Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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THE FALL OF THE SERBIAN CHURCH

Written by Vladimir Moss

THE FALL OF THE SERBIAN CHURCH

Vladimir Moss

 

     As a result of the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army, and their attendance at the false council of Moscow in 1945, the official Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe were soon drawn into the communist orbit. In the cases of the Romanian and Bulgarian Churches, this happened after the fall of the Orthodox monarchy. Thus the communist penetration of the Romanian Church began shortly after the abdication of King Michael on December 30, 1947.

 

     As regards Bulgaria, after the death of Tsar Boris in 1943 (probably at the hands of the Nazis), his brother, Prince Cyril, became regent and continued the same policy. But after the Soviet troops entered Bulgaria he was arrested and shot on “Bloody Thursday”, February 3, 1945.[1]So-called associations of priests controlled by the communists were infiltrated into the Church of Bulgaria, as into neighbouring Serbia. “After assuming power,” writes Ivan Marchevsky, “the communists began to destroy the clergy: a third of the 2000 members of the clergy was killed. Then they began to act in a different way: Vladykas appointed ‘from above’ ordained obedient priests.”[2]

 

     The Serbian King Peter remained in exile in England after the war, trying to help the resistance to communism in his homeland from outside. Hieroschemamonk Akakije (Stankevič) writes: “During the Second World War and until 1946, since the German Nazis had imprisoned the Serbian Patriarch Gabriel (Dožič) and later put him into the Dachau concentration camp because of his anti-Nazi statements, the administration of the Serbian Church was taken over by Metropolitan Joseph (Tsvijič) of Skopje, who was parted from his diocese after the Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia. Together with the Patriarch they imprisoned Bishop Nikolai of Žiča, who was the most respected and best loved Serbian bishop among the people, and whose opinion was considered important among the bishops, priests, monks and people. In that period, a number of Serbian hierarchs did not understand the real meaning of the evil of communism that was spreading fast throughout Serbia. Such a soft and inadequate attitude on the part of the Serbian Church towards communism is astonishing when we know that the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad had been in Sremski Karlovtsy even before the beginning of the war, for more than twenty years, and throughout that period it had been warning everyone, explaining the diabolical nature of the communist and sergianist hell… through which their country, Russia, had passed and from which they had been forced to flee for that reason. Also, those frightening warnings began to come true at the very beginning and during the war through all those monstrous evil deeds against the Serbian people, kingdom and Church that were committed by the communist bands in Serbia.

 

     “At that time, the justified position existed that it was not necessary to waste strength and men by confronting the large power of Nazi Germany and her allies (let us remember that at that time there was an order that for every German soldier killed 100 Serbs be killed)…, but that we should turn ourselves exclusively to the internal problem of communism, which was coming over Serbia like a dark shadow. Inspired by this idea, at the beginning of the war, the prime minister of the Serbian government in occupied Serbia, General Milan Nedič, requested from the Synod of the Serbian Church to condemn in the name of the Church the communists and the leader of the liberation movement, the so-called Chetniks, Colonel Dragoliub Mikhailovič, who together with the communists started the guerilla struggle against the German occupation army. The Synod replied to this appeal of General Nedič: ‘The Church is above parties, Dragoliub Mikhailovič, Ljotič and the communists.’ By the way, the unnatural companionship mentioned above was broken very soon because Mikhailovič’s national forces soon became completely at odds with the army organized by the communist party of Yugoslavia led by Joseph Broz Tito. Colonel, later General Mikahilovič continued to fight the Germans, but on a much smaller scale, and he forced the communists to leave the territory of Bosnia, and because of that General Nedič was unofficially helping him.[3]

 

     “Such a soft position was not only a result of a misunderstanding of the evil, God-fighting nature of communism, but in some places it was open sympathy with those forces, even communist bands, who were fighting against the Germans. The result of those positions was a very strong anti-German feeling, and contrary to that, great sympathy for the English side among many of the Serb hierarchs. How different was the position of the Russian Patriarch Tikhon towards the communists from the flexible position of the Serbian hierarchs. He was completely trapped by the Bolshevik revolution in 1918, but anathematized the communists and all those who cooperate with them.

 

     “Most of the official church statements during the war were vague. For that reason in 1942 the Serbian patriot and politician Dmitrij Ljotič wrote in his article ‘Neither Hot nor Cold’: “We heard the message of our paternal hierarchs gathered in the Synod and around it. They call on the people to have peace, love and unanimity… They simply called the citizens to peace and unity and love, taking good care how to gain peace, unanimity and love. And to make that position even more visible, they cared very much not to use a single word to explain who are those people in our country who disturb peace, unanimity and love, who kill the priests and other peaceful citizens and insult the Church….

 

     “’… The communists, on account of Red Moscow, want sabotage, disorder, rebellion, which leads to national destruction. General Nedič doesn’t want any of these three because if we avoid them then the Serbian people will live. Even those who were lucky enough to run away to London send us messages to preserve peace, and that people should keep away from sabotage and rebellion.

