COLUMN, KOVAČEVIĆ: Your Holiness, the “Krasnaya Revolution” has won, it is time for you to retire to a monastery…

Three days have passed since the victory of the “Krasnaya Revolution” in Serbia, and there has been neither sight nor sound of Serbian Patriarch Porfirije.

He is nowhere to be seen to speak out or congratulate the children who, in their struggle for justice and freedom, walked across Serbia from one end to the other several times over, their feet covered in blood, carrying crosses, icons and church flags at the head of the procession.

Along the way, bishops and priests across Serbia shut the doors of churches and monasteries to them, refusing to provide them with overnight shelter, all following the example of their leader, who, while sitting on a couch beside Putin in the Kremlin, called them colored revolutionaries backed by Western centers of power seeking to eradicate Serbian culture and identity.

He took revenge on the only person who offered them shelter, Bishop Justin, first discrediting him before the Church court, then relieving him of his duties in the Diocese of Žiča, and finally forcing him into retirement.

All right, someone might say, it was not he but the Church Assembly. But the truth is that Porfirije, with the assistance of the gray eminence operating under the coded name and presenting himself as Irinej of Bačka, has turned the highest body of the Serbian Orthodox Church into exactly what Vučić has turned the state into — his own little private singing club, whose members wear cassocks instead of ties and drive Audis.

Through his actions, his ambiguous and relativizing rhetoric, and even more through his inaction, he has made the Church repulsive to a large part of Serbia. They did not like seeing the spiritual father of a nation allow certain bishops to call their children Ustaše and foreign mercenaries, and then remain silent — a silence that, in his case, sounded like approval and endorsement — as Serbian youth and the country’s future were crushed in the streets, squares and police cells.

All it would have taken was a single word from him for a policeman to feel a lump in his throat, for his hand to tremble as he raised his baton against a helpless 15-year-old secondary school student lying on the concrete.

A single gesture from him would have been enough to change the situation, to calm things down, to prevent bloodshed, broken jaws and displaced kidneys. Just as the late Patriarch Pavle once led the Saint Sava Day processions through a police cordon on Kolarčeva Street.

KRASNAYA REVOLUTION: The Patriarch presented Serbian children to Putin as foreign mercenaries

But from Porfirije, we saw neither words nor deeds. Only silence… and that cynical smile.

His record as guardian of the throne of Saint Sava has been, to put it mildly, catastrophic. Over the past ten years, Porfirije has driven more people away from the Church than the Turks converted to Islam over five centuries.

He has turned the Church into a “ćaci” business that strikes deals with the criminal regime, builds apartments and dismantles the country’s education system, establishing a parallel university at the height of the greatest uprising by students and their professors not just in Serbia, but in the entire world.

Now, following the magnificent victory achieved by those very students and professors, Porfirije Perić can no longer be the patriarch of a people whose majority considers him unworthy of that position.

I know, someone will say: The patriarch is not elected by the people, the Church is not the state, it has its own canons and rules, the position of patriarch cannot be revoked, and so on.

I do not think anyone should remove him from office.

He should leave on his own, if he cares about the Church and Orthodoxy as much as he often claims. He should step down, retire, find himself a pleasant monastic cell in some monastery, where he can go to confession frequently.

By doing so, he would also disprove the malicious rumors claiming that he prefers worldly life to spiritual life, and that the monastic rule has never been dear to him.

It would be better for everyone, including him, to remember him as a monk and a penitent rather than as a patriarch whom the people turned their backs on in the streets.

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