All blood must be brought out into the sun

Bishop Grigori's contribution to interreligious and ecumenical dialogue is significant. Because he didn't just talk, he tried to share his life with others, ask for forgiveness and bow down someone else's victims, speaks and acts in support of the memory of the victims, and against bad memory, showing and explaining the difference. Likewise, there are few who, because of their activities in the field of interreligious dialogue, and especially ecumenical, are so criticized and attacked by part of their community. He did not give up, nor did he remain silent. On the contrary, he became even louder, not shying away from frequent media appearances.

Although a significant number of churches were restored in the Diocese of Zahum and Herzegovina while Bishop Grigorije was at its head, he did not fall under the temptationnon-farming - that while building temples, he forgets those who visit those temples, as well as those others with whom he will share everyday life. Thus, in March 2013, the Diocese issued a statement in which, among other things, it is said that the construction of new temples is not recommended until further notice, except in settlements where there is a significant increase in the number of inhabitants: "In this way, we want to recommend to everyone who had or will intend to contribute money for the purpose of building temples, which is not in accordance with this recommendation of ours, to give the planned funds for the arrangement or construction of kindergartens, schools, health institutions, humanitarian organizations and for any purpose that helps creating better living conditions for all people living in the territory of our diocese."

I did several interviews with Bishop Grigori. The first one was in the Tvrdoš monastery ten years ago. We had this conversation, on two occasions, in Germany, the country where he now sits.
The war in Ukraine was ongoing. We talked about our wars.

"All the people who, for various reasons, talk about how war should be waged and how wars must be fought, should consult with us who have lived the war," says the bishop. "When we talk about reconciliation - we and the heads of the Catholic Church, reis and muftis - we don't do it because we are aware in principle how important peace is, but because most of us are aware experientially how terrible war is."

BEATING BECAUSE OF TITA

Bishop Grigorije was born in 1967 in Vares, in central Bosnia. The earliest image etched in his memory is one late December 1971, as a four-year-old, kissing his dead father and telling his aunts not to cry because his dad was just sleeping.

"That's the moment I start to remember," he says.

Other memories are good - he is surrounded by the love and care of his mother, grandmother and grandfather, his three-year-old brother and other relatives. That feeling of being accepted and loved laid important foundations for him in the years to come. Childhood is also accompanied by living with nature, spending days outside, constantly playing and making up stories. Different worlds were imagined there.

"Then, I also unusually loved animals, dogs, horses... I gave each one a name. They were not allowed to sell them when I was at home," says the bishop.

There wasn't much talk about religion at home. Every night before going to sleep, the mother prayed to God briefly and poignantly with her words interrupted by sighs. A feast was celebrated, and the priest came once or twice a year. It was also known that the grandfather, to whom the bishop was most attached, is not in favor of the ruling system: he does not like to listen to Radio Sarajevo, but to Free Europe, and he does not like the one everyone loves - Comrade Tito. "The only time I got beaten was when they didn't let me watch Tito's birthday celebration. And I already went to school and I told them what I learned there - that the king went to London and left the people. Then my mother took the belt and hit me twice. And that was also the only time when my grandfather was not on my side. And he was my protection both before and after. If my mother would criticize me, he would tell her: 'Don't touch him, son, thank you.'"

"WHAT DOES IT MATTER"

Describing Vareš before the 1990s, the bishop says that there was an awareness of diversity, but then it was settled in a tolerant and natural way. By the way, his mother, and the whole family in general, were friends with the Croatian Franković family.

"Their father worked with my grandfather," says Bishop Grigorije. "He was a home guard, and when my grandfather was taken to a German camp, that man gave him basic things to find him, and his grandfather asked him to look after his family. And when the grandfather returned, he realized that he had kept his promise and helped his wife, my grandmother, and three children. They remained friends forever. In this war, when my brother was wounded, that man's daughter - Aunt Jelena, as we called her - came first to my mother and brought her some money, so she could have it."

In the later grades of primary and secondary school in Vareš, like the bishop of his peers in those years, the bishop socialized with everyone, regardless of nationality. "When we entered the fifth grade of elementary school, there was a boy standing next to me, his name was Darko Pavlić, he was kind and good. He remained my friend. He asked me for the first time in my life if I was Catholic. I said that I don't know, but that I am Serbian. I saw his gap for a moment, but it didn't affect us much. I remember that in the sixth grade, a girl fell in love with me and that her friend told her that I was Serbian, and she replied: 'What does it matter?' In high school, the three of us always hung out - Sead Kedrić, Mijo Jozeljić and I. We talked a lot about football. I was a fan of Crvena Zvezda, but I went to see Željezničar because of them. No one argued on national grounds. The tension may have started to be felt in the second half of the eighties, but I was already in Belgrade at the seminary."

