Claiming Autocephaly, Hoping for Autonomy – Legal Recognition and Self-Governing of National Orthodox Churches in Socialist Yugoslavia

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Abstract In 1946, the Yugoslav socialist state broke-up all its institutional ties with religious communities entitled to set their own rules of self-governing that they had never had before. Furthermore, Yugoslav legislation of the time provided no specific requirements for official recognition of religious communities, which henceforth became equal in their rights and duties. The hypothesis of the article is that this apparently benevolent state attitude might have had a less evident political purpose that could be disclosed through an in-depth analysis of a legal framework of religious freedom in post-war Yugoslavia and a long-term political agenda of its socialist government: if this socialist secularism released the religion communities from state supervision, it also boosted separatist and dissident movements within them. The law made churches free, but weaker due to being subject to competition and extortion. By focusing on the evolution of Serbian Orthodox Church self-governing during socialism, the article examines the impact of formally neutral state legislation on internal ecclesial conflicts – primarily those over autocephaly of the Macedonian Church, but including also the case of the independent Priests’ Alliance contesting episcopalian authority – that resulted in transformation of a once decentralized and democratic Serbian Orthodox Church into the present-day oligarchic one.

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