COLUMN, KOVAČEVIĆ: Not My Patriarch! Because my Patriarch would never slander his people in Moscow…

I may need the counsel of a theologian—someone well-versed in the canons of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Because after Patriarch Porfirije’s speech yesterday in the Kremlin, I’m genuinely uncertain whether I can still consider myself a member of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Simply put, I am ashamed of its current spiritual leader.

A patriarch who travels to Moscow only to defame the majority of his own people—especially the most valuable, intelligent segment among them—is no true patriarch. He is a nobody, a tattered cassock flapping in the northern wind like dirty laundry on a line.

A patriarch is supposed to embody love, compassion, and justice. He must feel, with every heartbeat and breath, what burdens his people, what injustice suffocates them. Patriarch Pavle was like that—a man who once broke through police cordons not with force, but with processions and prayers.

But this one—this patriarch—I feel he would rather send the police against his own faithful. Against the youth who carry Serbian flags and icons across the country and Europe like Christ bearing His cross. Against those who sing Saint Sava’s hymns and who, by divine grace (for I can find no other explanation), are reconciling with their Muslim brothers after decades of hate.

Vaša svetosti, bruka i sramota. pic.twitter.com/kXTdJUFqBb
— Stevanović Vladimir (@VladimirStev) April 22, 2025

And the worst part? He can’t even look these young people in the eye. Instead, like a snitch, he runs to the Kremlin and denounces them, calling them traitors, foreign agents, the vanguard of some imagined “colored revolution.”

All while Putin looks at him across the table, smiling, perhaps wondering, What did that nation do to deserve a man like this at its helm?

Let me leave you with one final, telling sketch of this patriarch—who is, in truth, no patriarch at all. Because a real patriarch inspires reverence and awe. This one? He inspires nausea.

A few months ago, the Patriarchate’s official website published an anonymous text accusing students from several universities of living in “parallel worlds” and promoting an “anti-Saint-Sava, anti-Christian, and anti-Serbian concept of life.”

But once public outrage erupted, the man who wears the crown of Saint Sava quickly distanced himself from the text. He blamed it on a subordinate—a scapegoat offered to absorb the wrath of the people.

And if anyone fell for that ruse, if any Serb swallowed that bait, I can say with confidence: no one is fooled anymore. No deception, no manipulation from this faded cassock will work again.

If such a man deserves the throne of Saint Sava, then I do not deserve to be part of that church.

Amen.