Belgrade - There has been very little of turn thy cheek or
love thy neighbour in the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) over the
turbulent past year, but instead, plenty of fighting, backstabbing
and hostility.
In Belgrade, the capricious hardline Kosovo Bishop Artemije openly
went against the Holy Synod, the church government, when it tried to
restrain his heavy-handed tactics which led to fistfights among monks
in the holy Visoki Decani monastery.
To the west, two years after the tiny republic Montenegro claimed
independence from Serbia, its clergy also wants to break away from
Belgrade's rule.
There, in the northern town Niksic, police had to intervene
against pro-Serbian demonstrators blocking the symbolic start of
labour on a monastery of the splinter-church.
Through it all, the ailing, 94-year-old nead of the SPC, Patriarch
Pavle, helplessly watched from his hospital bed, while bishops have
started jockeying for position to grab his throne.
At the centre of all crises stands Bishiop Amfilohije, 70, the
head of the SPC in Montenegro and the young state's public enemy
number one, as well as Artemije's rival and the most likely heir to
Pavle.
The liberal Belgrade weekly Vreme described Amfilohije - who hotly
supported Serbia in all wars of the 90s from the position of far-
right nationalism - as a 'robed warrior.'
War 'fascinates' Amfilohije, who sees it as 'Man's destiny,' and
who has 'dragged God's name into the bloody Balkan mudbath in which
all human values were lost,' the paper commented.
'Amfilohije is a misfortune ... hiding behind God's words and
devil's acts,' the Montenegrin parliament speaker Ranko Krivokapic
thundered in remarks against the bearded priest in an interview with
the Sarajevo weekly Dani.
It was 'major pity' that the UN war crimes tribunal did not indict
'warmongers' from the Serbian church, Krivokapic said, while accusing
Amfilohije of standing 'for extreme nationalism, sheltering of war
criminals amd propaganda for crime and fratricide.'
The bishop responded in kind, saying the voters would punish
Krivokapic's 'parasitic' Social Democratic Party, a junior member of
the ruling coalition, and 'send it to history.'
A resident of Montenegro's old, highland capital Cetinje,
Amfilohije also lambasted the country's police as 'unprofessional'
over its arrest of 65 Serbs who blocked the Montenegrin Mitropolite
Mihajlo from laying a cornerstone for the new monastery in Niksic.
In an open letter to the interior ministry he called Mihajlo, the
head of the breakway church, 'a damned ex-priest.'
The bitterness of Serb priests at their Montenegrin brethren
exploded in the wake of the effort by the latter to regain their
self-government, which they voluntarily ceded after having it for
centuries, by joining SPC when Yugoslavia was formed 90 years ago in
the aftermath of World War I.
Along with independence, the Montegerin priests also want to
retrieve all property, churches and monasteries, which had been run
by SPC since the end of the war.
A similarly tense scenario has been unfolding south of Serbia, in
Macedonia, another former Yugoslav republic, where the orthodox
church has been trying to become autocephalic since the 1960s.
New moves by the Macedonian church, unrecognized and anathemized
by SPC, are expected when its assembly meets next month.
USA
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