INTENTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

Visit of the Russian Patriarch to the Serbian Orthodox Church

AIM, Belgrade, May 20, 1994

The canon visit of the Moscow and Whole of Russia Patriarch, Alexei II, paid to the Serbian Orthodox Church was announced as a reconciling mission to the peoples at war on the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A meeting of the Serbian Patriarch Pavle, Zagreb Archbishop, Franjo Kuharic, and Reis-ul-Ulema, Mustapha Ceric, was planned to be held in Sarajevo. After Ceric conditioned his coming to the meeting by a declaration of Patriarch Pavle that he condemned destruction of mosques in Bosnia, the Serbian Orthodox Church sent a message to the public that the Patriarch had condemned destruction of temples of all creeds. Reis-ul-Ulema, nevertheless, refused to meet the Russian and the Serbian Patriarch.

The Russian Orthodox Church, more than the Serbian, strives to maintain good relations with the Islam. In that sense, commentators who claim that Reis-ul-Ulema, Mustafa Ceric, could not have had a more suitable interlocutor among the Orthodox clergy than the Russian Patriarch are quite right. Following his intolerance, though, he rejected such a possibility, probably to his own misadvantage.

Cardinal Kuharic came to Sarajevo, as could be expected. The visit of the Russian Patriarch to Sarajevo is linked to the possibility that next year Pope John II could meet with the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartolomew next year in Sarajevo. The Russian Patriarch himself, it appears, tried to show an ecumenical and peaceful initiative and parry in that sense to the Vatican. A kind of heavenly rivalry is, therefore, evidently, going on down in the land burnt down by war.

The Russian Orthodox Church resents the Roman Catholic Church for quite some time for using difficulties the Orthodoxy encountered in the communistic regime and even after its collapse, and, contrary to ecumenical principles, for treating Russian land as terra missionis. Two years ago, all the Orthodox churches offered support to the Russian Orthodox Church in a sharp message sent to the Vatican. A Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Irinej Bulovic, wrote at the time that the relations between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches were at their lowest point since the Middle Ages. Ecumenism which had for several years been the favourite subject on both sides was questioned. The meeting of the Russian Patriarch with a prelate of the Roman Catholic Church could affect the relations between the Eastern and the Western Church.

One of the messages sent by the two Orthodox Patriarchs and one Catholic Cardinal said that they did not consider the undergoing war a religious war and that they were not its background. Will this gesture, however, have any influence on stopping of the war in the Balkans, if anything can affect the course of the events at all? Twenty eight months ago, on Christmans 1992 in the Cathedral of St. Trinity in Banjaluka, pilates of the three religions (Banjaluka Orthodox Bishop Jefrem, Banjaluka Catholic Bishop, Franjo Komarica, and Banjaluka Mufti, Ibrahim Hadzihalilovic) made a prayer for peace together, and similar happened in several other B&H towns. At the time, almost a year after the war in Croatia, it seemed to be a voice of hope that the passions would be pacified.

Two months later, Bosnia was in flames, as well as the whole of Herzegovina, and this flame, having devoured hundreds of thousand human lives, scores of cities, still burns. In the same city of Banjaluka where the joint prayer for peace had taken place on the eve of the war, a mosque which was a world historical monument of the first order, was destroyed although it was not in the zone of war at all.

In december 1998, Radovan Samardzija, Secretary of the Federal Government Commission for Relations with Religious Communities at the time, who was one of the connoisseurs of the circumstances in the Churches on the territory of Yugoslavia, assessed that both the Orthodox and the Catholic Church stressed national programs and approached in that sense the attitudes of the national state political structures. Logical political differences were mitigated for the benefit of national homogeneity. In the meantime, communist and anti-communist structures changed their ideological attires. In Serbia, for instance, Orthodoxy became alsmost state ideology, and one could hardly say that the other regimes in former Yugoslav space were completely lay. All the three clergies grew very close to their relevant national state institutions. Ever since September 1988 when Bishop Amfilohije Radovic received with the traditional welcoming bread and salt in his Bishopry in Vrsac a group of Serbs and Montenegrins who were the advance guard of the nationalistic mass movement, the so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution", during the entire autumn 1988 and winter 1989, church dignitaries of the Serbian Orthodox Church were actively engaged in showing support to the national movement of the time.

Politicization of the Church was explained by the fact that the Serbian Orthodox Church is a national church. At the time of the growing nationalistic tide, holy relics of the Serbian Tsar Lazar were carried to all the regions where the Serbs lived. Such symbolic gestures probably sealed the Serbian nationalistic movement between 1987 and 1994. After 1987, remnants of the victims of mass Ustashe massacres of the Second World war were dug out of the pits to be buried in funeral services in the presence of large numbers of people. The Serbian regime gave much publicity to these events. Nationalistic ideologists prophesied that the victims must never be forgotten and that it was impossible to live together in this space.

In the events which followed, many war lords sought protection under the coat-tails of the Church, from Arkan to Radovan Karadzic, and many others who had all reason for confession. There were belligerent representatives of the Church on all sides, father Filaret, a monk whose photo was taken with a machinegun in his hands being just one of them. The Serbian Patriarch Pavle, who is certainly a representative of the moderate faction of the Serbian Orthodox Church, kept repeating "Let us be men!" all the time during this war, he appealed to reason, moderateness, and humaneness, but that weak voice had no echo in the troubled times brought about by this tribal war.

The Russian Church is "less national" than the Serbian (which is linked to a national saint, St. Sava, which is considered as schism by Russian theologicians).

The Russian Patriarch, nevertheless, held a service on the anniversary of burning of the Serbian Saint Sava, showing that this conflict is not predominant and that it remained in the shadow of the effort of the two Churches to preserve their unity. Right after the visit, reproaches could be heard from Macedonia because the two Patriarchs declared themselves against the autonomy of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and that of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

In Cetinje, the members of the self-proclaimed Autonomous Montenegrin Church were prevented by the police to contact the Russian Patriarch and present their "protest against the usurpation of the Serbian Orthodox Church" (as Slavko Perovic, the leader of the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro put it). The Russian Patriarch called the Montenegrins "children of the holy Serbian Orthodox Church", he said that he considred them to be "a pearl in the wreath of brotherly love and spiritual unity of the Russian and the Serbian people", he begged them not to be the ones "who will split the Heaven". Thus the details outgrew the objective of the visit. Having avoided a meeting with the journalists, the Russian Patriarch at least having to say so.

The achievement of peace in the Balkans has become a top priority moral challenge for intellectuals, politicians of the world, so it must be that for church dignitaries, too. At first sight, politically, this peace initiative resembles all other peace initiatives undertaken in this space. An attempt was made at least. The paradox is that, in the light of the Balkan flames, each actor quickly has to face the complexity of the circumstances here - and of his own situation.

Milan Milosevic