Introduction
In 2018, as a prelude to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the long-awaited Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly was celebrated during the fragile truce time sometime between the Annexation of Crimea and the Invasion of 24 February 2022. Granted by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as the Primus of the Orthodox World, the Ukrainian autocephaly incited an immediate and harsh reaction by the Moscow Patriarchy, as well as – unsurprisingly – by the Russian state. Across the ages, the tomos of autocephaly – the solemn canonical recognition of a certain regional church as an independent one, used to be seen as an act of national emancipation as well. There is seldom an Orthodox nation without its own self-standing Church. The canonical recognition does not imply an official recognition coming from the state authority, however. Therefore, a dispute over autocephaly of a given Orthodox church has often closely related to ethnic conflicts and international crisis challenging secular character of any state involved.
It seems that the easiest way for a state to face such crises is to restrain from interfering with contentions that only ecclesial courts and canon law experts are competent to resolve. In such a way, the state treats all interested parties as equal before the law, proving its own religious neutrality. The legal form of such a political approach would be unconditional recognition and free registration of all religious communities equal in their rights and duties regardless of their (un)canonical status. Simple, but rarely opted for, this secular strategy is far from being a standard in contemporary liberal-democracies (Finke, Fox and Mataic Reference Finke, Fox and Mataic2017). Findings of a comparative survey of European states (Flere Reference Flere2010, 99–117; Robbers Reference Robbers2019) speak in favor of differentiated legal treatment of religious denominations without and those with official recognition, the latter, needless to mention, being usually labeled as traditional or dominant ones, with special benefits.
In sharp contrast to this contemporary experience, the 1953 Yugoslav Statute on the Legal Status of Religious Communities Footnote 1 (henceforth: the 1953 Statute) seemed worthy of scholarly investigation as its provisions stipulated free registration of all religious denominations in a people’s democracy that was commonly associated with an anticlerical law and order. Starting from 1953, a religious community was not required to ask for its official recognition, but only to formally declare its existence before the state authorities. In a revolutionary way, Yugoslav socialist state voluntarily broke-up all remaining institutional ties with religious communities that felt free enough to set their own autonomous rules. Yet, the Yugoslav idiocrasy slipped under the radar of historians so far. Losing sight of the bigger picture, Paul Mojzes (Reference Mojzes1992, 348) and Stela Alexander (Reference Alexander1979, 146) believed that the aforementioned 1953 Statute only broke the ground for further improvement of religious freedom.Footnote 2 Curiously, if not paradoxically, the 1953 Statute was adopted at the peak of state-sponsored anticlerical campaigns and followed interruption of diplomatic relations with the Holy See caused by the controversial Stepinac affair. Hence, the hypothesis of this article is that such apparently benevolent legislation might have had a less evident political purpose, the one that could be disclosed only through an in-depth analysis of a broader legal framework and the long-term political agenda of the Yugoslav socialist government. If the 1953 Statute together with similar regulations such as the 1945 Act on Civil Associations, Assemblies and other Public Manifestations (henceforth: the 1945 Act) effectively released the traditional churches from state custody, it also boosted dissident movements within them. Neutral in its form, this legislation was less impartial in its outcomes. In the long run, it produced social effects that revealed its ratio legis : the implementation of 1953 Statute left behind some losers and winners as a social blueprint of the legal politics it stood for. Not all of them are relevant for the purpose of this study focused on the illustrative case of the Serbian Orthodox Church, since the similar Catholic experience had already been exposed in Miroslav Akmadža’s and Jure Krišto’s writings, while the case of the Islamic Religious Organization of Yugoslavia was tackled in the seminal book The Balkan Idols by Vjekoslav Perica. On the other hand, well described in Radmila Radić’s two-volume monography State and Religious Communities 1945-1970, internal conflicts in the Serbian Orthodox Church – such as the one over canonical recognition of the Macedonian Orthodox Church or the one over activities of the Priests’ Alliance – have not been closely examined either within the framework of the relevant state legislation, or that pertaining to the internal evolution of the Church organization. Yet, as this study tries to show, they all make more sense only if perceived in conjunction.
Towards free registration – on losers and winners
Late in August of 1945, shortly before the elections for the Constituent Assembly took place, the Yugoslav legislators passed into law the Act on Civil Associations, Assemblies and other Public Manifestations.Footnote 3 The 1945 Act guaranteed citizens’ rights to initiate establishment of political, cultural, scientific, technic, sports or other civil associations, but conferred on the police the full discretionary power over their official recognition i.e., the final decision-making over the legality of these initiatives (Zečević Reference Zečević1968, 73-76; Petković Reference Petković1982, 92).Footnote 4 Designed rather to restrain than to guarantee freedom, the 1945 Act introduced administrative control over civil society subjecting some to severe criminal penalties, including a three years’ prison sentence for all those who dared to run unrecognized civil associations.Footnote 5 It perfectly reflected the Zeitgeist of the late 1940s and ‘Stalin-style’ governing relying on administrative coercion. Nevertheless, the effective implementation of the Act had shown the human face of socialism as well. Against all odds, it improved religious freedom by granting legal personality to some so-far unrecognized religious associations contesting the authority of the several traditional churches of Ancient Regime.Footnote 6 Not everyone was dissatisfied.
