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Serbia`s Patriarch Pavle Relieved of Duties
Patriarch Pavle, who headed the Serbian Orthodox Church during the
Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, has been relieved of his duties due to
ill health, a church statement said on Saturday.
The 93-year-old was taken to hospital in November 2007. Before that
he had held occasional services and speeches, mostly on the subject
of Kosovo, Serbia's Orthodox heartland where the Albanian majority
declared independence in February.
A statement on the church's website said Pavle's powers and duties
have been taken over by the Holy Synod, the church's top body. The
oldest bishop, Amfilohije, would act as Synod president.
Pavle was born as Gojko Stojcevic in Kucanci, then part of the
Austro-Hungarian empire and now in Croatia. He rose up the ranks of
the Serb Orthodox Church in the 1950s when religion in socialist
Yugoslavia was neither banned nor encouraged.
In 1957, he became bishop of the diocese covering Kosovo, by then
home to an Albanian majority. He spoke of the hard****ps faced by the
province's Serbs, and was once attacked and beaten.
The fate of Kosovo remained his top concern after he became Patriarch
in 1990 when Yugoslavia started breaking up under a tide of
nationalism partly fuelled by the growing competition of its
Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim faiths.
His critics say he failed to contain hardline bishops and priests,
who stoked Serb nationalism against Catholic Croats and Muslim
Bosnians and publicly blessed paramilitaries going on to kill, rape
and torture thousands in wars in Croatia and Bosnia.
Pavle never commented on any church ties to these groups and was at
the time regarded as a weak figurehead. His profile rose as he became
more vocal in politics, joining protests against autocrat Slobodan
Milosevic in 1996-97.
After Milosevic was deposed in 2000, Pavle's focus was again on
Kosovo, by then a United Nations protectorate. NATO bombed in 1999 to
expel Serb forces accused of atrocities against Albanian civilians
while fighting an insurgency.
Sup****ters put Pavle's popularity down to his modesty. He declined to
use a chauffer-driven car in the 1990s and preferred to take public
trans****t around the capital Belgrade.
Detractors say he allowed the church to slip into romantic
nationalism and failed to heal rifts with Orthodox populations in
Macedonia and Montenegro demanding their own separate church.
According to church law, a successor is elected by a secret vote at a
congress attended by at least two-thirds of the total 40 episcopes.
If two candidates have the same number of votes, a Patriarch is
chosen by drawing lots to the sounds of a liturgy invoking the Holy
Spirit.
Published: May 17, 2008 22:20h
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