 

     “’Church representatives pass over all this and speak about peace, love and unanimity, not saying a single word about which course is better: that of General Nedič, or that of the communists. If the message were necessary, it would have been necessary to tell that, too, to the people. If they didn’t want to say that, it would have been more glorious and wiser to keep silent.

 

     “’If our hierarchs could not choose which of these two courses is better, how could they find a way to move themselves from their God-saving dioceses and hide here in Belgrade. Why didn’t they wait for the communists there?’

 

     “By the end of 1944 Soviet troops started to come into Serbia, and in October, 1944 they entered Belgrade together with the Yugoslav communist army. Many of the national forces and the clergy who were aware of the hell awaiting them in Serbia under these rulers, left Serbia together with the defeated Germans, and retreated towards Slovenia. Bishop Nikolai Velimirovič was the only one to understand how tragic the situation was, so in Slovenia he gave his blessing to the gathering of all the national anti-communist forces who were grouped there and were retreating before Tito’s troops and the Red Army. Several hundred thousand Serb četniks, the Ljotič volunteers, the Nedič national guard, Slovenian nationalists loyal to the kingdom of Yugoslavia and some Russian White Guards were ready to stand together against oncoming communism. Even General Vlasov with his 400,000 soldiers headed towards Slovenia, as the only ray of hope, the last chance for the communists to be driven away from the borders of Yugoslavia, as they had been in neighbouring Greece. Unfortunately, the allies had the most important role. General Vlasov was stopped by the ‘Allies’ and handed over together with his army to be killed by the Soviets, while the national forces in Slovenia were cheated by the Americans and English, deprived of their arms, and handed over to Tito’s partisans, who in a short period of time and in the most monstrous ways tortured, killed and burned bodies and put into mass graves several hundred thousand men. Just in one day, the partisans killed 62 Serbian priests from Montenegro, who found themselves in Slovenia with the leftovers of Djurishič’s Montenegrin national forces, which had already been reduced to one tenth of their former number by the partisans and Croatian Ustaše while they were passing through Bosnia. A small number of nationalists succeeded in fleeing through Italy and so the killing by the communists did not affect them. In this way, again with the help of the ‘Allies’, Tito’s assumption of power was guaranteed. Bishop Nikolai stayed firm in the United States, where he continued his fight for the liberation of the Serbian Church and State from the communists.[4]

 

     “Some sources report that Metropolitan Joseph [Tsvijovič] and the bishops who stayed in the country (Nectarije Krul, Jovan Ilič, Arsenije Bradvarevič, Emilian Piperkovič) openheartedly greeted the Soviet troops and Yugoslav partisan troops. In October, 1944 Metropolitan Joseph delivered a message to the people in which he called the liberation of Belgrade and Serbia the ‘dawning’. On November 12, 1944 in the Saborna church in Belgrade a pannikhida was held for all those killed in the struggle for the liberation of Belgrade. The service was celebrated by Metropolitan Joseph… The priesthood of Belgrade was collecting donations for wounded Soviets and partisans. In the Nativity Epistle of the Holy Synod, they spoke with delight about the new situation arising from the expulsion of the enemies from the country (the occupiers and the liberation of the country)…

 

     “The next big deviation from the pre-war position was the relationship of the Serbian Orthodox Church towards the Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, with which the Serbian Church got in touch immediately after Soviet troops entered Serbia. A delegation from the Moscow Patriarchate headed by Bishop Sergius of Kirovgrad came to Belgrade in 1944.

 

     “In March 1945 Metropolitan Joseph accompanied by Bishop Jovan of Niš and Bishop Emilian of Timočki travelled, at the request of the authorities, to Moscow, where they attended the false Council and the Soviet theatrical enthronement of the new patriarch, Alexis I.

 

     “Tito’s communists, taking over power with the help of America, England and the Soviet Union, at the very beginning showed their openly anti-Christian character. Very fierce anti-Church laws were enforced, and an agrarian reform was made whereby the Church was deprived, right from the beginning, of 70,000 hectares of land, 1,180 church buildings, a printing plant and a pension fund for the clergy. State donations to the Church were stopped, the catechism was thrown out of the schools, the authorities created big problems for the theological schools, the Church had to deliver all the registration books to the State registration offices, etc., etc.

 

     “Right from the beginning, persecutions and killings of clergy began.[5]The first martyr was Metropolitan Joanikije [Lipovac] of Montenegro, who was tortured by Tito’s communists for several months in prison. Partisan Major Čile Kovačevič brought him a chalice filled with the fresh blood of murdered Chetniks (that’s how he explained it), and he made the metropolitan commune in that blood. The metropolitan stayed firm, and was killed and burned in Arandzelovats during the night between the 8^th and 9^th of September, 1945. In this period of the consolidation of their revolutionary authority, the communists were helped by the ‘Allies’, English and Soviet. In 1944 and 1945 there were shootings without trial of all those priests who, as they believed, were unable to adapt to collaboration with the communists. According to incomplete information, the communists in those years killed 98 Serbian priests.[6]

 

     “After all these events, and finally losing trust in the Allies, who at the end, on the orders of Tito, even bombed a lot of Serbian cities and turned them into ruins, Metropolitan Joseph finally took an openly anti-communist position. He started to criticise the actions of the communist authorities in public, but his acts did not influence other bishops to take the same position towards the new godless authorities.

