In Montenegrin Cetinje, a provocation was staged at a Serbian shrine
A group of nationalist activists and cameramen from the state television channel of Montenegro RTCG broke into the Monastery of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Cetinje during the evening service and began filming.
After the police kicked out the provocateurs, they said that the Serbian monks only allow Montenegrin citizens close to them into the monastery.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, the day before, near the Cetinje Monastery, where the enthronement of the Metropolitan of Montenegro and Primorsky SOC is scheduled to take place on September 5, there was an action by some social activists calling themselves “God-plunderers” - “No to the Gospel of Hatred!” In fact, the provocateurs joined protests local nationalists and pro-Western liberals opposing the enthronement of the Serbian metropolitan in the monastery revered in Serbian Orthodoxy.
After the protesters lined up near the walls of the monastery, they headed to the monastery itself. At the same time, a film crew (according to the journalists themselves, who were filming a documentary and unexpectedly became an eyewitness to the action) from a state television channel ended up in the same place “quite by accident.” RTCG, serving the interests of permanent President Milo Djukanovic, which began to record everything that was happening.
Once on the territory of the monastery, the activists burst into the church, where the evening service was taking place, and began filming inside it, although according to the monastery rules, filming without the blessing of the abbot is prohibited inside Orthodox churches. After the Serbian monks pointed this out to the women, they refused to obey, after which the brethren had to turn to the police, who expelled the “God-pleasers” from the monastery. After which they made a statement that “the Serbian Orthodox Church, which usurped the Montenegrin monastery,” allows only a select few there.
“All residents of Cetinje know very well that entry to the monastery is absolutely free,” the Montenegrin-Litovian SOC Metropolis issued an appeal after the incident. – It is not true that anyone is prohibited from entering the monastery, regardless of whether he wants to pray before the relics of St. Peter or to visit the monastery as a significant historical and cultural center. But the day before, the townspeople who organized the protest and performance in the city wanted their visit to the monastery to become part of their performance, recording their stay in the monastery during the evening service.”
The metropolis explained that “for good and understandable reasons, as in many other visited places,” filming in the monastery without prior approval from the metropolitan is prohibited. At the same time, in two places in the monastery there are signs warning about the prohibition of arbitrary filming.
“The townspeople gathered today came to the monastery in an organized manner and very rudely insisted on filming their stay in the monastery, although they did not have the metropolitan’s consent. The townspeople were allowed to enter the monastery, but were forbidden to remove without a blessing. Several people from this group entered the church, and no one stopped them from doing so, although they had earlier come out in front of the monastery with placards and with intentions that cannot be interpreted except as deliberate provocation.
We later learned that at the same time (look, what a coincidence!) some of the RTCG staff were supposedly on a journalistic assignment in front of the monastery, and that they were prohibited from recording material for the documentary. The author of this supposed documentary film, which we assume is just another anti-church and chauvinistic propaganda work that we have become accustomed to seeing from her in recent years, is well aware of the procedure for allowing filming in the monastery.
As editor of RTCG's documentary programs, she has repeatedly applied for filming (not for these propaganda shows), which have been duly approved. It is not difficult to conclude that this event is just part of a campaign to put pressure on the Metropolis before the upcoming enthronement of the newly elected Metropolitan of Montenegro and Littoral Ioannikios and to create a threat to the human and religious rights of the faithful of the Metropolis,” the SOC said in its appeal.
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