Lities are peaceful and the opposite can happen only if the government throws in provocateurs, said the rector of the Cetinje Seminary, Gojko Perović.
He stated that he could not have assumed that such a large number of citizens would protest and that the situation "awakened something in the people".
"A large number of people who previously did not show interest in sociological phenomena are now very actively interested in seeing how this situation will be resolved, so it seems that it is not the same Montenegro as it was a month ago," added Perović for ATV.
He accused the government of being ignorant of what is happening and that the dialogue is currently limited to media announcements.
"I hope that they will take into account the number of people because these are not believers who came from some other planet, they are citizens of Montenegro, and in that sense they should hear the voice of the people, which is the state. The state is the citizens, not the state that is the government," Perović pointed out.
He complained that the whole of 2019 was spent in the absence of proper communication between the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral and the authorities and believes that the authorities are not ready to sit down and negotiate the law.
"We do not ask the church to dictate the content of the law, it is known whose job it is, although in the end we could have proposed it to the Assembly, but here it was felt that they did not have any need to sit down or listen to any advice and in the end we got a law that does not exist either in the surrounding area or in Europe, a law that lumps religious freedom and property issues into one basket".
Perović repeated that the background of the law is the announcement by the President of Montenegro and the Democratic Party of Socialists, Milo Đukanović, that he wants to restore the church, "even though it does not belong to him either according to the constitution or according to church canons."
"He is dissuaded from this by the greatest addresses of Orthodoxy and the patriarch of Constantinople and Moscow, but he wants it, he wants it. He sees in it the rounding off of some kind of identity of the statehood of Montenegro, which according to me and the majority of citizens of Montenegro is pointless because it might have worked in the Middle Ages, if some kind of king who is Orthodox and who professes his faith, so in that medieval atmosphere, for someone to build his own local church, and to do so in a secular civil state is out of mind. Neither the political intention that created the law is valid, nor the law is valid, and that it cannot survive," says Perović.
He said that the liturgies are peaceful and "the opposite can happen only if the government throws in provocateurs, and then as far as our prayer liturgies are concerned, they will be visually recognized".
"We have a generally good cooperation with the Montenegrin police behind us, they provide security for all our gatherings. We recently had a meeting with the police where we said that we personally and our leadership will recognize anyone who came to our rallies to promote any political or party ideology, because that is not the topic of our litias, but the defense of the church against the law that was prepared to transfer church property to the state, while the church does not have at its disposal all the resources that all other natural and legal entities have at their disposal according to the previously adopted laws of Montenegro... "The topic is legal and unconstitutional and has nothing to do with the issue of Serbs and Montenegrins, with the fact that someone wants to attack the state of Montenegro. Those who passed the law are attacking Montenegro because they violated the Constitution," concludes Perović.
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