 

     “Since he took such a fearless position towards the communists, Metropolitan Joseph found himself in a very difficult position and he was under a number of pressures. Several times the new authorities organized ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ with red flags, banners and shouts of ‘Down with Joseph!’ During one such anti-religious event, when a large number of demonstrators stopped in front of the patriarchal building, and started to shout the well-known words, ‘Down with Joseph! Down with Joseph!’ the metropolitan came out onto the balcony and in the strong voice with which he usually spoke to thousands of the faithful, shouted as if he did not understand: ‘Down with Joseph? Which Joseph? Broz or Stalin?’[7]

 

     “Just after the end of the war, he rejected the request of the federal minister of internal affairs, Vlade Zečovič, to send a message to the clergy that they should not commemorate the king’s name in the Divine services. In rejecting this, he said: ‘The king’s name will be commemorated until the state organization is decided.’ Having seen the firm position of Metropolitan Joseph, the communists changed their threats and tactics. In 1946 he began to receive official delegations from the authorities, bringing him messages that ‘Tito is regretting that he didn’t have the honour of meeting the representative of the Serbian Church, and he is expressing his sincere wish to do this as soon as possible’. The same year Metropolitan Joseph delivered a speech in the patriarchal chapel in which he said: ‘Such a shame and disaster the Serbian people have not undergone since the Turks. Let everyone know that many have broken their teeth attacking the Church. So will the communist beast. Endure, Serb, and don’t be afraid.’ The Soviet Patriarch Alexis I, during his visit to Bulgaria (in June, 1946) expressed the wish to visit the Serbian Church. That message he sent through Bishop Irinaeus Čilič who was in Bulgaria attending the celebration of the 1000-year anniversary of the repose of St. John of Rila the Wonderworker. Metropolitan Joseph did not reply to Patriarch Alexis. After the war, while sending one of his priests to a parish in a village, he gave him a cross and asked him: ‘Do you remember how the Spartan mother saw off her son to the battle, giving him the spear? I give you the cross of Christ, and am sending you to the terrible war with the godless. Here, my son, is the cross and the vow with it or on it.’

 

     “Metropolitan Joseph began to criticise the MP’s subordination to the communists. For example, in a conversation with the American ambassador Harold Schantz he declared that the MP was an extended arm of the Kremlin, which was trying to Bolshevize the Serbian Orthodox Church. {However,} he still did not completely understand the deep meaning of handing over the freedom of the Church to the militant godfighters, which is sergianism; he didn’t in the name of the Serbian Church stop giving the Soviet church communion in prayer and sacraments as well as other support for it.[8]

 

     “The political orientation of the Serbian bishops at that time, from a strictly Orthodox point of view, was not equal to the seriousness of the historical situation in which Serbia and the Serbian Church found themselves. They didn’t attach enough importance to the political system in Serbia, such as the Orthodox autocracy-monarchy, but the tendency was towards modern political options, to the democratic organization of the State, which, as is well-known, is, together with communism, just one of the sides of the Judaeo-Masonic coin… In the early-mentioned discussion of Metropolitan Joseph with the American ambassador he made the contradictory declaration that Stalin had taken over the position of Tsar Nicholas II. According to him, it [communism] was the same type of rule – authoritarian and undemocratic - as tsarism was. He claimed that he was against every type of totalitarian regime, both right and left. Metropolitan Joseph, like all other Serbian bishops, was actually in favour of the system of the liberal democratic kingdom that was enforced in the kingdom of Yugoslavia before the war.

 

     “In the Church and among the people everybody wanted Patriarch Gabriel to return to Yugoslavia, who had been released from German imprisonment [in Dachau] at the end of the war, and still did not come back. Since Metropolitan Joseph rejected many of their requests, the communists had the idea of inviting Patriarch Gabriel, who was temporarily in Italy, to come back to the country, to which, after a time, he agreed.[9]He adopted a more modest position than Joseph. He considered that, with the help of ‘diplomacy’, more coordination with the authorities and keeping away from conflicts, he would save the Serbian Church from total disaster, so he started to declare loyalty to the authorities, although he often criticised their representatives, even Tito himself, concerning their actions against the Church, always declaring he was against the actions, but not the authorities themselves. He managed to avoid enforcing many requests of the communists, likewise the recognition of the communist clergy association, the foundation of the so-called Macedonian Church, as well as the condemnation and defrocking of the hierarchs abroad whose removal was requested by the authorities.

