Patriarch Pavle, who headed the Serbian Orthodox Church during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s died yesterday, a senior church official said.
The patriarch (95) died at a special apartment in Belgrade’s Military Hospital where he had been treated since 2007 for various ailments, Bishop Amfilohije, the acting head of the church’s Holy Synod, said in a statement.
“The death of Patriarch Pavle is a huge loss for Serbia,” President Boris Tadic said. “There are people who bond entire nations and Pavle was such a person.”
Critics, however, say Pavle failed to contain hardline bishops and priests who stoked Serb nationalism against Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians and publicly blessed paramilitaries who committed war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia.
After the war, he became more vocal in politics and openly criticised the policies of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.
But he was accused of allowing the church to slip into nationalist policies and failing to mend ties with Orthodox churches in neighbouring Macedonia and Montenegro. He also played a pivotal role in opposing the pope’s desire to visit Serbia.