Patriarch of the past

The Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle, who has been interned in a hospital in Belgrade for the past year, requested the right to resign in October. The Church Assembly has nevertheless decided that he should remain in office for life. Ethnos newspaper sees a political dimension to the power struggle in the Orthodox Church: "The Church Assembly has been forced to retain Pavle because it could not agree on a successor. ... Pavle belongs to the past. ... He became patriarch when the nationalists came to power together with former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. ... Apart from the large influence the Serbian Church has in the country's political life ... its political power also rests on a very significant fact: ... Not just Serbians in Serbia, but also those in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia belong to the Church. For this reason it is of great importance to the US and the EU that a pro-Western patriarch should be elected."

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