 

     “But he did partake in the Pan-Slavic Congress in Belgrade in 1946 in which he declared gratitude to ‘Mother Russia’ for preserving the unity of the Slavs, repeating the words that Metropolitan Joseph had said at the liberation of Belgrade. On the same occasion he welcomed Tito and Stalin, whom he named ‘the Great’.

 

     “In the year 1948, at the request of the authorities, he attended, in the name of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the false council hosted by the MP in Moscow, even though before that he had for a long time tried not to do so. Still, he did not fulfil many requests of the MP and the communists by which they tried to subordinate the Serbian Church to the MP.

 

     “When Patriarch Gabriel came back to Serbia in 1946, Metropolitan Joseph naturally became his closest associate in ruling the Serbian Orthodox Church. Regardless of the fact that he still openly criticised the communist authorities, he participated, together with Patriarch Gabriel, in all public events and in the MP council of 1948.

 

     “After the repose of Patriarch Gabriel [in 1950], it was clear to all the faithful that the only natural heir should be Metropolitan Joseph. But of course, the godless authorities who were fighting with the Church all the time would not allow Metropolitan Joseph to be elected as Serbian patriarch. Before the election of the patriarch in July, 1950 the UDBA [Yugoslav secret police] arrested Metropolitan Joseph in Belgrade, beat him up, and forced him into a monastery in Bosnia, where they imprisoned him in order to stop his influence on the hierarchs. He was arrested several times, and was banned from living in Belgrade, so he found shelter sometimes in the monastery of Zhicha, and sometimes in Ljubostinja. Each time he was arrested and banned from Belgrade, he was heavily beaten. In 1953 he was already very ill, so he was allowed to go back to Belgrade, to the monastery of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, but without the freedom to go anywhere else. As a political prisoner, abandoned by his brother hierarchs, he reposed there on July 3, 1957. ”[10]

 

     Some bishops thought that, besides, Metropolitan Joseph, “Metropolitan Nectarius Krulj of Dabro-Bosnia could have been chosen as patriarch. The vote was scheduled for June 10, 1950. The communist regime wanted as the candiate Bishop Vikentije Prodanov of Zleto-Strumichka. The bishops’ council rejected this candidate, so the communists used the special police to disable most of the members of the council, and in that way they blocked the worked of the council. The next meeting of the Council to elect the patriarch was scheduled for June 20, 1950. In the meantime the secret police removed the two candidates: Metropolitan Joseph was arrested and imprisoned in Žiča monastery, and Metropolitan Nectarius was pressured to withdraw his candidacy, which he finally agreed on. Frightened by such brutality on the part of the communist authorities, the other bishops in the list of candidates, along with two metropolitans: Damascene of Zagreb and Arsenije of coastal and inland Montenegro, put Bishop Vikentije on the list of candidates. And so with heavy pressure from the secret police, Vikentije Prodanov was chosen as patriarch by one episcopal vote only. Even though he was very obedient to the authorities, the newly chosen Patriarch Vikentije resisted some of Tito’s plans, for example, the forming of the Macedonian Church. So he didn’t last long on the patriarchal throne. He died eight years later.

 

     “After Vikentije, the communists needed a completely loyal person, who would bring the Serbian Church in service to the atheist regime. Such a candidate they found in the person of the widowed priest Chranislav Djorič, who became a monk with the name German and in 1951 became Vikentije’s vicar-bishop. In the campaign electing German as patriarch, the communist regime did not hide its active participation. All the memories of the electing council were very thoroughly worked upon by the secret police. The boss of the Serbian secret police Milan Velič openly said to the members of the electoral council: ‘We want German to be chosen, and he will be chosen, whether you vote for him or not. We want in the person of the patriarch to have a safe and sound friend, and with Vikentije we were too credulous.’ Everyone received an envelope with money. One of the examples of various blackmailing and threats was Abbot Platon Milevoyevič of Studenitsa, to whom the bloody boss of the Belgrade secret police, Miloš Minič, came with one associate and told him he would be arrested for public immorality and misuse of money in selling the monastery’s woods unless he voted for German. The secret police claimed that they had all the proofs of all his weaknesses, having mistresses in the monastery, several children born outside wedlock, and so on.”[11]

 

     “Father Macarius, abbot of the famed Dechani Monastery, was given 200,000 dinars ($650) as payment for his coerced vote for Germanus. He came back to his monastery after the election and threw the money at his monks, telling them that he ‘felt like Judas’.

 

     “Many delegates to the Electorate were given a special pen and paper on which they were to cast their ballots, in order to show whether they had kept their promise to the agents of the Secret Police. (Two sworn statements by witnesses).”[12]

 

     According to witnesses in the patriarch’s house, he had a party card. And when he was once accused of embezzling a very large sum of money and was threatened with a court trial, the Serbian equivalent of the KGB saved him and paid the money themselves. Thereafter he was completely “their man”.[13]

 

     In 1960 Archimandrite Justin Popovich wrote: “… The atheist dictatorship has so far elected two patriarchs… And in this way it has cynically trampled on the holy rights of the Church, and thereby also on the holy dogmas.”[14]

 

     In the post-war period, the communists tried to break down the resistance of all those bishops who opposed them. In most cases they succeeded. But there were some exceptions.

