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__NEWS__Yugoslavia__________________
Adopting the Russian Model
A new government gives a special place to the Orthodox Church
By Enrique Carlier
The victory of the Serbian Democratic Opposition (DOS) in the national elections of last December have changed the political landscape in today’s Yugoslavia. But the new government, led by President Vojislav Kostunica and Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic—the two men who guided the DOS to electoral victory—has inherited a highly volatile situation.
Today’s Yugoslavia is composed of the federated republics of Serbia and Montenegro, along with the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. After a decade of warfare and unrest, Yugoslavia has been dismembered; Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are no longer part of the federal republic. The arrest and impending trial of the former dictator Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague; the continuing acts of reprisal against Serbs in Kosovo; the guerrilla raids by ethnic Albanians from Kosovo into Macedonia; the growing movement for independence in Montenegro—all these factors cloud the future and jeopardize the stability of Yugoslavia.
In these difficult times, however, there have been some positive developments for the Church: a return of the faithful to their parishes, a rise in religious vocations (especially in Kosovo), and a renewed interest in religious education.
In February, when the bishops of Yugoslavia made their ad limina visit to Rome, Archbishop Franc Perko of Belgrade provided a generally upbeat summary of the situation that faces the Catholic faithful during a meeting with the Holy Father:
We make up only 5 percent of the population (with 550,000 faithful). After the developments of the past year, a great deal has changed in our ecclesial communion. Religious life had suffered through many decades of Communist oppression, and in more recent years under nationalist oppression as well. Our faithful have endured tremendous hardships. Today we are pleased to see many lay people contributing actively and generously to the mission of the Church. Our priests, having been through such difficult conditions, are happy to be able to carry out their ministry of service and evangelization. Still, there are not enough priests; only in Kosovo has there been an abundance of priestly vocations.
Archbishop Perko also issued an invitation for Pope John Paul to visit Yugoslavia “when circumstances allow it.” But he admitted that the Catholic people of Yugoslavia may have unrealistic expectations about a papal visit, since they fail to recognize the difficulties that would be involved in planning such a trip.
Finally, the Belgrade archbishop observed that in his country, so thoroughly devastated by warfare, “we have a great deal of material poverty, and after those many years of atheism we have a great deal of spiritual poverty as well.”
A dispersed minority
Because of the complicated distribution of ethnic minority groups in Yugoslavia, and the extremely delicate relations among those groups, the nation’s episcopal conference has tried to be extremely respectful of each national group. For that reason, the Jubilee celebrations of the year 2000 were carried out primarily at the local level, in individual dioceses and parishes.
The territorial organization of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia is also complex. There are five dioceses: in Serbia, the Archdiocese of Belgrade; in Vojvodina, the dioceses of Subotica and Zrenjanin; in Montenegro, the Archdiocese of Bar and Diocese of Kotor. An apostolic administration was recently established for Prizren in Kosovo. The region of Srem, west of Belgrade, is still part of the Croatian diocese of Djakovo. And Vojvodina also forms a portion of the territory for the Byzantine-rite Diocese of Krizevci, which also extends into Croatia and Macedonia.
In the center of the country as it stands today, the 8,400 Catholics of the Archdiocese of Belgrade are virtually lost in an area of nearly 20,000 square miles, with a population of 5.5 million. Consequently, one main duty of pastors is to hold together a Catholic community which has become very widely dispersed.
With the country now living in peace —after years of turmoil, in which one pastoral emergency followed another, and church bombings or death threats were commonplace—the Church can now concentrate on normal pastoral concerns. Bishops and priests recite a familiar litany of concerns: the need to help the faithful deepen their interior life, to guard against materialism and consumerism, to strengthen family life, to provide better preparation for marriage, to educate young people in the faith. The clergy of Yugoslavia also stress the importance of Christian unity, not only as a witness to the faith but also as a means of promoting reconciliation and peace in a land where ethnic and religious tensions contributed heavily to the devastation of the past decade of war.
Ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue is therefore a high priority for the Catholic minority. In Yugoslavia, Church leaders are actively pursuing opportunities to build stronger relationships with their Muslim neighbors (who represent 20 percent of the population) and especially with the Serbian Orthodox Church, which claims the allegiance of almost two-thirds of the population. However, as Archbishop Perko acknowledged in his remarks to the Holy Father, “The Orthodox do not trust the Catholic Church.” He suggested that “in the future, with patience,” the Catholic and Orthodox faithful of Yugoslavia could reach a better mutual understanding.
In January of this year Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi of Genoa, the vice-president of the Italian bishops’ conference, traveled to Yugoslavia. The cardinal told reporters that one important purpose of his visit was “to convey the greetings and best wishes of the Holy Father to Patriarch Pavle and the entire Serbian Orthodox Church.” Unfortunately during the cardinal’s visit, which coincided with the Orthodox celebration of the Epiphany, Patriarch Pavle was visiting Kosovo (which is within his patriarchate), and was unavailable to meet with the visiting Italian prelate. Instead Cardinal Tettamanzi spoke with the Orthodox Bishop Vladika Sava of Kraguejevac, who acted as representative for the Patriarch and the Orthodox synod of bishops. The visit by Cardinal Tettamanzi was also marked by a significant ecumenical gesture on the part of the Catholic organizers: an Orthodox choir was invited to sing in Belgrade’s Catholic cathedral as the visiting cardinal celebrated Mass.
