Croatian orthodox church?

By Nikola Maric

nikola_maric

As if we did not have enough problem with the state of  Serbian Orthodox Church we are finding  out that there is a brand new  “Croatian Orthodox Church”  being formed in Zadar. No, Croatians did not leave their Catholic Church to embrace Orthodoxy. Our Serbs living in Croatia do not want to be Serbs any more. Instead, they chose to become what many Croatians always called the Serbs living in the State of Croatia: Orthodox Croatians, or, if you prefer, Croatian Orthodox!. No matter how you slice it Croats would rather swallow poison than pronounce the word “Serb”.

I recall a very good friend of my wife, a Croatian lady from Sarajevo, who did many good deeds to help my wife in her early days in America. Later, when I arrived to these parts and married this young lady from Banat, the Croatian lady extended her hospitality to both of us. In a casual conversation she would often brag how she had many Orthodox friends. At first I was not sure if she was talking about Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, or some other people of Orthodox faith, but when she introduced me to her guests as an Orthodox from Yugoslavia I just could not take it any more. I told her that I was a Serb from Yugoslavia.

- Say it, Mrs. Ivkanec: SERB!-, said I.

She was a decent lady, very decent, and a very good friend, but there was something that prevented her from calling me Serb, perhaps her upbringing in Croatian circles, perhaps her ignorance, I was not sure which? Add to this some hundreds of thousands of other Croats who just never wanted to see Serbs living in “their” state, and you have this “new” Croatian Orthodox Church in Zadar, a coastal town of Dalmatia. This “new” Church was allegedly initiated by a certain “Abbot Yelisay who expressed a hope“ that the Croatian State as well as the entire public in general will accept the renewal of the “Croatian Orthodox Church” as a spiritual need of the part of their inhabitants and recognize it as a “main and primary Orthodox Church in Croatia.”

Prior to this event, a few months earlier, they formed a so called Croatian Orthodox Community, whose goal was to attract as many Croatian men and women as possible in order to remind them how these brotherly Christian people cohabitated in the so called “Independent State of Croatia”! And this is just too much to swallow, even from Croatians. Has this Serbian maniac Yelisay gone mad? Has he ever heard of Jasenovac, Stara Gradiska, and other exterminating camps run by the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945?

...

Read rest of column in Liberty

Штампа Ел. пошта

  • SPC
  • Dijaspora
  • Svetigora
  • Save Displaced Serbs
  • Srbi za Srbe
© 2024 Портал Српске народне одбране у Америци. Сва права задржана.
Joomla! је слободан софтвер објављен под GNU General Public License.