 

     For example: “The Bishops’ quarters in Novi Sad, in which Bishop Irenaeus (Tsilits) of Bachka lived, became the target of ‘national rage’ – communist demonstrations that threw a large number of stones at the building with terrible exclamations. During a festal litia in 1946 in one village, when the bishop came out from the church in full vestments, the organized communist crowd threw a number of stones at him. Being hit on the back of his head, Bishop Irenaeus fell on the ground. The raging crowd attacked the bishop, and the priest who was trying to defend him was stabbed by knives. Severely hurt, all covered in blood, his beard pulled out, his vestments torn, spat upon and insulted, Bishop Irenaeus was taken to Novi Sad during the night. As a consequence of these heavy wounds, he spent the rest of his life mostly in his sickbed.

 

     “Metropolitan Nectarius was lynched by the communists. In August 1953 a group of about 150-250 communists (including some women) arrived unexpectedly in the monastery of Osren. They forced their way into the monastery guest-house, and uttering terrible words they came to the bishop’s cell, where they started to hit and push him until he fell to the ground. One of the women was pulling his beard. The calls for help of an old bishop, who was at that time 75 years old, were heard by nobody. They kept on tearing his ryasa, pushing and torturing him. Heavily wounded, he had to leave Tuzla, and go to Belgrade, where he lay in hospital for several months. Metropolitan Nectarius was the spine of the resistance to the communists in the Serbian Orthodox Church. Before the election of German as patriarch, the president of the socialist republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – his name was Djuro Putsar, his nickname was “the old one” – said to Metropolitan Nectarius and Bishop Basil: ‘The two of you represent 80% of the Council, and if German is not elected, we know who is responsible.’ Metropolitan Nectarius called patriarch German ‘Judas’ son’.

 

     “In 1944 Metropolitan Arsenije was condemned in Cetinje by the national court to ten-and-a-half years’ hard labour for anti-state activities because he did not carry out various requests made by the communists and because he said in his sermons that the Catholic Church did very evil things to Orthodox people. Together with him, seven old Montenegrin priests were condemned too. In 1960, due to serious illness, he was released at the age of 77. Rejected by all, his last days were spent with his daughter and son-in-law. He reposed, humiliated and persecuted by Patriarch German, whom he cursed on the last day of his life. Up to his last hour he rejected the communists and German. Even on his deathbed, the communists asked him to sign a statement by which he approved of the official policy of Patriarch German. Under the pressure of the communists, his funeral was conducted in secret.

 

     “Bishop Vasilije was forced to leave Banja Luka by the communists. At his question whether there was any written document by the state authorities about his ban from Banja Luka, the communists answered: ‘The people does not give written decisions, and it does not make any such decisions. The people has the right to make such decisions, because it is above the authorities, and each authority originates from the people.’ After constant threats to lynch him, he decided to leave for Belgrade. On his way to the railway station, a lot of men and women ran after him, shouting: ‘You wanted it written, here it is written, you will get it from the people, who is waiting for you. Down with the bearded man! Down with the people’s enemies and the collaborators of the occupiers!’ One of them attacked the car and started to curse God. When the bishop had hardly reached the station, an even larger mass of people were waiting for him there. They started to throw tomatoes and stones at him, and when they had surrounded him completely they started to spit at him, pull his beard and hit his head and body. The police was present all the time, but did not react to this public violence. One communist sub-officer kept on getting close to his face, and saying: ‘We are materialists, we only believe in matter, and not in the immortality of the soul, as you priests teach. Confess that it is senseless. You collaborated with the occupiers, and you don’t want to collaborate with today’s authorities. That is why people are making you leave. Confess that you were wrong, and repent.’ He was so badly hurt that he twice fell on the ground. Then they dragged him over the railway line and tore his sleeveless coat and his mandiya. In the train all the passengers kept on insulting him, and as he sat by the window it was broken from the outside. The reason for this lynching was his resistance to compromise with the godless authorities. Still, he couldn’t withstand the communist tortures to the end, and under UDBA pressure he gave his support to Bishop German as candidate for patriarch.

