Patriarch Pavle: head of Serbian Orthodox Church
His Holiness Patriarch Pavle
November 18, 2009
Timesonline Article
Visibly devout, humble, diminutive and plain-speaking, Patriarch Pavle led the Serbian Orthodox Church through very difficult years.
On taking office in December 1990 he was thrown immediately into the maelstrom of Serbian and wider Yugoslav politics as the old communist state began to be pulled apart on ideological and ethnic lines.
Pavle’s long life — at 95, he was the oldest patriarch of any of the Orthodox Churches — mirrored the changing fate of his nation through the 20th century. He was born Gojko Stojcevic in 1914 to a peasant family in the village of Kucanci in Slavonia, then part of Austria-Hungary.
Orphaned at a young age, he was brought up by an aunt who became a substitute mother for him. “When I die I will meet her first and only then all the others,” he declared. After the village school, he studied in Tuzla before going on to school in Belgrade as a teenager. Despite a preference for technical subjects and low marks in catechism, he entered the Orthodox seminary in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in 1930.
Six years later he transferred to Belgrade University, initially in the medical faculty and then the theological faculty. Before the Second World War he served as secretary to the Minister of Church Affairs. When war broke out he joined the army medical corps. During the Nazi occupation he returned to Slavonia before heading back to Belgrade, where he was assigned to clear ruined buildings.
The future patriarch spent the rest of the war in several monasteries, teaching refugee children amid the Bulgarian occupation. He was found to be suffering from tuberculosis and was told that it would kill him.
Once war was over and his health had recovered, he entered Blagovestenje monastery, taking the monastic name Pavle, and was tonsured a monk in April 1948. He then moved to the Raca monastery in western Serbia, during which time he also served as a teacher at the seminary in the Kosovan town of Prizren. From 1955 to 1957 he gained a doctorate in New Testament and Liturgy at the Theological Academy in Athens.
In May 1957 Pavle was consecrated Bishop of Raska and Prizren (bishops are chosen from among monks not from the married parish clergy). His new diocese covered southern Serbia (including the Sandzak) and Kosovo, areas with large Muslim and other non-Orthodox minorities.
Pavle worked hard to build and restore churches, despite the obstacles from the communist authorities. He was assiduous in visiting his flock throughout the diocese. He also found time to write and lecture.
But it was his election as Archbishop of Pec, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovci and Patriarch of Serbia in December 1990 that thrust him into the national spotlight. His election was controversial — Patriarch German was ailing and unable to fulfil his functions, but many felt that the job of patriarch was for life and it was wrong to elect a successor while he was still alive.
Pavle was an unexpected choice — the other two of the required three candidates were seen as obvious choices, while he was not. But he was the one picked by lot. His first statement on his election was typically humble, describing himself as “weak” and asking for help from his fellow bishops and from God to carry out his role.
As communism was falling across Central and Eastern Europe, Pavle had the joy of welcoming back into the fold the Free Serbian Diocese, formed in the US in the 1960s by those dissatisfied with the accommodations that his predecessor had been forced to make with the Belgrade authorities.
Less happily, Pavle made almost no headway in restoring canonical ties with the breakaway Macedonian Orthodox Church. It had been set up in the 1950s with Yugoslav state backing but nevertheless represented a strong current of Orthodox opinion in Macedonia that resented any idea of control from Serbia.
But Pavle’s biggest challenge was to deal with the political situation amid a collapsing Yugoslavia. When, in January 1992, the Vatican recognised the independence of Slovenia and Croatia (in the wake of recognition by several other European states), Pavle wrote to the leaders of the other Orthodox Churches. “The origin of the conflict in Yugoslavia and in the Balkans and not only in this region is the insistence with which the Church of Rome considers the Balkans, which are inhabited mainly by people of Orthodox religion, as a missionary territory,” he complained.
Yet during a proposed visit by Pope John Paul II to Sarajevo and Belgrade in autumn 1994, Pavle was among the minority on the Holy Synod of Bishops who backed it. The Vatican had to abandon the visit.
Pavle’s statements as war overtook the region oscillated between heartfelt pleas for peace and backing for ethnic Serbian warmongers and warlords (he was not the only religious leader to find it hard to address genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by their own side).
In November 1992 he joined the Catholic Archbishop Vinko Pulic of Sarajevo and the Muslim Reis-ulUlema of Bosnia, Jakub Selimoski, in Zurich, where they jointly condemned inter-ethnic hatred. At the same time Pavle was close to the Bosnian Serb leadership, especially Radovan Karadzic, even spending one Christmas in their self-declared capital of Pale.
But it was his relation with Slobodan Milosevic that caused the most difficulty. Initially supportive of the Serbian strongman, Pavle later backed away. After being manipulated by Milosevic into calling on students on the streets of Belgrade in March 1991 to abandon their protest, Pavle was jeered. But he had the humility to return soon afterwards to apologise publicly to the crowds.
In 1997 he again took part in anti-government street protests, but in 1999 he was condemned for agreeing to take part in the Government’s Republic Day celebration, in which he praised Milosevic. Again, Pavle was pressured into apologising.
The Patriarch, who recognised that Milosevic had done little for the Church and caused great harm to the Serbs, particularly over his beloved Kosovo, found it easier to deal with post-Milosevic governments.
Kosovo troubled him deeply. Although he had been assaulted by ethnic Albanian youths there in 1989 (an attack for which he needed hospital treatment), Pavle was not — like many other Serbs — consumed by disdain and hatred, even when dozens of ancient churches and monasteries were destroyed by ethnic Albanians out of revenge and hatred. He recognised that Albanians were the overwhelming majority. He argued that Serbs must remain there and try to outbreed the Albanians.
Ironically, just as his predecessor had been controversially ousted because of ill health, Pavle too would suffer this indignity in 2007, only to have the decision messily overturned. After two years of ill health, he died in Belgrade’s Military Medical Academy.
Pavle’s direct statements won general respect in Serbia, even though they were often naive, inconsistent and incoherent. Public respect was for the devout simple monk, overwhelmed — like the population — by often traumatic developments that he had no way of controlling. A citizen of successive collapsing states, he saw his role as preserving the spiritual and cultural heritage of his nation in a turbulent world.
Patriarch Pavle (Gojko Stojcevic), Serbian Orthodox Patriarch, was born on September 11, 1914. He died on November 15, 2009, aged 95
