on Tuesday to act boldly to put its house in order after being battered by a series of corruption scandals.
In a speech to the parliamentary group of his conservative New Democracy party, Karamanlis called for a "total clean-up" of the Church.
The spate of scandals, concerning corruption of judges by priests, which have shocked the faithful in this deeply religious country, has spread as far as the Greek Orthodox Church's present leader Archbishop Christodoulos.
He 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.
"We hail every effort by the Church to proceed with an internal clean-up, a clean-up which is obligatory if the prestige of the church is to be maintained. That is why compromise must be ruled out, in favour of bold decisions," Karamanlis said.
Church authorities have vowed to engage in a large-scale cleaning-up operation within the ranks of the clergy and have called on the faithful to blow the whistle on corrupt clergymen.
Last week police arrested a senior clergyman, Archimandrite Iakovos Giosakis, on his way to an examining magistrate in Piraeus near Athens to make a statement as part of an investigation into illegal antiques dealing.
According to media reports, Giosakis is alleged to have corrupted four law officers who have since been threatened with dismissal.
The Church's judicial body also took the highly unusual step last Friday of suspending a bishop from his duties for six months pending investigations into allegations that he solicited the support of a judge to block an objection to his clerical appointment.
The bishop appeared before his peers to deny the charge.
More than 97 percent of Greeks belong to the Greek Orthodox Church.