Regarding a series of statements made in public by the President of Serbia, Mr. Aleksandar Vučić, in the last few days, in which the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, the 2020 liturgy and the like are repeatedly mentioned, while understanding his criticism of the worrying and shameful lack of compassion shown by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Montenegro towards the suffering of the Serbian people in Operation Storm by sending representatives of our country to the "celebration" of the anniversary of that ethnic cleansing, we feel a pastoral obligation to react to some political interpretations of church topics, leaving those political and ideological topics to politicians and ideologists.

It is a great harm to the unity of the church and the people, from the position of the President of Serbia, to wave very vague criticisms at the expense of the Church, mentioning, in the same breath and in almost the same sentence, that "we had ideas in the Church that were wicked and dangerous" and adding that "some" tried "to create an Orthodox Church in Montenegro", and that "Patriarch Irinej and the bishops" thwarted these attempts by "sensing in time what was at stake"! If we add to this Vučić's statement that "the processions in Montenegro began when they wanted an Orthodox Church in Montenegro, just to erase what was Serbian", then it seems to us that we are entering a zone of useless and harmful ambiguities, which could be tolerated by someone with less responsibility and importance in the public, but not by the President of Serbia.

With our best wishes and prayers to God that the political leaders of Serbia do their job for the progress of that state and its citizens, and that, as much as is in their power, they be of help and support to all Serbs, wherever they live and work, we must recall that we do not have a positive experience with political guidance and interpretations of church activities. Neither is this the job of politicians, nor does their uninvited interference in church affairs bring good to the state and the Church. In this sense, we consider it unacceptable that these confusing yet loud accusations about “wicked and dangerous ideas in the Church” are repeated continuously, and very unhealthy that they are, according to some rule, tied to the time of the liturgies in Montenegro in 2020, and that some allusions, unfinished and inaccurate, are directed towards “someone” who “tried” to do “something” with the Church in Montenegro.

In truth, we remind Mr. Vučić and the wider public that it was the believers of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, namely its four dioceses, bishops, clergy, monasticism and the faithful people (all of them as citizens of Montenegro or their representatives and intercessors before God), with the moral and spiritual help of the priests and believers of our local Church all over the world – who defended the Church from the attack of the then Montenegrin political leadership on church property and church integrity. By defending the church name, identity and property, they thereby defended the unity of the Serbian Orthodox Church. And exactly as it should have been: the phenomenon that attacked the civil and religious rights of the people and the clergy was responded to both civilly and spiritually. We did not allow politicians to have the main say even then, so the believers among the politicians understood this correctly, and there were also those who did not have the right to do so. We appreciate that if it had been according to the wishes and intentions of these others, the strength of the church's resistance to the anti-church policy of Milo Đukanović would not have been as great as it was, with God's help, nor would it have had the soul of a church movement that the people massively recognized and supported.

Therefore, "some" who worked against the unity of the Church in Montenegro, or rather - who had such intentions and ideas, are only and exclusively representatives of the then political leadership of Montenegro, who for that purpose passed that inappropriate and anti-civilizational law, towards the end of 2019. It should be said that it is difficult to recognize them in these latest statements by Vučić, and that the faithful people and the clergy are, to say the least, confused by such retroactive interpretations of the reasons for the launch of the 2020 procession. These "some" cannot, even in the most clumsy verbal allusions, have any connection with the leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, as some Belgrade tabloids once attributed to the late Metropolitan Amfilohije, which we hope was not President Vučić's oratorical intentions. However, we are reacting precisely because Mr. Vučić's statements are clearly full of ambiguities. And if the esteemed President of Serbia, by some chance, confuses the then synchronized action and work of the hierarchs, clergy and faithful people in Montenegro with non-existent church separatism, we remind him that this is an activity that, in an organizational and operational sense, decisively contributed to the successful leadership and completion of the prayer and protest march of the citizens of Montenegro. This and such a march contributed to the amendment of the distorted Law on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Legal Status of Religious Communities and the signing of the Fundamental Agreement between the State of Montenegro and the Serbian Orthodox Church.

None of this is written for the reason that we are making political work more difficult for the President of Serbia, and even less to justify it to him.

Because neither one nor the other would be in accordance with the dignity of the Serbian Orthodox Church, for whose unity and glory the clergy and faithful people of Montenegro have wholeheartedly sacrificed throughout history, and especially in recent decades.

FROM THE METROPOLITAN OF Montenegro and the Littoral