Patriarch Pavle of Serbia Dies




Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, died today, Sunday 15 November, after a long illness. He was 95. Patriarch Pavle led the Church through its recovery after the fall of communism and during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s called for peace and reconciliation.
The announcement from the Serbian Church stated simply: "Sunday November 15, 2009, at 10.45 at the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade, after receiving the Sacrament, Archbishop of Pec, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovac, Patriarch Pavle of Serbia reposed in the Lord".

Our priest-in-charge of St Mary's Belgrade, the Revd Robin Fox, is the Archbishop of Canterbury's Apokrisiarios (personal representative) to the Serbian Patriarchate. Fr Fox informs us that the Serbian government has declared Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week as national days of mourning. It is likely that the funeral will be this Thursday in the Rakovica monastery in Belgrade. Patriarch Pavle gave strong personal support to the Anglican community in Belgrade. His friendship to our Church is beautifully symbolised by his permission to St Mary's Anglican congregation to celebrate Christmas Eve midnight mass in the chapel in the Patriarchate itself.

There are over 7 milion members of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Its Holy Synod will be responsible for choosing a successor to the Patriarch, normally after 40 days of official mourning.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with the saints: where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Comments

  1. Srebrenica Genocide20 November 2009 at 04:04

    PATRIARCH PAVLE I, SUPPORTER OF KARADZIC AND MLADIC, ESCAPES MORTAL JUDGMENT

    After hearing Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle I, who has just died in his 96th year, praised as an “ecumenist” by the Pope and a “man of peace” by the German Catholic Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has expressed regret that the Serbian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch has escaped mortal judgment.

    GfbV/STP President Tilman Zülch observed that “Pavle maintained very close and friendly relations with the two major Bosnian Serb war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic during the time when they were imprisoning more than 200,000 Bosnian Muslims and Catholics in concentration and detention camps and 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women were being systematically raped”. The Patriarch remained silent as Serbian troops commanded by the two war criminals destroyed centuries-old mosques and madrassas (a total of 1186) and over 500 Catholic churches and other religious buildings.

    Throughout Serb-occupied Bosnia only a single mosque was left standing. Pavle, who conferred his blessing on the war criminals on a number of occasions, later sought to gloss over his support for genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina later with vague declarations in support of peace. Pavle’s macabre involvement is illustrated by the photograph above which shows him blessing Radovan Karadžić (currently before the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague) and Ratko Mladić (protected for years by the Serbian authorities and the Serbian Army).


    “We are still waiting for Archbishop Zollitsch, a child survivor of a Tito concentration camps where thousands of Danube Swabian women and children perished, to show some respect at least for the victims of Sarajevo and Srebrenica”, Zülch added.

    Srebrenica genocide
    http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com

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