 

     “Bishop Varnava (Nastič) was condemned in 1948 by a communist court to ten years’ hard labour for the ‘crime of treason: he helped to weaken the economy and the military power of the state, he helped terrorist bands, he published enemy propaganda, and he was a spy for the Anglo-Americans.’ He suffered his punishment in Zenitsa jail. All the time he was in total isolation in a dark and damp cell under the greatest affliction of soul and body. The communists immediately cut his hair off and shaved his beard to humiliate him and make him a laughing-stock. They made him do the hardest jobs because they knew he was physically sensitive and weak in health. They starved him of food and water, tortured him with loneliness and deprived him of information from books or newspapers, with no communication with the outer world, just in order to break down his morale and subject him to their godless commands. In reply to all those tortures, he chanted church songs in his cell. Since no torture could break his spirit, the spirit of Bishop Varnava, the UDBA planned his so-called transfer in 1949 and arranged a traffic accident by crashing a locomotive into a parked, locked railway car in which he and a number of other political prisoners were bound. The impact was so powerful that out of a full car only eleven prisoners survived. Bishop Varnava was thrown through the window while tied together with a Catholic priest who died immediately as they fell. Bishop Varnava stayed alive, but both legs and one arm were broken. People from the train station and other trains ran to help, but police surrounded the car and would not allow anyone to come close to the wounded, and one policeman even turned an automatic gun against the people. One hour later, the UDBA came and took all the wounded to the city hospital nearby, where the doctors immediately started to help. Suddenly an UDBA man came back to the hospital and ordered the doctors to stop helping the wounded and to take them off the operating tables. The protests of the doctors were not considered. Bishop Varnava at that moment was on the operating table with a hole in his heel where a metal rod was to be inserted to help his broken leg heal. All the wounded were put in an army truck on wooden planks and they were driven at a horrific speed over very bad roads, so that two of them died during the trip. In 1960, after several transfers, from one prison to another, where he became severely ill, the much-suffering Bishop Varnava came to the end of his term of punishment. At that moment he submitted a plea to the Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church to be reactivated. Patriarch German did not take his plea before the Synod, but sent him a message: ‘It is necessary that you first regulate your relationship with the authorities’, which practically meant that he had to give a statement of loyalty to the communist regime. From that time the UDBA started to pressure him again. The boss of the religious section of the UDBA Milan Velič sent him a letter signed by about ten hierarchs recommending that he sign the statement of loyalty to the authorities and request that the Holy Synod retire him. Velič brought him the prepared text of his statement, a very cunning document prepared by Bishop Vissarion Kostič in which, among other things, they asked him to praise Tito’s regime, be one with the official position of the Church and to fence himself off from the work of the emigration. When he strongly resisted, the UDBA officer told him: ‘That means you are condemning Patriarch German and the other bishops who have already given such statements.’ Bishop Varnava said: ‘Everybody shall answer before the Last Judgement for his deeds on earth.’ Then the UDBA officer said: ‘You think Patriarch German will answer before the Last Judgement?’ Bishop Varnava answered: ‘The first and the hardest!’

 

     “When Patriarch Vikentije went to Moscow and laid flowers at the tomb of Lenin, Bishop Varnava under his full signature from prison sent a letter saying: ‘In whose name did you go, who did you represent, and who authorised you to put the flowers on the tomb of Lenin? From that wreath that you laid on Lenin’s tomb, take off one leaf in the name of the Serbian priesthood, one leaf in the name of Serbian bishops , one leaf in the name of the Serbian people, and the remaining six leaves will represent you and the members of your delegation.’ Because of this letter, the Hierarchical Synod gathered and pronounced him irresponsible and irrational. That was when his real spiritual torments began, because his brother hierarchs became his enemies. The notorious Bishop Vissarion led the systematic action against Bishop Varnava, who often used to say: ‘Being imprisoned by the communists was sweet for me, but now it is not the communists who are persecuting me, but my brother bishops.’ Lonely, and surrounded by the iron wall of the communist police, Bishop Varnava died in unexplained circumstances.

 

     “During his ordination, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, 1947, in the Saborna church in Belgrade, the newly ordained Bishop Varnava uttered the following prophetic words: ‘When our Lord Jesus Christ sent his apostles into the world, he put before them sacrifice as the programme and way of their lives. And only readiness for apostolic sacrifice made the Galilaean fishermen receive apostolic honour. Lofty honour in the Church of Christ means lofty sacrifice. The Holy Hierarchical Council led by the Holy Spirit chose my unworthiness as bishop of the Church of Christ. By that choice they condemned me to the sacrifice of Christ’s Golgotha. And in condemning me to that highest sacrifice they gave me the loftiest honour that can be given to a mortal man. All I can say is that I shall gladly climb my Golgotha, and I shall never trade that honour for any other under the sun of God. The bishop’s position is a sacrifice on Golgotha because the bishop’s service is apostolic service, and to the apostles the Lord said: “The cup which I am drinking you will drink, and the baptism which I am being baptised with you will be baptised with” (Mark 10.39). And the cup which our Lord drank and the baptism with which he was baptized, what else could it be but the cup of Golgotha and the bloody baptism in His own Blood?… And that is why, though I know the weaknesses of the soul, I am not afraid that my leg will shatter on the road of Golgotha strewn with thorns that I am today undertaking. Even if it wanted to shatter, the light and the warmth of innumerable examples of Christ’s heroes will bring back to it firmness and might.’ This sermon by Bishop Varnava was fulfilled completely through his much-suffering hierarchical service and struggle to defend Church freedom.

