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10 THE POLITICS OF THE SERBIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH SABRINA P. RAMET I t has often been observed that the Serbian Orthodox Church is a political organization first and foremost and a religious organization only secondarily . Whether this statement is true or not depends, above all, on what one understands by the terms “political organization” and “religious organization.” If we define “political organization” to mean an organization striving for power on earth and seeking to advance a policy agenda aªecting laws, notions of rights, school curricula, and values, then most, if not all, religious organizations would qualify as political organizations. Indeed, can one even imagine a religious organization which would not also be political? Could we imagine a religious organization which would not seek to promote specific social values (especially concerning sexuality , but also concerning social mores more generally), which would not have strong views about school curricula, literature, and the limits of individual rights, and which would not seek to use the laws to advance and safeguard its interests and agenda? The politicization of religion is, thus, not merely a phenomenon of Orthodox religion. On the contrary, examples of this phenomenon abound, whether one looks at the United States, Russia, Egypt, Mexico, Israel, Spain, Iran, Germany, Croatia, Bosnia, or any of a multitude of other national contexts. Yet Orthodoxy is not interchangeable with any other religion. What is distinct to Orthodoxy, as opposed to, let us say, Catholicism or Islam or Buddhism, is its shying away from universalism. The Orthodox Churches, like the ancient religions, are the Churches of their respective nations, their myths being the myths of their respective nations. The Battle of Kosovo, for example, is consecrated as an event with religious signi ficance,1 but it is only the Serbian Church which is interested in this myth in the first place. For the Russian Orthodox Church, for example, it is not even on the horizon. Serbian Orthodoxy, Democracy, and War If one wanted to portray the Serbian Orthodox Church as a pro-democratic institution, one might, perhaps, note Patriarch Pavle’s demand in June 1992 and again in July–August 1999 that Slobodan Milopevi_ resign from o‹ce, backing calls for fresh elections. If one wanted to portray the Serbian Orthodox Church as, let us say, “internationalist,” then one might perhaps point to Pavle’s collaboration with Catholic archbishop Franjo Cardinal Kuhari_ in September 1992 in calling for peace, and Pavle’s statement later that year that “the war benefits only one common enemy— the devil!”2 But these characterizations should strike us as artificial. Far from being oriented to the give-and-take of democracy, prominent figures in the Serbian Orthodox Church have repeatedly seen theirs as a world apart, a better world, potentially even a celestial kingdom. In this spirit, for example , Svetozar Dupani_, in an article for Pravoslavlje (1 October 1987), conjured up notions of cultural incompatibility in a way which seemed to call into question the future of Serb-Croat cohabitation: The world which developed under ‘Byzantine influence’ . . . diªers from the world which evolved under the ‘Western-Roman influence,’ not only in its religion, but also in its culture, historical development, ethics, psychology, and mentality. The Byzantine world cannot envision a common survival in the same state with the members of the Western-Roman tradition, particularly not after the Second World War.3 Nor can one forget that during 1990 and 1991, the Serbian Church’s news organ, Pravoslavlje, stoked the flames of nationalist resentment by publishing article after article on the allegedly Serbian heritage of eastern Slavonia (then under siege), including Osijek, and on the suªerings of the Serbian people (only) during World War Two. Already in September 1989, when the air in Belgrade was thick with nationalism, the Serbian Church recalled that there had been eighty-six Orthodox priests and 134 churches in the Orthodox eparchy of Slavonia in 1937, vs. forty-two priests and 94 churches as of 1989.4 The Church did not mention anything about changes in the size of the Orthodox population over the course of the fifty years, or the fact that the Serbian Church had been able to restore 64 churches, 2 monasteries, 15 residential buildings, and 9 chapels in Croatia in the years 1945–85, and to build 25 new churches alongside 4 chapels and 16 new residential buildings (some of them in Slavonia). SABRINA P. RAMET 256 [3.15.202.4] Project MUSE (2024...

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