NEWS FEATURE: Belgrade’s archbishop: `Get rid of Milosevic’

c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ It isn’t hard to find the home of the archbishop and metropolitan of Belgrade, Franc Perko. His house, in the center of the city, is the one marked with a big, black swastika on the door and”NATO”in large Cyrillic letters. Dismissing it as”not important,”Perko has allowed the […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ It isn’t hard to find the home of the archbishop and metropolitan of Belgrade, Franc Perko. His house, in the center of the city, is the one marked with a big, black swastika on the door and”NATO”in large Cyrillic letters.

Dismissing it as”not important,”Perko has allowed the graffiti to remain throughout the two months of NATO bombing.


Perko, a Slovenian who heads the Yugoslav Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference, along with other Catholic clergy in the capital, say there has been no overt discrimination against the minority faith. Catholicism, like Protestant denominations, is perceived by the general public as a Western faith as opposed to the dominant Serbian Orthodox Church.

But unlike other leaders of religious minorities here, Perko, 70, is plainspoken in his analysis of the deadlock between NATO countries and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.”The key to stopping the bombardment is not in Brussels or Washington or New York. It is only here, in Belgrade,”said Perko, a ruddy-faced man with a booming voice.”It is necessary to get rid of Milosevic. That’s it. That’s it. We need to find someone else. How? I don’t know. It is just clear that Milosevic has fulfilled his purpose.” In Kosovo, the scene of NATO’s heaviest bombing and Serb ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians, Perko said the church has no regular contact with the local church leader, Bishop Marko Sopi in Prizren, or his 22 parishes which had served the 3 percent of Kosovo residents who were Catholics.”We know he is there. We know that,”said Perko, noting that telephone contact with the region is virtually impossible.”We don’t know how he is but we know he is there.” To his knowledge, Perko said, NATO bombs have struck only one Catholic structure _ a church in the Kosovo town of Djakovica that sustained minor damage in an attack on a Serb military position by NATO planes.

Nationwide, 350 priests are serving the 500,000 Catholics who make up 5 percent of Yugoslavia’s population. In his 12 years as Belgrade’s leading cleric, Perko said he has seen his flock in Belgrade dwindle from 34,000 to 10,000, primarily as part of the massive population shifts that came with the breakup of Yugoslavia. For example, predominantly Catholic Croats have left Serbia in large numbers while mostly Orthodox Serbs have done the same from Croatia.

One leading Belgrade priest, the Rev. Lorand Kilbertus, a Jesuit, called the period of fighting between Serbs and Croats which began in 1991 much more difficult on the city’s Catholics than the current war, which is rarely cast in religious terms. The fighting between Catholic Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs was viewed by most people in the Balkans as a religious conflict. “Then we were getting threatening phone calls, people saying things like, `Why are you still here?'”said Kilbertus, 71, a broad-shouldered man with heavy-framed glasses and slicked back white hair.

At his small St. Peter’s Church located in the courtyard of a block in the very center of Belgrade, Kilbertus said he has had to cancel two regular Sunday Masses as the number of parishioners has declined to 200 from 600. With electric outages and fuel shortages, public transport is crowded and erratic. And in a city which straddles the confluence of two rivers with bridges _ a favorite of NATO bombers _ parishioners are reluctant to travel from other parts of the city for fear of getting bombed or stranded, Kilbertus said.

Aside from prayer, Kilbertus has little hope Yugoslavia’s believers can have an impact on resolving the conflict.”When the guns shoot and the bombs explode, the human voice is nothing,”said Kilbertus, whose father, an ethnic German, disappeared in a Yugoslav concentration camp at the end of World War II.”I do not want to take revenge. The one who takes revenge always thinks he is the last one but it never stops.” Just as it infects political relationships in the Balkans, Kilbertus said an acute sense of history colors religious interaction as well. Referring to Serbian Orthodox grievances directed at Catholics, Kilbertus said,”They often mention what the Catholics did to the Orthodox, how Napoleon took Moscow, how the Crusaders sacked Constantinople.” Most Yugoslav Catholics are, at best, wary of the Serb nationalist politics of Milosevic because they themselves are usually members of ethnic minorities like Croats or Hungarians. Few, however, are willing to speak out publicly against the Yugoslav president.

The Rev. Anton Hocevar, for example, is the Slovenian rector of Belgrade’s Christ the King Church, which at 158 years of age is the city’s oldest Catholic parish. Hocevar, an energetic 80-year-old with a ready smile, said he has”nothing to say”by way of explaining the NATO bombing to his parishioners, some of whom lived through the German bombing of the city in 1941 and the Anglo-American air attacks of 1944.”My sermons are always about religion,”he said,”not politics.”


DEA END BROWN

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