NEWS FEATURE: Serb-American: `I feel like my lover is killing my mother’

c. 1999 Religion News SERVICE BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ As a U.S. citizen born and bred in Yugoslavia and now once again living here, Father Srboljub Bulic is in anguish over the NATO bombing. “I feel like my lover is killing my mother,”said Bulic, borrowing a line from an emigre Serb artist who recently returned from […]

c. 1999 Religion News SERVICE

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ As a U.S. citizen born and bred in Yugoslavia and now once again living here, Father Srboljub Bulic is in anguish over the NATO bombing. “I feel like my lover is killing my mother,”said Bulic, borrowing a line from an emigre Serb artist who recently returned from the West.

As a seasoned clinical psychologist who came to Belgrade to help set up a first-of-its-kind church counseling service, Bulic is witnessing how his patients are holding up psychologically to the nightly attacks that rain destruction, rattle windows and cut off electricity and water.”The prevailing feeling is disbelief, hurt and anger at the people who are doing this,”said Bulic, 66, who holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh.”They ask me, `How long will this last? How long will I have to go to the air raid shelter every night?'” As a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church who led parishes from Bisbee, Ariz., to Buffalo, N.Y., Bulic is steeped in the pluralism and tolerance of American religious life. But in Belgrade, his church is often regarded as the sole claimant to Serbs’ spiritual lives, a bastion against Western Christian innovations. “We teach them to be not so narrow-minded in their belief,”said Bulic, referring to the clients of the Orthodox Pastoral Counseling Center he co-founded in 1997 and which includes two priests on its staff.”We teach them that they need to know about Jesus Christ, not just St. Sava,”he said, speaking of Serbia’s most important religious figure and credited with founding the national church in the 13th century.


During a recent interview in his high-ceilinged central Belgrade office hung with the portraits of past church leaders, Bulic, wearing a black cassock, spoke for several hours in a soothing, rumbling voice about his life, pausing occasionally to light up a Dunhill cigarette.

Bulic became a priest in 1954, at a time when the Serbian Church was suffering intense repression under Tito’s Communist regime that ultimately claimed the lives of 400 clergy. He worked for a couple years in a parish before being arrested for”expressing criticism of the regime”while performing his obligatory military service. Convicted in 1956 of”disseminating enemy propaganda,”Bulic served a three-year prison sentence.

Shortly after his release from prison, he fled across the border to Austria where he was granted political asylum. From there he made his way to Bedford, England where he worked in a Serbian parish and, to make ends meet, a factory. In 1964, he moved to the United States, living with his wife and two daughters in a series of small towns with Serbian churches before settling in the Pittsburgh area. There, Bulic spent 10 years working as a full-time psychologist and a part-time priest before departing for Belgrade in 1994.

His ties to the United States are still strong. Bulic said he e-mails regularly with this family and waits for their telephone calls to Belgrade each Sunday at 3 p.m. Once the U.S. Embassy advised expatriates to evacuate and it became clear NATO bombing was nearly certain, Bulic said he agonized over whether to return to the United States.”Where should I be? With my family or with my people? These are the people who gave me the basic human and religious sense of who I am and what I am,”Bulic said, adding that the other side of the argument was also compelling.”Do I have the right to deprive my family of ever seeing their father, and grandfather and husband again? I am still dealing with that.” Ultimately, his commitment to the counseling center won out. Staffed by volunteers and offering its services for free, the center’s waiting list has remained at between three and four weeks, despite the increased difficulty and danger for patients to reach it.

As lines for sugar, cooking oil and cigarettes grow longer, NATO planes once again target power stations and unemployment soars with the destruction of factories, Bulic said he has seen his patients’ mental health deteriorate. “The most immediate concerns of human beings are for food and shelter,”said Bulic.”If I don’t have that, it will affect me. It is going to create additional emotional disturbances because I cannot live in peace with myself or my family because I cannot feed myself or my family. The emotional tolerance will break; it will take the form of depression and phobias.” On a recent day, Bulic’s patients included a 19-year-old boy having trouble reconciling his lifestyle with being a Christian, a 42-year-old geneticist with marital problems and a Serbian refugee from Bosnia-Herzogovina suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

As for Bulic’s prognosis for the long-term psychological health of the Serb people once the conflict ends, he said much will have to do with how peace is achieved.”It all depends on how it ends up: whether people have a sense of having suffered the pain, the anguish for a just cause,”said Bulic.”I have to be pessimistic and say that the recovery of the country will take a long time.” Bulic, too, will need some time to come to terms with what has happened.”As a young man I believed strongly in democracy and freedom. I paid for that when Tito was ruling this country so mercilessly,”said Bulic, referring to his prison term.”Even after living in the U.S. for a long time, I can’t understand or believe this is happening. Greater evil does not eliminate smaller evil … I hope and pray that the Lord allows me time to explain to my three grandsons _ American Serbs _ what is happening here.” DEA END RNS

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