Montenegro Metropolitanate Pushes Back on Vucic

The Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral of the Serbian Orthodox Church announced on August 5 that remarks by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic about the church in Montenegro and the 2020 protests, known as the litije, were causing confusion and damaging church and national unity. The statement came in response to comments Vucic made at a gathering in Mrkonjic Grad, in Republika Srpska, and was released in the evening, around 6:12 pm.

The same day, the Diocese of Budimlja and Niksic issued a statement with the opposite view. That diocese sent the Serbian president “sincere gratitude to the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, for his continuous attention, care and deep understanding.” Two statements on the same day, from two organizational units of the same church, showed that reactions inside the Serbian Orthodox Church to Vucic’s words were far from unanimous.

What Vucic Said in Mrkonjic Grad

The Serbian president spoke about ideas within the church that he called wicked and dangerous, and mentioned polycentric ideas about federalizing and confederalizing the Serbian church. In the same address, he linked the start of the 2020 protests in Montenegro to attempts to create an Orthodox church in Montenegro without the word Serbian attached to it.

In the opening of its statement, the Metropolitanate said it understood Vucic’s criticism of Montenegro’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs over sending a representative to mark the anniversary of Operation Storm. After that caveat came the reason for the statement itself: the Metropolitanate said it felt a “pastoral obligation to respond to certain political interpretations of church matters, leaving political and ideological issues to politicians and ideologues.”

The Response from Cetinje Monastery

The Metropolitanate’s central objection concerns the form of Vucic’s remarks, which it says were left unfinished and without names attached.

“It does great damage to church and national unity for the president of Serbia to wave around very vague criticism of the Church, saying in the same breath, almost in the same sentence, that ‘the Church had ideas that were wicked and dangerous,’ and then adding that ‘some’ tried ‘to create an Orthodox Church in Montenegro.’”

The Metropolitanate also said it has had no positive experience with political direction or interpretation of church affairs, adding that this is not a job that belongs to politicians. It called it unacceptable that accusations about “wicked and dangerous ideas in the Church” keep recurring and, as if by some rule, keep getting tied to the time of the protests.

Who Defended the Church in 2020, According to the Metropolitanate?

The answer is explicit: not politicians. The Metropolitanate recalls that church property and church integrity were defended by believers of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, the four dioceses there, the bishops, the clergy, the monastics and the faithful people.

“By defending the church’s name, identity and property, they thereby defended the unity of the Serbian Orthodox Church as well. And they did it exactly the way it needed to be done: the response to something that came down on the civil and religious rights of the people and the clergy was both civic and spiritual at the same time. Even then we did not let politicians take the lead, and believing people among the politicians understood that correctly, though there were also some who did not like it.”

The “some” who worked against church unity, the statement goes on, were solely representatives of Montenegro’s political leadership at the time, who passed the disputed law in late 2019. The Metropolitanate explicitly rejected any suggestion that the remarks referred to the leadership of the church in Montenegro, noting that such claims were previously published by certain Belgrade tabloids, which attributed them to the late Metropolitan Amfilohije.

The Chronology Behind the Dispute

Montenegro’s parliament passed the law on freedom of religion in late 2019, the protests began in early 2020, the disputed provisions were amended that same year, and the Fundamental Agreement between the state of Montenegro and the Serbian Orthodox Church was signed in 2022. Throughout that period, the church in Montenegro acted as an independent party, without mediation from Belgrade, and it is precisely on that point that the Metropolitanate now rejects any retroactive interpretation.

That is why the closing part of the statement carries the sharpest tone, even though it contains no insult. The Metropolitanate stressed that none of it was written to make the Serbian president’s political work harder, and even less to justify itself to him, since neither would be in keeping with the church’s dignity.

The open question after this day is not whether the dispute will escalate, but who speaks for the Serbian Orthodox Church when two of its units, hours apart, send opposite messages to the same man. The Assembly of the Serbian Orthodox Church holds its regular session in May, and until then every new statement from Belgrade about the church in Montenegro feeds into a debate that is already underway.