The Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral announced that the President of Montenegro Milo Đukanović "said a lie today" saying that the Serbian Orthodox Church refused to sign a contract with the state of Montenegro during the time of Prime Minister Igor Lukšić.
They submitted a quote from Metropolitan Amfilohi's response to Lukšić in July 2011, two days after receiving the Prime Minister's initiative to prepare, as stated in that initiative, "draft texts of special Basic Agreements between the Government of Montenegro and religious communities".
"In the first paragraph, the Metropolitan designates a representative of the Metropolitanate for talks with the delegated representative of the Prime Minister, then expresses his belief that the Government will respect the fact of "clearly recognized canonical structures in Montenegro, embodied in the four dioceses of the Serbian Orthodox Church" and that "the Government recognizes which institution has the capacity to represent the Orthodox Church in Montenegro as a single canonical parliamentary institution for all Orthodox believers, regardless of their differences - the Serbian Orthodox Church with the seat of the Patriarchate in Belgrade" and finally concludes: "We believe that this is a very important step forward in the regulation of relations of the Orthodox Church and the State of Montenegro and that, in order to reach an agreement, it will be necessary to mutually respect both contracting parties and their internal legal, i.e., canonical structure and properties," the MCA press release states.
They add that at the end of April 2012, the Metropolitan of Amfilohije, on the authority of the Holy Synod of Bishops, submitted to the same Prime Minister an amended Draft of the Basic Agreement.
"Since April 2012, there has been no communication from the Government side until April 2015, when the then Minister for Human and Minority Rights sent a proposal to continue the talks. The Metropolitan responded without delay, saying, among other things: "And on this occasion, we express our readiness and we express good will for the preparation of the Basic Agreement". After several meetings, those talks stopped. The first reason for the end of the talks was the refusal of the Government to make a clear and reasoned statement about the draft of the Basic Agreement that was submitted to them in 2012 and present its new text to the Church in the form of working material. The second, more important reason is the duplicitous attitude of the Government, which, in the middle of the alleged dialogue about the Basic Agreement, without any consultation with our Church, and we assume without the majority of interested Churches and religious communities, prepared in parallel, and in the end unilaterally determined The Draft Law on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Legal Status of Religious Communities The disingenuous attitude of the then cabinet, whose prime minister was the current president of the state, made any discussions about the Basic Treaty completely meaningless until the issue of the said Law is resolved. What are the president's motives for deceiving the public like this, we can only guess, what is certain is that the spread of fake news does not benefit our society," concludes the reaction of the MCP.
Related Articles
Bonus video:
