A/51/542/Add.1 English Page 15 59. Posters are occasionally put up on the facades of Catholic churches by extremist Orthodox organizations. These posters include such forms of wording as: "Zionism, Papism, Turkey, Free Masonry make war on martyred Serbia. Greece alone offers resistance and sympathizes with the struggling Serbs"; "Communism is vanishing in the Orthodox States, in eastern Europe, the Vampire of Rome (the Pope) is preparing to gorge himself". 60. Religious objects are sometimes the targets of vandalism. For example, the statue of Christ in the courtyard of the Cathedral of St. Denis in Athens was decapitated in February 1996. 61. On the subject of religious education within the school system, the private schools of the Catholic Church (12 Catholic schools with some 10,000 pupils, mainly of the Orthodox faith, and fewer than 1,000 Catholic pupils) teach the Catholic religion to pupils of that faith. In the State schools in the islands of Siros and Tinos, where 85 per cent of Greek Catholics live, Catholic teaching is also provided by priests or lay people. Problems are said to arise sometimes in connection with the creation of posts for Catholic teachers. 62. Foreign religious personnel who do not come from the European Union reportedly also occasionally encounter obstacles in connection with entry visas and the renewal of residence permits. 63. Except for the problems referred to above, the situation of the Catholic Church in the religious sphere is said to be satisfactory, in particular with respect to their religious publications and processions. (ii) Education 64. According to the representatives of the Catholic Church, a Greek Orthodox education, focusing exclusively on the Orthodox religion and the Greek nation, has in fact come into existence to the detriment of the religious minorities. For that reason, it has come to be generally believed that only Orthodox Christians are truly Greek. Thus the Catholic Church and its spiritual head, the Pope, are allegedly portrayed in a negative light in school textbooks, particularly history books. Those textbooks are seen as being, as it were, permeated by Orthodox thinking. Nevertheless, according to non-governmental observers, appreciable progress has recently been made, in particular through the publication of textbooks on the history of religions and their philosophy which incorporate fairly satisfactory chapters on non-Orthodox religions. (iii) Employment 65. According to information from non-governmental sources, Greeks of the Catholic faith are not, in practice, accepted for careers in the army, the police and other sensitive areas of the administration, including diplomacy. Some Catholics reportedly conceal their faith in order to have access to such posts. 66. The Ministry of the Interior, Administration and Decentralization stated that entry to the administration was subject, inter alia, to the requirement of Greek citizenship and not to a religious criterion. The Ministry specified that /...