Legal framework
In the spring of 1953, Yugoslav Communists decided to disassociate religious communities from all other civil associations. Alongside the 1945 Act as a general law, they passed into law a Lex specialis entitled the Statute on Legal Status of Religious Communities which defined religious communities as legal persons under civil law. Footnote 7 The latter definition implied the marginalized influence and role of religion since the Yugoslav socialist legal system privileged the concept of a social legal person over the concept of a legal person under civil law. The main criterion of distinction between these two legal entities was in their respective property regimes. Whereas the latter was based on disfavored private ownership expected to eventually vanish, the former was based on social ownership as a core concept of Yugoslav socialism (Gams Reference Gams1956, 188).Footnote 8 Namely, social legal persons were those collective entities – companies, as well as public institutions – whose assets were in a nominal possession of a society as a whole, but entrusted to the workers’, aka employees’ self-management. The idea was to delegate decision-making processes to those directly concerned by them. Favorized by the state, social ownership was not the only form of possession over property in socialist Yugoslavia, though. In a restricted way and rather exceptionally, the government tolerated private initiative as well. Thus, a group of citizens in pursuit of strictly private goals of lesser importance could be registered as legal persons under civil law. As such, they were distinguished from civil associations such as sports clubs, professional organizations or cultural institutions grounded on individual enthusiasm, but with a recognized social aim and, therefore, subsidized by the state.Footnote 9 On the other hand, deprived of an acknowledged social purpose, a legal person under civil law was no more than a label reserved for a few ‘backward’ institutions on their way to extinction, such as remaining crafts shops and religious communities.Footnote 10
Verging on a stigma pertaining to churches, this second-rate legal status was paradoxically related to a lax registration procedure that allowed Yugoslav citizens to found religious communities in nearly complete freedom.Footnote 11 Unlike civil associations, that had to seek an official police permission in accordance with the 1945 Act, religious communities only had to inform a competent state authority – the federal state commission in charge for religious affairs – of their existence formally. The vocal absence of specific public records registering religious communities, the fact that such information was fairly informal and free of charge, as well as the fact that they could not be officially rejected (or dismissed) by any public authority, led to a conclusion that legal personality of religious communities in Yugoslavia was not the matter of an official recognition but only of a formal declaration.Footnote 12 After the constitutional reform of 1974 that turned the Yugoslav federation into a confederation composed of eight federal entities, each supplied with its own legislation, this unique federal legal framework was replaced with a series of eight statutes that did not deviate much from the earlier federal model. However, some of the federal entities’ legislation specified the aforementioned declaration procedure to some extent. As has already been noticed (Božić Reference Božić2020), southeastern Yugoslav republics and autonomous provinces were slightly more regulative than those in the Northwest. Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro delegated competencies over this procedure to the local police offices.Footnote 13 Vojvodina and Bosnia put municipal authorities, perceived as less demanding, in charge of it,Footnote 14 while Slovenia and Croatia kept this matter in competence of their respective religious affairs commissions.Footnote 15
This simplified model of formal declaration remained the legal standard in contrast with the longstanding practice of the Yugoslav Kingdom. Namely, prior to 1945, legal recognition of a specific religious denomination could be granted only by a legislative act produced by the state lawmaker – either through a parliamentary act or an act of the King’s sovereign will. Strictly limited to several traditional churches – such as the Serbian Orthodox or the Roman Catholic Church, along with a few religious minorities – primarily the Jewish and Muslim Community – legal recognition of religious denominations was a discrimination issue in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and its predecessor states. Thus, the great gainers of the socialist 1953 legal reform were small religious communities mostly of Protestant affiliation. Unrecognized and oppressed until then, these denominations could finally get emancipated. Put in the narrow historical context, this insight might suggest a plausible, yet unverified hypothesis regarding the political background of the 1953 lax legislation: deeply involved in an open conflict with the USSR and still strongly dependent on foreign support conditioned by further liberalization of Yugoslav law and order, Tito’s Yugoslavia might have passed into law the 1953 Statute as a concession to its Western partners (Lees Reference Lees1997; Bogetić Reference Bogetić2000).Footnote 16 Although the Yugoslav lawmaker felt the need to remove assumptions that the 1953 Statute had been elaborated in such a way only under Western pressure,Footnote 17 the evident lack of documented sources in favor of this hypothesis opens some perspective for another one: the lost monopoly of traditional churches made them the biggest losers in a political play hidden behind the law. The Yugoslav Government report following the 1953 Statute explicitly referred to liquidation of a discriminatory distinction between recognized and unrecognized religious communities as the aim of this legislation.Footnote 18 As such, the 1953 Statute surely went in favor of small non-traditional religious communities, but also approved ‘schismatic’ movements that cut into the body of traditional churches overtly opposing the new revolutionary regime. The early Yugoslav socialist state plan to establish a national Catholic Church independent from Rome, as well as its government’s apparent intention to legalize separatist movements within the Serbian Orthodox Church, could have been implemented more easily by loosening the legal recognition procedure. Moreover, even if the Government gave up the creation of a Yugoslav national Catholic Church soon afterwards, the long and exhausting conflict between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Yugoslav socialist government over independence of the Macedonian Orthodox Church has remained an intriguing testimony of the vexing socialist model of the State and the Church separation, with the relevant 1953 legislation in the midst of it all.