Church and state
Generally speaking, the political developments of the past year have been favorable to the cause of greater religious freedom. But at least to date the Serbian Orthodox Church has been the sole beneficiary of those developments. Orthodox leaders have managed to establish a close form of collaboration with the government, reminiscent of the role of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow.
For example, when the government made the decision to include religion classes in the educational curriculum, the Orthodox leadership went one step further, recommending that the classes be obligatory. The introduction of religion into the public-school curriculum has been under discussion for several years. Under the leadership of former President Milosevic, the Yugoslavian government and the Serbian state regime had announced their intention to resume religious education, which had been outlawed in the country since 1946. Last November, when they gathered for their annual meeting, the Orthodox bishops focused their discussions on the issue of religious education. At the conclusion of the meeting, the Orthodox Synod issued a statement insisting that “religion classes should be included as obligatory in all courses of study for the elementary and secondary schools.”
The policy decision eventually reached by the Kostunica government granted the Orthodox leadership much —if not quite all—of what the Synod had sought. The minister for religious affairs, Gordana Aninic, declared that religion classes will be mandatory for the primary grades, and optional thereafter.
That policy decision was reached despite strong opposition. President Kostunica himself had declared his preference for voluntary religious education. The Serbian chapter of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights had declared that compulsory religious education would “seriously violate the principles of a secular state, and point to the establishment of a church whose authority goes beyond the private sphere, and whose indoctrination takes on the character of official public business.” The Helsinki Committee stressed that the new policy would be a violation of religious and human rights for all non-Orthodox students.
In a revealing response to that criticism, the Orthodox Synod argued that religious beliefs are not merely private affairs, adding that the doctrines set forth by the Church have an important influence on the moral conduct of the citizenry. Public morality as influenced by the Orthodox Church, the Synod continued, would “reflect the fear of Satan and of all his followers.” In a reference to their country’s years under Communist rule, the bishops’ statement made it clear that in their opinion, “Satan’s followers” had held the upper hand in Yugoslavia “during the past six decades.”
For a full decade after the fall of the Communist regime, the Milosevic government refused to return parish properties that had been confiscated from the Orthodox Church by the Communists. So the new government’s education policy is regarded in some quarters as a means of making compensation for the injustices of the past. Before the arrival of the new government, religious-affairs minister Aninic explains:
The attitude of the authorities toward the churches and religious communities was hypocritical; there was a façade of public respect and an attitude of private contempt. The Church and religious communities were treated as second-class institutions.
The country now owes a special obligation to the Orthodox Church, Aninic argues—strongly hinting in the course of his argument, that in exchange, the government expects support from the Church in its effort to end its isolation from the European community. As he puts it, the 55 years of ideological opposition to religion:
. . . leave us with a debt to help the Orthodox Church—which, in its turn, will help Serbia to rebuild and to move closer to the community of Christian nations in Europe, to which it has always belonged.
In short, Yugoslavia’s new leaders have ample motivation for giving a special privileged status to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The new government has reinstated the right of the Church to maintain legal records of births, deaths, and marriages, and to appoint chaplains to serve in public hospitals, prisons, and military units.
Ecclesial rivals
Aninic insists that the special recognition afforded to the Serbian Orthodox will not affect the government’s ability to work with other religious groups; he insists that Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, and other Protestants are also welcome to enter into collaborative arrangements with the regime. “We are going to contact the various humanitarian groups with religious affiliations,” he says, “and assure them that their activities, and their efforts to help our people, are very important and useful.” In theory, at least, the new Yugoslavian government is committed to ensuring “rights and freedoms” of all religions.
One more factor must be entered into the equation of church-state relations in Yugoslavia today: the struggle between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Montenegro. This is a conflict that dates back to 1920, when the Serbian monarchy suppressed the independence of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church.
The hierarchy of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church was reconstituted in 1993. In January 2000 the reform-minded Montenegrin President, Milo Djukanoviv, whose drive to independence had left him openly at odds with the Yugoslavian government, granted his official recognition to the Montenegrin bishops—to the evident discomfort of Serbian Patriarch Pavle.
For his part, the Montenegrin Orthodox leader, Metropolitan Mihailo, has not forgotten that in his youth he witnessed the seizure of 650 Montenegrin parish and monastery buildings by the Serbian Orthodox Church. In May 2000 he had a measure of revenge; 15 parishes in the region were returned to his jurisdiction—thus doubling the total number of parishes within the Montenegrin Orthodox Church. Today the Serbian and Montenegrin Orthodox churches are locked in a rivalry similar to the one that has pitted three different Orthodox groups against each other for the allegiance of the faithful in Ukraine.
Enrique Carlier writes for the Spanish magazine
Palabra, from which this article has been adapted.