Belgrade - The leader of the Serbian church, Patriarch Pavle, died on Sunday at the age of 95, local media reported quoting the church. Pavle lead the nation's Orthodox Church through its post-Communist resurgence and its troubled role in the Balkan wars.
Pavle passed away in the military hospital which he had been cared for for the past two years. He leaves behind a church torn in a power struggle of reformists and dogmatists.
The feuding bishops were unable to elect a successor to the incapacitated Pavle a year ago, though they were scheduled to.
A virtual living saint for believing Serbs, he was nevertheless criticized because he linked the resurgence of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) to Slobodan Milosevic's policies.
Born a sickly child in 1914 and orphaned quickly, Pavle became a monk in 1946, after surviving a bout with the then often fatal tuberculosis.
He spent most of his life in Kosovo, where he was the head of Raska-Prizren diocese between 1957 and his appointment as the patriarch on December 3, 1990.
The SPC, after being sidelined for decades in the Communist former Yugoslavia, under Pavle permeated every facet of life in Serbia.
Priests visit hundreds of thousands of homes to perform various rites, catechism has been introduced to schools and bishops advise the deeply religious and nationalist Premier Vojislav Kostunica.
Unlike even two decades ago, in Serbia today it is more than fashionable to celebrate the family saint and the call a priest for the last rites for the deceased.
While in much of Europe church attendance is receding, the SPC has been busily building new churches and even buying them in Germany, France.
Tiny, fragile and humble, Pavle was also at the helm during brutal ethnic and religious violence in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Neither Pavle, nor his church and priests did much to change the direction of aggressive, hardline nationalism they took together with Serbia.
The course was set before Pavle replaced the deceased Patriarch German, with the 1986 "Memorandum" of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), which envisaged a greater Serbian state.
Early in his own reign, Milosevic - who was never interested in the church, but used it along with SANU academics - rewarded the SPC loyalty by financing the construction of the huge, all-visible St Sava church in central Belgrade.
In 1991 Pavle backed Milosevic - whom he saw as the savior of Kosovo from the majority Albanians - by advising students against their protest against the strongman.
Later, as war broke out in former Yugoslavia, SPC priests blessed the cannons shelling Sarajevo from the hills and Kalashnikovs used to mow down Muslim civilians around Srebrenica, as in a video released a decade after the 1995 massacre.
Under Pavle, SPC has failed to distance itself from the Srebrenica massacre, where 8,000 Muslims were killed, or smaller crimes, many of which were carried out by men claiming to be devout Christians and big donors of the Church.
With bishops far more hawkish than Pavle lined up for succession, any change in policy in the SPC is likely in the near future.