The macedonian orthodox church: From autonomy to autocephaly
It is still striking that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a revolutionary actor fighting for an internationalist and secular cause, was engaged with such a commitment in a decades long canonical conflict over emancipation of the Macedonian Orthodox Church (Palmer and King Reference Palmer and King1971). The explanation could be both a political and an ideological one. The socialist revolution in Yugoslavia ended in 1946 with the new Constitution that promoted a federal state concept as a solution to the so-called ‘national question’, i.e., a series of restless, harrowing ethnic conflicts that had eventually torn apart the prewar Yugoslav Kingdom. The 1946 Yugoslav Constitution turned a highly centralized monarchy under Serbian dominance into a multi-national federation with each of the South Slavic ethnic groups counting on its own federated state – so-called republic. By satisfying claims for ethnically based internal demarcation, this model relied on nationalist sentiments rather than denying them. From the Marxist perspective, this politics was justified inasmuch as it was striving for a higher goal – to suppress Serbian hegemony as a local-scale imperialism. Its implementation faced a peculiar problem: if it was relatively easy to (re)establish the statehood of once independent and confirmed nations such as the Croats, Serbs or Slovenians, it was way more difficult in the case of ethnicities such as Bosnians, Montenegrins or Macedonians, whose ‘national’ identity at the time was still unconsolidated. In other words, the Yugoslav constitution of 1946 created federated states for some yet to be nations. An ideological impetus urged a resolution of this paradox. Namely, according to the logic of historical materialism, the socialist revolution was meant to happen at the very end of world history, coming only after a long series of previous events and periods, including national state-building. There was no shortcut or bypass: a national revolution had to precede the socialist one. In the Marxist perspective, the national question, including the Macedonian one, asked to be resolved first. Although ideologically justified, the Communist agenda in favor of the Macedonian cause remained controversial in its means: in order to complete the Macedonian national identity-building process, the Yugoslav Government simply took to the well-known patterns by enlivening the linguistic, historical and religious Macedonian distinctiveness, including establishment of an independent national Orthodox Church. There were no peculiar socialist features in the given process: ethnicity-turning-nation remained the nationalists’ issue, and was a mindset that the Yugoslav Communists believed they could control and manipulate. This was a tightrope walk as any action in favor of a distinctive ethnic or religious identity, in this case Macedonian, was considered restrictive towards other identities, above all that of the Serbs.
Being victim of its neighbors’ long-lasting disputes over its native land, language identity and religious affiliation (Ljuljanović Reference Ljuljanović, Berezhnaya and Hein-Kircher2025), the Macedonian people finally got their national recognition due to Stalin’s interference in dispute between Yugoslav and Bulgarian Communists over the region in 1941: Macedonia returned under the jurisdiction of the former (Mitrovski, Glišić and Ristovski Reference Mitrovski, Glišić and Ristovski1971, 158-173),Footnote 19 eventually becoming one of the distinctive units of the future Yugoslav Federation.Footnote 20 Being of a weak institutional basis, the new socialist Macedonia was urgently resorting to its historical continuity in local traditions and organizations, such as the ancient Ohrid Orthodox Archbishopric. The latter was abolished in 1767 becoming canonically subdued under the jurisdiction of the Serbian Orthodox ChurchFootnote 21 as a stronghold of unbudging Serbian ethno-nationalism (Buchenau Reference Buchenau, Listhaug, Ramet and Dulić2011, Subotić Reference Subotić and by2019). Thus, the reestablishment of Ohrid Archbishopric with the blessing of the Serbian mother church was unlikely to happen. To foster the process, the Yugoslav government prevented the return of the exiled Serbian bishops to Macedonia at the end of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation. ‘Beheaded’ in such a way, the Orthodox Church in the region was left to indigenous priests and the faithful self-organized within the first National-Church Assembly that officially claimed reestablishment of the Ohrid Archbishopric as an independent Macedonian Orthodox Church in March 1945.Footnote 22 With a strong institutional support coming from both the Party and the Government, this enterprise was breaking the resistance of the Serbian Orthodox Church which considered this Macedonian initiative an act of schism, as well as a separatist movement against Serbian national interest.Footnote 23 The first major breakthrough took place in 1957, when the Serbian Holy Assembly of Bishops ( Sveti Arhijerejski Sabor ) finally allowed for the use of Macedonian as an official language of church administration and agreed upon appointment of indigenous clerics in vacant bishoprics in the region.Footnote 24 In October 1958, after a year of waiting in wain for the agreement implementation, the dissatisfied Macedonian priesthood organized another National-Church Assembly which declared the autonomous Macedonian Orthodox Church headed by a renegade Serbian bishop eager to help the Macedonian cause. Having faced this unilateral act as a fait accompli , the Serbian Assembly of Bishops had surprisingly approved it already in 1959. It was probably so because of the Macedonian decision to remain in canonical unity with the Serbian Church by keeping the Serbian Patriarch for their pontifex too.Footnote 25 Less than a decade later, this last bond would be broken as well. In 1967, Macedonian Orthodox Church proclaimed its autocephaly unilaterally. In reply, the Serbian Orthodox Church promptly broke off all official relations and started the canonical procedure against the rebellious Macedonian bishops. The matter reached no resolution. The Church Court in Belgrade had never had any hearings and no Macedonian faithful had ever been excommunicated (Puzović Reference Puzović1997, 350 and 351). On the contrary, by the late 1970s, the Serbian Orthodox Church renewed negotiations with the Macedonian church by staying open for liturgical communication with the Orthodox people in the region as if nothing had ever happened before.
