Patriarch Porfirije (BETAPHOTO/MILAN OBRADOVIC)
In his annual Christmas epistle, Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Porfirije spoke of the tragedy that befell Novi Sad late last year, when a concrete overhang at the city’s central railway station collapsed killing 15 people and leaving two critically injured. The patriarch called for hostilities to cease, urging the people divided over the accident to follow the example of Serbian Saint Sava, who managed to reconcile his two feuding brothers for the sake of peace in the country.
“We are looking into our own hearts and at each other, praying to the Lord to grant us the strength to draw warning lessons from this tragic event and other mentioned and unmentioned events in the country and the world, that we must be brothers to one another, be men, true to Christ, honest, [and] fundamentally good,” Patriarch Porfirije stated, referencing the death and destruction in the Middle east along with the war in Ukraine.
According to him, many misfortunes, conflicts and wars begin with dehumanizing those closest to us – by extinguishing the humanity of another human being – so it is “of crucial importance that we all, each and every one of us, stop using language which first labels others as strangers, then opponents, then enemies and, finally, inhuman.”
In the portion of his letter dedicated to Kosovo and Metohija, the patriarch said that “for the past quarter century, in these lands where they have lived for hundreds of years, the Serbian people have been the most endangered and unprotected people of the European continent.”
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