c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE _ The world’s window on the Serbian Orthodox Church is a good deal easier to find in the virtual reality of the Internet than in this city’s electricity-deprived wartime reality.

Down a long, unlit and musty hallway, past the ecclesiastical court, a small museum and a tailor’s shop for clerical clothing is the library, one of the darker, mustier parts of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s sprawling patriarchate complex.

Here, a staff of four divides its time between tending to the library’s 400,000 volumes and maintaining the 6.5 million-member church’s official Web site in Serbian and English. Before NATO’s bombing campaign began on March 24, it was a fairly sleepy operation. But, since the attacks started and the world’s attention turned to Belgrade, the site has had 250,000 hits.

A goodly fraction of those people send the Web site comments and queries about the war and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the dominant faith in this country of 10 million. “Ninety percent of the people are sending support, wishing us strength, sending us prayers. Most of them come from the United States, Canada and western Europe,”said Deacon Luka Novakovic, 37, a personable man in a black cassock who runs the library and put the Web site on line 18 months ago.”And then there are the e-mails asking why we are not doing anything about the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, or why the church is supporting the president of Yugoslavia.” Church prelates have spoken out strongly against the abuses of Serb security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. They have also repeatedly criticized the policies of president Slobodan Milosevic and, more recently, NATO’s bombing campaign. But Novakovic said the world’s media has too frequently shown little understanding for the position the Serbian Orthodox Church has staked out for itself.

Judging from e-mail queries, Novakovic said,”We can see that these people only watched CNN or some similar television station and they are only getting one kind of information.”Novakovic, with the aid of a satellite dish, said he regularly watches CNN, Britain’s SkyNews and Germany’s ZDF’s coverage of the war. As the one library staffmember with a fluent command of English, Novakovic answers the lion’s share of queries from abroad.

There is widespread ignorance in the West about Orthodox Christianity, which, with 300 million members, is the world’s second largest Christian faith and is a loose family of national Orthodox churches. The Serbian Orthodox Church is still more difficult to understand because it defies the pattern of many of the Orthodox churches in those nations recently emerged from communism. Much to the credit of its leader, Patriarch Pavle I, Serbia’s national church has avoided becoming either a pawn of the government or a reactionary repository of virulent nationalism.

Novakovic, who studied a total of six years outside Serbia at a Russian Orthodox seminary and at Oxford University, is solidly behind engaging the church with the world, something the Web site reflects.

In Serbian and English, the site traces the role of Christianity in Serbs’ development from the 7th century on, delves into church theology, explains the deep historical significance of Kosovo for Serbian believers, and chronicles the latest bomb damage to monasteries with vivid color images.

As might be expected from an institution battered by 50 years of communist rule in Yugoslavia, the Serbian Orthodox Church is not on the cutting edge of technology.”There is still resistance. It was a very big problem for me to get recognition from the church,”said Novakovic, noting that only at last month’s synod of bishops in Belgrade was the Web site named as an official means of dispersing information.”Old people in the church are skeptical because they have heard about all the bad things (on the Internet). I would tell them that on television, too, you can watch nice church programs or you can watch pornography … You have a choice.” Novakovic, who was recently put in charge of disseminating church information generally, sees the Web site as part of coordinated effort to increase the church’s profile and, ultimately, wrest concessions from the Yugoslav government. “What we must expect is for the government to find an adequate place in society for the church,”said Novakovic, explaining that the church is pushing for access to classrooms, help in rebuilding monasteries and a reduction of redtape in building new churches.

For the time being, though, Novakovic is consumed with the war, the sounds of which interrupted a recent interview twice as NATO jets broke the sound barrier over Belgrade. In the near daily cycle of NATO bombing of Belgrade’s electrical transformers and Serb repairs, Novakovic said it is increasingly difficult to keep the site updated. However, local power outages don’t effect the world’s access to the Website. “Our server is an American one, so it is safe,”said Novakovic, who added that he is especially concerned that the thousands of church members outside Yugoslavia maintain access.”There is a need for all Serbs to be in touch with their mother here in Belgrade. Most Serbs outside Yugoslavia are very connected to the church, which serves as a kind of embassy.” Eds: To find the Serbian Orthodox Church’s Web site, go to http://www.spc.yu. If that doesn’t work, try http://www.serbian-church.net. It is an alternate site set up in case internet access to those addresses with a Yugoslav,”.yu”, suffix is cut off, something rumored by Belgrade’s computer community to be imminent.

DEA END BROWN