Both the Macedonian insolent acts, as well as the Serbian mild resistance to them, can be understood only in conjunction with the relevant legal framework as an avenue of state interference with the affair. If there was no doubt that the manifest support of the Communist Party and the state financial assistance to the Macedonian Orthodox Church would have come anyway, it would surely have been way easier to invest it into – and have it spent by – an officially recognized church as a subject of legal duties and rights, including property related ones. Therefore 1953 Statute was an important milestone on the long path to financial and legal emancipation of the Macedonian Orthodox Church that has just been outlined. Moderate reaction of the Serbian high clergy, on the other hand, might disclose a refined sense of the episcopate for the Yugoslav Realpolitik. Rather than a result of institutional weakness, the indulgence of Serbian bishops regarding the issue of the Macedonian Church might have been a clever concession at a certain price the Socialist State was willing to pay: a growing autonomy in the interior Serbian Church organization and affairs.
Cost and benefits of self-governance on the rise
Unrecognized religious denominations were not the only beneficiarees of the new socialist legislation. The 1945 Act on Civil Associations, Assemblies and other Public Manifestations also granted visibility to some dissenting elements within the recognized traditional churches. Following the idea that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, the Socialist State allowed official recognition of the so-called religious association most often gathering rebellious priests contesting the authority of the high clergy with their reactionary attitude. Hence, the Communist resorted to the long-lasting animosity between the Bosnian Franciscans and the Catholic bishops of Sarajevo, Mostar and Banja Luka reluctant to cooperate with the Socialist State. Unlike Croatia proper where there were no strong Catholic priests’ associations with a large membership, the Yugoslav government could always count on a strong Bosnian priests’ association The Good Shepherd (in Serbo-Croatian, Dobri pastir ) composed mostly of dissatisfied Franciscans as a valuable and trusted ally in a long war of attrition with the unruly Catholic bishops of Yugoslavia (Akmadža Reference Akmadža2018, 26-30, 55 and 417-428).Footnote 26 There were asymmetrical experiences as well. For example, it is unlikely that the more cooperative leaders of the Islamic Religious Community of Yugoslavia (Perica Reference Perica2002, 74)Footnote 27 could have ever applied its 1952 decision on suppression of independent mystic dervish orders and their tekkes effectively without the state support. According to the 1945 Act, the police could always resort to its discretionary power to dismiss any demand for registration coming from Sufi orders, while the courts could impose penalties including imprisonment on their spiritual leaders – sheikhs, who dared run any of such unrecognized communities.Footnote 28 However, nothing sheds better light on the Law than the case of Serbian Orthodox Church torn between its unyielding episcopate and defiant priesthood.
Historical framework
A collegium of powerful bishops ruling sovereignly over a community of the faithful is a common yet not quite accurate perception of the present-day Serbian Orthodox Church and its leadership. Designed along the lines of an episcopalian and hierarchical model, it has experienced decentralized and democratic governance as well. A series of National-Church Assembles acting as supreme governing bodies gathering clergy and laics in key historical moments is a commonplace in Serbian past. On the other hand, the active role of its congregation in priests’ nominations and local church governing has almost been forgotten. This role was introduced into the Serbian Orthodox Church structure top-down, i.e., by Habsburg imperial decrees, first in Vojvodina and Croatia, then in Bosnia. Although they had never removed the bishops’ supreme authority in the Serbian Orthodox Church, these imperial regulations embedded a certain presbyterian practice that eventually turned into a century-long tradition of self-supported parishes run by its own congregations (Ljubibratić Reference Ljubibratić1925; Slijepčević Reference Slijepčević2018a, 205-209).
