Patriarch Pavle of Serbia falls asleep in the Lord
His Holiness Pavle, Archbishop of Pec, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovac, and Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Serbia, reposed on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at the age of 95.
The Patriarch was born Gojko Stojcevic on September 11, 1914 at Kucanci, a village which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire but is now in Croatia. After attending school in Belgrade, he studied at a seminary in Sarajevo. During the Second World War he took refuge in a monastery at Ovcar, and then returned to Belgrade, where he briefly worked in the construction industry. In 1946 he became a monk at Blagovestenje monastery in Ovcar, taking the name Pavle (Paul). For 11 years he lived as a monk at the Raca Monastery in central Serbia, and from 1950 lectured at the Prizen Seminary in Kosovo. From 1955 to 1957 Pavle studied Orthodox Theology at the University of Athens, where he discovered a particular gift for liturgics – he was later to become one of the most prolific liturgical writers in the Serbian Church.
On completion of his studies he was elected Bishop of Raska-Prizren, the diocese which includes Kosovo. He remained in that post for 33 years until his election as Patriarch on December 1 1990. Pavle had by this time experienced at first hand the hatred that was to consume the former Yugoslavia: in 1989 he had been beaten up by a group of Albanian youths in Kosovo, receiving injuries that required three months’ hospital treatment.
Predrag Miodrag recently wrote:
“He is very accessible. When his sister was alive he frequently walked to her house by foot. He in general like to go about by foot, without an escort. Anyone can approach him and speak with him. He receives visitors every day at his residence. People go to him with their needs and their small questions, and he finds a comforting word of consolation for each of them.
“He gets up very early and, when everyone is still sleeping, he serves the Liturgy, praying for the entire Serbian people. All Serbia is in his heart. He is small in stature, but great in spirit. He has thin fingers, but when he forms these fingers into the sign of the cross legions of demons flee; he wears thin cotton vestments, but beneath these vestments is hidden the soul of a brave warrior. The people say: ‘This is our angel, who protects and defends us.’”
The Milosevic regime was to lose the support of the Patriarch and his Church, and Pavle made efforts to find common ground between the various opposition groups. At a synod meeting in June 1999 – after NATO had ended 11 weeks of bombing – the Serbian Church called for Milosevic to stand down. Six months earlier, in a sermon in Belgrade, the Patriarch had declared that the struggle for Kosovo, where Albanians outnumbered Serbs by nine to one, would be decided as much by demographics as by the outcome of war. “Who has the most sheep in the field, that is his field,” he said, adding: “Multiply yourselves.” Following attacks by the Albanian population, some 80,000 Serbs had fled Kosovo – out of a population of around 200,000 – and Pavle urged the remaining Serbs to stay in the province. “If this trend is not stopped immediately,” he said in June 1999, “the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo will be complete.”
Pavle remained popular among his flock, who admired his humility. He cobbled his own shoes, and tended to use public transport – he did not like to travel by car, saying: “I will not purchase one until every Albanian and Serbian household in Kosovo and Metohija has an automobile.”
The Patriarch supervised the first official Serbian translation of the New Testament, which was published in 1984.
Patriarch Pavle had been suffering from ill health since last year, and although he was nominally still head of the Church, his duties had been carried out by Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro.
Bishop Lavrentije of Sabac said the Patriarch’s death is no reason for sadness because the Patriarch always had sought to reach out to God. Lavrentije said Pavle &ldquohas been more in heaven’ than on earth.
“The Serbian people now have someone to represent them before God better than anyone else,” he said.
May his memory be eternal!