Serbian Orthodox Church chooses new patriarch
Metropolitan Porfiry of Zagreb-Ljubljana was chosen by apostolic lot as the forty-sixth Serbian patriarch.
The election of the new primate of the SOC took place in the crypt of the Belgrade Cathedral of St. Sava in Vracar, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
During today's meeting of the Holy Bishops' Council of the SOC, three candidates took part in the apostolic lot (the monk, after praying, chose a note with the name of one of the three candidates for primacy): in addition to Metropolitan Porfry of Zagreb-Lublin - Bishop Irinej of Novi Sad and Bacz, Sombor and Szegedin and Bishop Ephraim of Banya Luča.
The enthronement ceremony of the newly elected Serbian Patriarch will take place tomorrow at the Cathedral of St. Sava. The next meeting of the Holy Bishops' Council of the SOC is scheduled for May, when episcopal appointments will be made in the dioceses.
Metropolitan Porfirij Peric of Zagreb and Ljubljana was born in 1961 in Curuga, Serbia). He was ordained as a monk at the Visoki Decani monastery (Kosovo) in 1985. He graduated from the Orthodox Theological Faculty in Belgrade in 1986 and in the same year, the Bishop of Rasko-Prizren, later Patriarch Paul, was ordained as a herodeacon in the Holy Trinity Monastery of Musutiste (Kosovo).
In 1990, with the blessing of Bishop Irinej Bulovich of Bach, he came to the Monastery of the Holy Archangels in Kovila, where he was appointed its abbot. The monastery was engaged in the rehabilitation of drug addicts. In 2004 he received his doctorate from the Faculty of Theology of the University of Athens. Since 2014 he has been Metropolitan of Zagreb and Ljubljana.
The future patriarch invariably spoke and speaks with great love about Russians and Russia:
“For our people, Russia, as the late Patriarch Irenaeus said, is like a huge ship. We are connected with Russia by issues of identity and, of course, issues of religion. We are united by the Orthodox Church. We have absolutely the same values, the same view of the world. Of course, not only with Russians, but also with Greeks, with all Orthodox peoples. However, because of blood kinship, to the greatest extent, both our history and our identity are intertwined with the Russian people,” said then-Metropolitan Porfiry of Zagreb and Ljubljana after the death of Patriarch Irinej.
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