After the First World War and creation of the Yugoslav Kingdom, a patchwork of more or less autonomous Serbian church organizations from Austro-Hungary, Montenegro and Serbia (including Macedonia) had suddenly united into the present-day Serbian Orthodox Church.Footnote 29 Having different internal regulations and weak mutual institutional connections before 1918, these organizations struggled to reach a clear agreement upon the structure and functioning of the reunited Serbian Orthodox Church. Therefore, the latter kept tolerating regional traditions and institutions under the guidance of the Assembly of Bishops. Composed of acting Orthodox prelates coming from all over of the Kingdom, the latter had far from uncontested authority. Faced with autonomous parishes and self-confident priesthood organized in the Priests’ Alliance, the Assembly of Bishops sought an ally in the authoritarian state. It was the 1928 political crises in conjunction with the economic depression that led to the King’s dictatorship ready to reward Serbian Bishops’ support. In 1931, the Serbian Orthodox Church was granted its first Church Constitution by the Yugoslav King.Footnote 30 The Constitution set the Assembly of Bishops as officially the supreme church body which promptly resorted to its plena potestas and abolished the unruly Priests’ Alliance the following year. From then on, a priest could be associated only with his colleagues coming from the very same diocese and only under his Bishop’s blessing and supervision. These so-called diocesan priests’ associations were without real autonomy and weight. As a compensation for acting dully, all Orthodox priests could count on regular salaries and social security benefits provided by the State since 1936.
This was a short-lived settlement, though. In 1945, the new Communist government put an end to the old law and order and suspended public funding of any religious activities. However, if the priests’ material condition declined, their freedom of association materialized once again. Namely, the 1945 Act on Civil Associations, Assemblies and other Public Manifestations implicitly allowed registration of professional associations including unions, i.e., priests’ alliances. The stage for the revival of the old rivalry between the episcopate and the priesthood had been set once again, with the State not remaining on the sidelines this time either.
The serbian orthodox church: from autocephaly to autonomy
Bearing in mind the social capital the Church enjoyed in rural inlands as strongholds of their Partisan resistance, Yugoslav Communists were continuously striving to acquire the support of local clerics during the Second World War. One of the major outcomes of their efforts were formal assembles that gathered all those clerics, mostly countryside priests, willing to join the fight for the Communist revolutionary cause.Footnote 31 As trusted corps, these clergymen carried on contributing to newly-emerging socialist order, sometimes holding high positions in government after the War (Mladenović Reference Mladenović1975, Matić Reference Matić1985).Footnote 32 From 1949, such clergymen were organized in the Federal Alliance of Orthodox Priests vocal in its opposition to the Assembly of Bishops resistant to the new socialist order and federal organization of the state.Footnote 33 Using the pulpit, but also an open access to the mass media – above all, their own weekly magazine Vesnik – the Alliance members were building an image of a new Orthodox cleric as a model of ‘a people’s and progressive priest’ and ‘socialist worker’ both observing towards traditional Christian beliefs and eager to embrace a modern worldview,Footnote 34 including socialist values as well.Footnote 35 Under government sponsorship (Radić and Mitrović Reference Radić and Mitrović2012, 68-74) and tutorial (Đurić-Mišina Reference Đurić-Mišina2000, 1463),Footnote 36 Vesnik magazine was cultivating a politically correct religious discourse in compliance with the ruling ideology. Aligned with the official course of the Yugoslav government, the Alliance argued strongly in favor of the Macedonian Orthodox Church, risking thus allegations of betraying the Serbian national interest.Footnote 37 In response, the Priests’ Alliance claimed a strictly evangelical purpose of the Christian religion and opposed the national and political ambitions of the senior church dignitaries reprimanded for chauvinism and clericalism.Footnote 38 This was in line with the Alliance advocacy for fundamental principles of the new order such as the Unity and Brotherhood conceived in the light of religious tolerance and ecumenism in the institutional memory and doctrinal teaching of the Serbian Orthodox Church.Footnote 39 Hence, Vesnik magazine never missed a chance to announce any national holidays celebrating Yugoslav togetherness, including Tito’s birthday, along with various religious feast days. In a word, the Alliance tried to promote an Orthodoxy with a socialist face. Yugoslav Communists considered the Alliance members reliable and committed ‘priests in our ranks’ (Đurić-Mišina Reference Đurić-Mišina2000, 1473) in the struggle with conservative Serbian bishops devoted to nationalist agenda (Đurić-Mišina Reference Đurić-Mišina2000, 1459-1461 and 1471-1474). Many prelates, often perceived as opposition leaders active home and abroad, in emigration, were subject to government smear campaigns backed by the Alliance. Vesnik magazine reported against notorious Anticommunists such as Bishop Josif Cvijović, a vocal opponent of emancipation of the Macedonian Orthodox Church,Footnote 40 Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, a prominent figure of the Serbian clerical-nationalism close to Nazi collaborationist Dimitrije Ljotić,Footnote 41 and Bishops Dionisije Milivojević and Irinej Đorđević, unofficial leaders of the Serbian emigration in the West,Footnote 42 was an important part of discrediting tactics pointing the disobedient top of the Serbian Orthodox Church from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Furthermore, having kept their bishoprics and, consequently, their posts in the Assembly of Bishops in absentia, emigrant Bishops Velimirović and Milivojević made a case against the entire Serbian Orthodox Church. The actual target of discreditation was the episcopacy.
