Ambassador to the Holy See: Pope’s Visit to Serbia Not Realistic

Vladeta Jankovic/BETAPHOTO/NENAD PETROVIC/

Serbia’s former ambassador to the Holy See, Vladeta Jankovic, on Nov. 24 said that a visit of the pope to Serbia was not realistic and was not to be expected in the foreseeable future.

In a statement to BETA, Jankovic said that the statement by Foreign Minister Nikola Selakovic that he “is expecting that conditions will be created in the state and the Church for a pope’s visit,” was nothing new.

“The state can invite the pope to visit Serbia, and our state has extended that invitation on several occasions, from the time Boris Tadic was the president till Tomislav Nikolic was the president. The pope, as the head of the state, can accept the invitation, but the pope never accepts an invitation from a state unless there is also an invitation of the predominant church, which in our case is the Serbian Orthodox Church,” Jankovic specified.

Asked what the potential pope’s visit was mainly dependent on, Jankovic replied that it was the stand of Russia. “A decision of our church depends on our relations with the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, which is at the moment having a severe conflict the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. As long as the Russian Orthodox Church and the Patriarch of Moscow are more important to us than the Ecumenical Patriarch, there will be no visit of the pope to Serbia. The visit is not realistic at all and is not to be expected in the foreseeable future,” Jankovic explained.