The Bishop of Banat of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Nikanor, celebrated forty-one years of his episcopal service dressed in ceremonial vestments in the colours of the Serbian flag, complete with Serbia’s state coat of arms. The sticharion, epitrachelion, belt, cuffs, epigonation, sakkos and omophorion were all in tricolour shades.
Nikanor is, as old Montenegrins would say, totally unhinged on almost all questions of the political theology of Svetosavlje (*Saint Sava tradition). He speaks, thinks and behaves in the finest and most authentic tradition of the Serbian Orthodox Church (1921). He more or less hates everything that is not loyal to Serbdom and the macho-straight order of things. Three or four years ago, he even took on the despot himself, and as far as I understand, he is still popular among students.
The fact that Nikanor wears the Serbian flag can be cringe-inducing for any believing Orthodox Christian who goes to church because of Christ, but it is by no means an anomaly for the earthly administration of the Serbian franchise of the Eastern Orthodox Church. On the contrary, there is a certain brutal honesty in it.
However much my fellow citizens who say they are believers of the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral (MCP) may be angered by this — even when, for example, they live in Niksic or Berane, where the MCP has no ecclesiastical jurisdiction — the Serbian Orthodox Church was and remains the church of Serbia. Not necessarily Serbia as today’s state and its internationally recognised borders, but Serbia as a national and historical project.
Even when Serbia did not exist as a state, the Serbian Church preserved the national core of what would once again become Serbia. Just as the Montenegrin Church preserved the core of what would become modern Montenegro. The difference is that the Montenegrin ecclesiastical organisation was dissolved and absorbed into the Serbian one, while the Serbian Church survived as one of the most important guardians of the Serbian national idea.
The problem arises when the boundaries of the ecclesiastical and national community begin to be imagined as the borders of a state that still needs to be brought into alignment. We have already seen this attempt in the Balkans, and the last time it ended in widespread slaughter.
This brings us to ethnophyletism. When you elevate the nation to the altar and make belonging to a people the measure of orthodoxy, you move away from the very one in whose name you claim to speak.
Heresy, of course, is all around us. And if I already have to choose among heretics, I choose the grandson of a Greek priest from Ulcinj, who preached Christ a few days ago in a beautiful and, I would say, truthful interpretation, adding only a drop of his well-meaning and benign misanthropy. That sermon is much closer to Christ’s message to me than what various Nikanors preach to us, closing the “kingdom of heaven” to those who are not ethnically correct.
Many people in Montenegro want to go to church. To take part in the service. To light a candle. To hear God’s teaching in silence and remind themselves of how they should live according to Christ’s example. Not everyone wants to use going to church to express a political position or choose a side in Montenegro’s endless identity war. But if they are Montenegrins, many will find it difficult to feel at home in a church built by their ancestors that does not respect the country in which they live and its symbols.
What an incredible paradox. At Serbian Orthodox Church buildings in America, the flags of Serbia and the United States can stand side by side. At the cemetery in front of a Serbian church in San Francisco, one can even find a Montenegrin flag and the Montenegrin coat of arms. So, thousands of kilometres away from Montenegro, there is room for a Montenegrin symbol.
Only in Montenegro itself, on Montenegrin churches and monasteries, is there almost no room for it.
And symbols are by no means insignificant in our context. They clearly say who is welcome and under what conditions. If, on a church built by your ancestors, you see the flag of another country, while there is no place for the flag of the country in which that church stands, the message is hardly neutral.
And perhaps it will be precisely because of such messages that one day many will find it difficult to explain why they closed the doors of the church to people because of their flag, nation and name — if and when they stand before Christ.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect the views of the CdM editorial board)