The Priests’ Alliance not only did a favor to the socialist government by doing this, but it also fought for its own cause: that is, participatory rights of the priesthood and lay members of the Serbian Orthodox Church run by an episcopacy without any bottom-up control. Ever since its foundation, the Alliance had been persistently contesting prelates’ sovereign power introduced by the 1931 Church Constitution. Even if the Alliance had never elaborated any precise agenda, nor taken any clear course of action towards challenging or amending this constitution, a series of instructive sources, such as newspaper reports and essays, working materials and proceedings of the Alliance official meetings make at least a partial insight into these alternative ideas and possible concepts of the Serbian Orthodox Church organization. Although none of these sources had ever really dared to deny there was an episcopalian character to the Serbian Orthodox Church, they mainly supported episcopal supremacy only in questions of doctrine, whereas they claimed the shared responsibility for ecclesiastical affairs between the high priesthood and other church members.Footnote 43 Democracy in the Church was taken seriously too. As a consequence, electiveness of church dignitaries through the reaffirmation of the National-Church Assembles as the supreme ruling body should have been a strong guarantee against the bishops’ autocratic pretensions.Footnote 44 Strengthening the existing autonomy of parish councils elected by their lay members was another one.Footnote 45 To sum it up: the voice of priesthood and their flock was to be heard as well. Twofold argumentation justified such self-government. First and foremost, the sources refreshed a forsaken memory of more than a century long experience of church organization in the Habsburg lands.Footnote 46 Well-grounded in historical facts, this line of argumentation was seriously compromised by separatist movements that the Serbian Orthodox Church was faced with at the time, primarily the Macedonian one.Footnote 47 Such movements, by definition, used to resort to National-Church Assemblies as a way to insure democratic legitimacy for their decisions. It might have been the reason why, at some point, the Alliance started presenting democratization of the Church not only as a legacy of the illustrious past, but above all as the then present-day need, aka a path of reform that the Church should have followed if it really had sought for a way to fit into the new socialist order. In fact, the self-management as a Yugoslav way of socialism in economy and politics became a model for the Church governing as well.Footnote 48 The destiny of Church institution was at stake.
Weakened by resolute expropriation and advanced secularization, with no foreign support, the episcopacy of the Serbian Orthodox Church demonstrated a bold resistance. In fact, the Assembly of Bishops’ hit back at rebellious priesthood by withholding its blessing for the Statutory Act of the Priests’ Alliance asking for its amendments on several occasions. Notwithstanding that the Alliance truly tried to satisfy bishops’ demands by redrafting the initial text of its Statutory Act, it had never really met the bishops’ expectations (Slijepčević Reference Slijepčević2018b, 292-302). The stumbling stone was the bishops’ supervision over priests’ association, which the Alliance could never implement without losing its own purpose – the priests’ autonomy in word and action.Footnote 49 Consequently, the Statutory Act had never received its official approval from the governing church body, which treated the Alliance as an uncanonical entity. It undermined the Alliance’s legitimacy and damaged its reputation among faithful and clerics permanently, providing the bishops with a momentum in further dynamics of this rivalry. Besides, the Assembly of Bishops had always skillfully manipulated with its legislative power restored after the constitutional separation of the state and the Church. After they had passed into law the new Church Constitution in 1947,Footnote 50 bishops as law-makers kept making significant efforts towards bonding priesthood even more substantially to episcopal authority. Apparently, by the late 1950s the Serbian episcopacy abandoned its defensive strategy and started showing more initiative in beating democratic tendencies the Priests’ Alliance fought for. In 1952, the Assembly of Bishops passed a highly controversial decreeFootnote 51 going against the idea of priest immutability – a right of a priest not to be reinstated from one parish to another solely on his bishop’s decision.Footnote 52 Besides, in 1957, the Assembly of Bishops dismissed elected parochial councils and replaced them by Bishops’ Commissioners on a poor pretext that the new elections were not possible under the current circumstances.Footnote 53 The means of pressure was still the same: in 1961, the Assembly of Bishops confirmed its 1952 decree on priest immutability,Footnote 54 despite all protests and lobbying of the Alliance members.Footnote 55 Furthermore, on the same occasion, bishops passed into law the Penal Code of Serbian Orthodox ChurchFootnote 56 providing new penalties against disrespectful priests in order to tighten the church discipline and restore episcopal authority. Two penal provisions in focus of the critical reviews and polemics are still useful for understanding the living and doing in the Serbian Orthodox Church of the time. Article 17 of the Church Penal Code threatened priests disobeying their bishop and other ecclesiastical authorities by laicization and excommunication. The same provision incriminates priests publicly or secretly turning faithful people against ecclesiastical authorities and their decisions. Building on this, Article 44 penalized priests who questioned, criticized or mocked the acts and orders of ecclesiastical bodies before their flock or other clerics, both by preaching or in writing. This may explain why most of critical articles in Vesnik were published unsigned all from the early 1960s. The fear was real, moreover, the second provision did not contain any precise disciplinary measures, but left it to the Church courts to exercise their discretionary rights over punishment of the most disrespectful priests.