 

     “This was the way they prepared the total collapse of the Serbian Church. First by removing unfitting [bishops], and then carefully choosing new bishops sympathetic to the regime, or at least those who would accept the new kind of situation. In the period after the war the existence of the Serbian Church depended on the way the patriarch and the bishops treated Tito’s regime. In the time of Metropolitan Joseph, the patriarchal locum tenens, the Church still, regardless of external persecution, enjoyed internal freedom, because his firm position, if we exclude his lukewarm and flexible position towards the MP, let everybody know that he would firmly hold to the Church canons. And he succeeded. Much more modest, but still firm, was the position displayed by Patriarch Gabriel. The two of them represented the last defence of Church freedom.

 

     “As we have seen, after the death of Patriarch Gabriel, the situation in the Church became more difficult. Using the UDBA, the communists choose Vikentije as patriarch, who did many favours for them. In 1958 the act of the destruction of the Serbian Orthodox Church came to its end when the UDBA imposed as patriarch German, who was an absolutely submissive tool, accepted all the requests of the regime. The first big concessions to Tito were the act of forming the Macedonian Autocephalous Church and the blessing of the pro-communist association of priests (partisans), through which the possibility of total control of the Church was created. Patriarch German told the priesthood in Belgrade: ‘Whichever priest insults Tito, insults me.’ Really the position of the Serbian patriarchate was harder than at any time in its long-lasting history, because for the first time its patriarch and bishops joined the enemies of the Church. In the years after the war most of the Serbian bishops obviously had no ecclesiological consciousness, which is a confessing position of struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith, which was best illustrated by the presence of the Serbian Church at the councils of Moscow in 1945 and 1948, as well as the fact that not a single bishop or clergyman – though many of them were against the communists and criticised the behaviour of Patriarchs Vikentije and German, - never thought of stopping communion with the red patriarch in Belgrade, which all this time was in full eucharistic communion with the new calendarists…”[15]

 

     From the time of the election of Patriarch German in 1958, and with the exception of a very few clergy such as Bishop Varnava, the communists were now in complete control of the Serbian Patriarchate. Archimandrite Justin Popovich wrote on the catastrophic situation of the Church at this time: “The Church is being gradually destroyed from within and without, ideologically and organisationally. All means are being used: known and unknown, open and secret, the most subtle and the most crude… And all this is skilfully dissolved, but in fact it is the most deadly of poisons with a sugar coating… The most elementary and rudimentary logic demonstrates and proves: cooperation with open atheists, the cursed enemies of Christ and the Orthodox Church of Christ, is illogical and anti-logical. We ask those who seek such cooperation, or already cooperate, or – terrible thought! – compel others to cooperate, with the words of Christ: ’What communion can there be between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what is there in common between light and darkness? What agreement can there be between Christ and Belial?’ (II Corinthians 6.14-15). Do you not hear the Christ-bearing Apostle, who thunders: ‘If we, or an angel from heaven begins to preach to you that which we have not preached to you, let him be anathema!’ (Galatians 1.8). Or have you, in the frenzy of the atheist dictatorship, gone completely deaf to the Divine truth and commandment of Christ: ‘You cannot serve God and Mammon’ (Matthew 6.24)?”[16]

 

     Having now entered into the service of Mammon, the Serbian Church entered the World Council of Churches in 1965. In September, 1966, two inter-Orthodox Commissions were established in Belgrade to negotiate with the Anglicans and the Old Catholics. In 1967 Patriarch German said to the Roman Catholic bishop of Mostar: “The times are such that our sister Churches have to lean on each other, to turn away from that which divided us and to concentrate on all that we have in common.”[17]The next year he recognized Catholic marriages, and became one of the presidents of the WCC. In 1985, at a nuns’ conference, he welcomed two Catholic bishops “with special honour” into the sanctuary, and then all the conference members (Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants) recited the Creed together in the Liturgy.[18]In 1971 he signed the following WCC statement in Geneva: “The powerful Breath of renewal will blow into the mighty arena of the Church, as well as into each of her communities; for these are not simple administrative units, but they all constitute a part of the one great Christian Church.”

 

     Patriarch German liked to justify his ecumenism by quoting the Serbian proverb: Drvo se na drvo naslanja; a covek na coveka – “Tree leans on tree and man on man.” But the Free Serbs had an answer to this. “We can also quote the proverbs of our people: S’kim si, onaki si. – ‘You are like those with whom you associate.’ If you find your fellowship with heretics, you begin to share their erroneous thinking and eventually become a heretic. As an American proverb goes: ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”[19]

 

     Commenting on the decision of the Orthodox Churches to become “organic members” of the WCC, Fr. Justin wrote: “Every true Orthodox Christian, who is instructed under the guidance of the Holy Fathers, is overcome with shame when he reads that the Orthodox members of the Fifth Pan-Orthodox Conference in Geneva [in June, 1968]… on the question of the participation of the Orthodox in the work of the World Council of Churches, considered it necessary ‘to declare that the Orthodox Church considers itself to be an organic part of the World Council of Churches.’

