Press, Priests and Pork Sausage

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: In the Balkans, everything is politics. Thus with the recent story concerning a folk festival marked by consumption of the world’s biggest pork sausage, the Serbian Orthodox Church’s reaction to it, and the coverage this drew in the Western press.
One SOC bishop threatened to excommunicate believers who attended the Turija town festival – a 20-year old tradition with the world’s biggest pork sausage at its centerpiece (this year, it was 2.2 kilometers long!) – because it took place during the feast of Lent. Another has threatened similar measures against newlyweds who chose to consume their marriage during Lent. Most Serbs, who follow Orthodox customs as part of their ethnic identity but don’t adhere strictly to church rules, shrugged off the threats and went about their business. But the Church outbursts definitely fed the grist mill of secular humanists and elements in foreign press with Serbophobic tendencies…

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic, correspondent for Inter Press Service and the British Independent, wrote about the conundrum recently with obvious disdain for the Church, using the occasion to attack the SOC as the root of all that’s wrong in Serbia.
Zimonjic accuses the Church of supporting Milosevic (which isn’t true), and fomenting ethnic conflict (no more, and perhaps less, than the Catholics and the Muslims). She even gets an “analyst” to sardonically note that the SOC never threatened to excommunicate “believers accused of war crimes.”
Well, why should it, long as they are only accused and not convicted of actrocities, preferably with some proof? But for the “analyst,” accusation is proof enough of guilt. He belongs to the secular humanist intelligentsia that holds Christianity in contempt while bowing to the gods of Democracy and Human Rights. Is it a coincidence that Zimonjic chose his quote? As much as when any wire service always quotes Coalition for International Justice and Human Rights Watch when talking about the Hague Inquisition.
The Serbian Orthodox Church had been a pillar of Serbian society during the Ottoman occupation and during the first 110 years of modern nationhood. But that position has eroded as much as a result of Comunist oppression as the Church’s willingness to use coercion, rather than persuasion, on its believers. Introduction of religion classes in public schools under the Djindjic regime was hailed as spiritual revival, while in reality it was Statification of the Church.
Instead of pleading and leading by example, the Church apparently feels more comfortable threatening. In that sense, the SOC is neither “conservative” nor “backward,” as its globalist-socialist critics allege, but disturbingly “progressive.”
Any resemblance with US Culture Wars is purely intentional.