Instant and fierce, the Priests’ Alliance reaction was in vain, mostly because of the state non-interference.Footnote 57 The official government neutrality was a friendly one, though. As Radmila Radić noticed, in late 1954, the Yugoslav Government and the top of the Serbian Orthodox Church established an open line of direct communication and cooperation (Radić Reference Radić2002, 335). The Socialist State had realized by then that it could have achieved much more by negotiation than confrontation with the Serbian bishops. This shift in the government strategy might have had more than one cause. Namely, it came at the peak of state-sponsored anticlerical campaigns in schools and mass media paving a way to a more moderate state and party position towards religion in general from the early 1950s. It also coincided with the outbreak of a practically open war between the Yugoslav State and the Roman Catholic Church caused by the Cardinal Stepinac trial that urged prompt cooling of relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church in return. The Government could not afford waging a war on two fronts. It sought a compromise instead. The rising assertiveness of Serbian bishops ready to consent to the official use of the Macedonian language in 1955 and to an autonomous Macedonian Orthodox Church four years later apparently required some counter-concessions by the State.Footnote 58 Perhaps it was not by chance that the bishops’ provocative executive decrees and legislative measures aimed at rebellious clerics had been undertaken only after 1955. As any other rules of autonomous law, the above-mentioned decisions of church bodies could have been effectively implemented only with the assistance of the state coercion enforcement apparatus – the courts and the police. The Serbian episcopacy bared their teeth knowing they really could bite. Growing confidence of the Assembly of Bishops clashing with the priesthood fighting for their rights might have been grounded on the new state and church collaboration and reasonable expectations stemming from it.
Subsequent developments indicate the same conclusion. During the 1960s, the Serbian Orthodox Church showed special consideration for state interests in resolving two big affairs. In 1963, the top of the Serbian Orthodox Church gave its active support to the state crackdown on anticommunist Western emigration that escalated after Tito’s official visit to the USA followed by mass protests led, inter alia, by Dionisije Milivojević, the Serbian Orthodox Bishop of North America. This provoked a serious schism in the Serbian Orthodox Church in the West and a later condemnation and dethronement of Bishop Dionisije by his colleagues at home. Only four years later, the Serbian Church faced its biggest challenge ever after the autonomous Macedonian Orthodox Church had unilaterally declared its autocephaly. It was a shocking strike to the authority and integrity of the Serbian Church that generated only a mild bishops’ reaction, however. If the Assembly of Bishops remained firm in its opposition to the Macedonian Church independence, it is interesting to note that the Church Court procedure against Macedonian “schismatics” had never resulted in their conviction or any other canonical epilogue. The issue remained pending for decades. Curiously, within the very same session of the Assembly of Bishops discussing Macedonian schism, two capital amendments to the 1947 Church Constitution had been passed as well: that concerning abolishment of electiveness of parish councilsFootnote 59 and the one regarding debarment of priesthood from the Serbian Patriarch election procedure.Footnote 60 The debate over democratization of the Serbian Orthodox Church was over.
A sharp contrast to this Serbian Church evolution into an oligarchy, was the organization of the contemporary Macedonian Orthodox Church. With a doubtful foothold in canon law, its establishment must have been an attempt at gaining democratic legitimacy and popular support. Hence, all the way from its early 1945 drafts (Ilievski Reference Ilievski2014) to its first Constitution of 1975, the normative framework of the Macedonian Orthodox Church clearly differentiated the episcopalian supreme authority in matters of religious teaching and liturgical issues, from administrative governance and financial control over parishes and dioceses delegated to church self-governing bodies – a series of elected assemblies and committees. The composition of the latter reflected a carefully balanced proportion of clergy, monks and lay members’ representatives elected in full observance of secret ballot principles and with limited mandates.Footnote 61 Moreover, Article 27 of the 1975 Macedonian Orthodox Church Constitution explicitly recognized the priests’ right to associate into autonomous professional alliances that had distinctive institutional roles within the Church organization and governance.Footnote 62 Nearly an echo of Priests’ Alliance petitions and appeals, these provisions clearly illustrated that there had always been a democratic alternative for the Serbian Orthodox Church too.