 

     “This assertion is apocalyptically horrifying in its un-orthodoxy and anti-orthodoxy. Was it necessary for the Orthodox Church, that most holy Body of the God-Man Christ, to become so debased to such a pitiful degree that its theological representatives – some of whom were Serbian bishops – have begun to beg for ‘organic’ participation and membership in the World Council of Churches, which will supposedly become a new ‘Body’ and a new ‘Church’, which will stand above all other churches, in which the Orthodox Churches and the non-orthodox churches will appear only as parts. God forbid! Never before has there been such a betrayal and abandonment of our holy Faith!

 

     “We are renouncing the Orthodox Faith of the God-Man Christ, and organic ties with the God-Man and His Most Holy Body: we are repudiating the Orthodox Church of the holy apostles, the Fathers, and the Ecumenical Councils – and we wish to become ‘organic members’ of a heretical, humanistic, humanized and man-worshipping club, which consists of 263 heresies – every one of which is a spiritual death.

 

     “As Orthodox Christians we are ‘members of Christ.’ ‘Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?’ (I Corinthians 6.15). We are doing this by our organic union with the World Council of Churches, which is nothing other than the rebirth of atheistic man, of pagan idolatry.

 

     “The time has finally come for the patristic Orthodox Church of Saint Sabbas, the Church of the holy apostles and Fathers, of the holy confessors, martyrs and new-martyrs, to stop mingling ecclesiastically and hierarchically with the so-called ‘World Council of Churches’, and to cast off forever any participation in joint prayer or services, and to renounce general participation in any ecclesiastical dealings whatsoever, which are not self-contained and do not express the unique and unchangeable character of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church – the Orthodox Church – the only true Church that has ever existed.”[20]

 

     The attitude of the Russian Church Abroad towards the Serbian Church now began to change. Thus on September 14/27, 1967, Archbishop Averky of Jordanville wrote to Metropolitan Philaret: “With regard to the question of the Serbian Church, whose Patriarch German is a stooge of the communist Tito, as the Serbs themselves are convinced, calling him ‘the red patriarch’. We have heard this from many clergy and laity who have fled from Serbia. How can we recognize, and have communion in prayer with, ‘the red patriarch’, who maintains the closest friendly relations with red Moscow? Cannot our Hierarchical Council make erroneous decisions? Do we in the Orthodox Church have a doctrine about the infallibility of every Council of Bishops?”

 

     Archbishop Averky’s attitude to the Serbs was confirmed by the ROCOR Council of Bishops in 1967, which resolved to annul the resolution of the Council of Bishops in 1964 on the preservation of prayerful communion with the hierarchy of the Serbian Orthodox Church.[21]

 

     Early in 1970, Metropolitan Philaret announced to the members of the ROCOR Synod that since the Serbian Patriarch German had chosen to serve as Chairman of the World Council of Churches, ROCOR should avoid joint prayer and service with him, while at the same time not making a major demonstration of the fact.[22]This act appears to have had some influence in Serbia: in 1971, Archimandrite Justin broke off relations with the Serbian patriarch, while retaining contacts with the other bishops.[23]When Fr. Justin died on March 25, 1979, the patriarch did not attend his funeral…

 

     In November, 1994 Bishop Artemije of Raska and Prizren, in a memorandum to the Serbian Synod, said that ecumenism was an ecclesiological heresy, and that the Serbs should withdraw from the WCC.[24]More recently, in 2005, he wrote: “The result of this participation [of the Serbs in the WCC] was reflected in certain material aid which the Serbian Orthodox Church periodically received from the WCC in the form of medicine, medical care and rehabilitation of some individuals in Switzerland, student scholarships, and financial donations for certain concrete purposes and needs of the SOC, such as the construction of a new building by the Theological School. We paid for these crumbs of material assistance by losing, on the spiritual plane, the purity of our faith, canonical consistency and faithfulness to the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church.

 

     “The presence of our representatives (and Orthodox representatives in general) at various and sundry ecumenical gatherings has no canonical justification. We did not go there in order to boldly, openly and unwaveringly confess the eternal and unchangeable Truth of the Orthodox Faith and Church, but in order to make compromises and to agree more or less to all those decisions and formulations offered to us by the non-Orthodox. That is how we ultimately arrived at Balamand, Chambésy and Assisi, which taken as a whole represent infidelity and betrayal of the Holy Orthodox Faith.”[25]

 

     Logically, in order to make his actions conform with his words, Bishop Artemije should have left the Serbian Synod. He did not, and remains in it to this day. Nevertheless, his words remain true, and constitute a clear condemnation of the position of the Serbian Church since its entry into the WCC in the 1960s.

 

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