The parallel drawn between a progressive rise of the bishops’ internal power over the Serbian Church and their external assertiveness towards the government expectations is not the only indication of a peculiar and unconventional state-church relationship in the socialist Yugoslavia. Long before 1967, the Government turned a deaf ear to the Priests’ Alliance call for help with the amendments on 1947 Church Constitution, leaving the priesthood – or at least its rebellious part – pretty much alone in the fight for their rights. By the late 1960s around 90 percent of public money reserved for the Serbian Orthodox Church was being paid to its governing body run by episcopacy.Footnote 63 Pushed to the sidelines, with less money and a fading influence,Footnote 64 the Alliance faced divisions and membership fatigue,Footnote 65 even more so after the 1968 Assembly of Bishops had prohibited appointment of the Alliance members to high positions in church administration.Footnote 66 The Alliance resisted for some more time, but at its 1974 Congress it was already only a shadow of what it used to be in the past.Footnote 67 By that time, its critique of Church hierarchy resonated as a hollow mantric incantation that produced no echo. Left to itself, the Alliance could only denounce the power of the episcopacy ‘as a growing cancer that took control over the Serbian Orthodox Church’Footnote 68 and blame ‘bishops that had never had such a power before socialism’.Footnote 69
Conclusion
Right after the Second World War, the Serbian Orthodox Church in socialist Yugoslavia acquired an autonomy from state interference that it had never enjoyed before. Privileged, yet surveilled throughout its long history, the Serbian Orthodox Church adopted its first Constitution all by itself in 1947. Ever since then, the Church legislative and executive bodies have been passing interior regulations and running ecclesiastical affairs free of any government intervention. The separation between the State and the Church, proclaimed by the 1946 socialist Constitution, was not a dead letter but a living experience. However, the newly gained freedom was challenging as well. Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom were equally granted to all dissenting religious movements that tore into the body of the Church. In fact, the 1945 Act on Civil Associations, Assemblies and other Public Manifestations provided for a legal existence of the earlier forbidden Priests’ Alliance disputing episcopal supreme authority within the Church, while the 1953 Statute on the Legal Status of Religious Communities enabled official registration of separatist movements, such as the Macedonian one. In other words, the socialist secular state made the Church free, but subject to competition and extortion.
In subsequent years, the Serbian episcopacy proved skillful in an almost five-decades-long struggle for power within and control over the church. All from the mid-1950s, bishops were a reliable partner of the state that initially relied on ideologically compatible ‘people’s and progressive’ clerics from the Alliance. A curious parallelism is worth disclosing: ready to lose some and to win some, Serbian bishops eventually started showing more consideration for the emancipation of the Macedonian national church, getting less government meddling with their own, internal church affairs in return. Without the prior state sponsorship, the influence of the Alliance declined before proliferation of autonomous church regulations boosting bishops’ power to the detriment of priesthood autonomy. Thus, the liberalization of Yugoslav state during the 1960s – a hesitant affirmation of individual rights, its decentralization and market economy – coincided with a decreasing democracy within the Serbian Orthodox Church, progressively leaving behind its long tradition of elected parochial councils and Church-National Assemblies. The final outcome of this bishops’ Realpolitik has been a present-day oligarchic organization of the Serbian Orthodox Church headed by its omnipotent episcopacy, leaving the priesthood and its lay members with barely any room in church self-governing. A parallel institutional development of the Macedonian Orthodox Church evolving towards internal democratization and self-governance involving its lay members in Church decision-making bodies, as well as the recognition of priests’ autonomous rights, confirms, on the whole, that there had always been another way for the Serbian Orthodox Church framing too.
However, the case of the Serbian Orthodox Church was not a unique one. With some variations in tactics, the Yugoslav government applied the same strategy in order to establish sustainable influence on other religious organizations as well. Having less chance for reaching compromise with the Catholic high clergy, the Communists used the long-lasting division among the Catholic clergy in Bosnia and induced a creation of the government-friendly The Good Shepherd Priests’ Association composed mostly of dissatisfied Bosnian Franciscans as traditional opponents to bishops’ authority. On the other hand, the leaders of the Islamic Religious Community of Yugoslavia had been rewarded for their notorious cooperation with government assistance in their attempt to suppress independent dervish orders and tekkes – places of worship related to heterogenous forms of Islamic religious practice spread all over Yugoslavia. In both cases, the Socialist State counted on internal conflicts and autonomous religious regulations. It is only that in the case of the Islamic Community the socialist Government sponsored the mainstream against a dissenting minority, whereas in the case of the Catholic Church it was the other way round. The case of the Serbian Orthodox Church was a specific one inasmuch that it resembled the latter more at first, only to get progressively closer to the former, leaving the distinction between cohabitation and collaboration of an officially secular state with a supposedly unsubdued church confusing and obscure.
Financial support
This work was supported by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, #7422, Imagining a Nation: The Contesting Serbian National Narratives (XX-XXI centuries) – IMAGINATION. In addition, the author would hereby like to express his special gratitude to Professors Mario Perini and Giammaria Milani for their invitation and welcome during his research stay at Siena University Department of Law, in February and March 2026, when the final version of this article was written.
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