THE REPETITION OF THE TRAGEDY IN BOSNIA

Bishop Grigorije came to Belgrade for the first time in 1982. At the train station, he was met by his mother's uncle, elegant and in a suit, who then introduced him to the spirit of the city. When World War II began, he was a law student in Sarajevo and was taken to the Jasenovac concentration camp. He survived the camp, went to live in Belgrade and swore that he would never set foot in Bosnia again.

"A real gentleman, tall, handsome, he took me around Belgrade's restaurants and bars - from 'Balkan' to 'Kazine' to 'Moscow'. He told me how man is a being that needs to adapt - that I should not try to stubbornly remain what I was, but to accept the world I came into. And he traveled all over it. He graduated in economics and worked as a traveling salesman, he showed me pictures from various countries... It is interesting that he believed that everything in Bosnia remained the same as in 1941, when he left it. I was sorry, I wanted to reassure him, but he said that people would kill each other there again and that he did not want to experience that again. He died of a heart attack in 1982. I did not spend much time with him, but I felt that acquaintance as a real blessing from God. And eight years after his death, tragedy unfolded again in Bosnia."

TURNING INTO COLD STONE

In Belgrade, the bishop graduated from the seminary (high school) and the Orthodox Faculty of Theology (1994), where he received his doctorate in 2014, and from 1995 to 1997 he attended postgraduate studies in Athens.

We talk about football, which he still loves today ("I was talented, but the coaches were constantly picking on us, which I couldn't stand, so I trained in martial arts"); about studies at the Orthodox Theological Faculty and student protests against Slobodan Milosevic, of which he was one of the organizers; about the decision to become a monk, made in the midst of those protests... And he was ordained a monk in the Ostrog monastery in June 1992 and immediately afterwards he came to the Tvrdoš monastery near Trebinje with bishop Atanasi (Jevtić). He became the abbot of this monastery in 1996, and in 1999 he was ordained as the bishop of Zahum-Herzegovina and Primorje. As is known, he will remain in that position until 2018, when he moved to the head of today's Diocese of Düsseldorf and all of Germany.

For the longest time, however, we talk about the war, which he spent in Herzegovina.
"I have often said that in a certain sense, war is a very intensified life - the ugly is more present, death is more present, but the good is also more present," says the bishop. "There is a danger that we will believe that we are indifferent, but what we will experience will await us," continued Bishop Grigorije. "Because death becomes everyday. I thought I was strong and brave, and then I was constantly burying young men who were between 18 and 25 years old, looking at their mothers, wives, small children... You turn into cold stone. And suddenly I could no longer pass by those cemeteries, I could not look at them. It seems that all that horror was suppressed - to survive until the war was over. The fear that people on the battle lines have is indescribable. And all my friends from childhood, from all three sides and all three religions, were there. Opposed. And I think that everyone has that post-traumatic syndrome, as I have it too, although I was not in the trenches, but I was waiting for news and deaths, burying... And our house in Planinica burned down and everything in it, including diaries from the seminary and songs which I wrote for ten years. It doesn't matter what they were, but I can't read them anymore."

And then the bishop stops and says:

"All the people who, for various reasons, talk about how war should be waged and how wars must be fought, should consult with those of us who have lived the war. Because war is terrible, and not only in terms of the fact that you can lose your head or that you can lose someone close to you, like I lost several people I loved very much... But imagine a moment - my brother goes with his father-in-law to a corpse exchange . And his father-in-law lost his son at the age of 23, and he says to my brother: 'If someone had told me that I would be happy with my dead son...'"

BOTH GOOD AND EVIL

Then Bishop Grigorije talks about numerous inactions, including top persecution of Muslims from Trebinje: "It happened thanks to both sides, the Muslim leadership that wanted them to leave and the local paramilitary formations and some other types. They also killed a Muslim family, two men and a woman in front of their children. I also wrote a story about it. I went to their grandparents in the village to bring them some help. And that boy asks me, he's four or five years old: 'Can you, uncle, take me to the hospital, my mom and dad are there?' I thought how much suffering one crime creates and how dangerous it is for tomorrow. That boy might be living in Norway or Denmark today and, if the miracle hadn't happened, he would be the avenger. He stepped on the blood of his parents that morning. His grandmother was not allowed to cry in front of the children, so she held a scarf in her mouth, so that the sobs would not be heard."

There were also great and good deeds, says the bishop. He remembers, among other things, how at that time many Muslims came to the Tvrdoš monastery to Bishop Atanasije, wanting to be baptized and thereby be saved: "Bishop Atanasije said that baptism must be based on freedom and he did not agree to baptize them, but they helped and sent them to Montenegro through some people... Father Ilija Topalović gave a baptism certificate to a Muslim woman who was being mistreated and told her to use that paper if she could help her, and when she just wants to tear it up."

He adds that it does not necessarily mean that the good will be valued immediately, but that does not change anything... He cites the example of Amir Reka from Goražde, who saved 1992 Serbian civilians from certain death in 45, and just three days earlier several members of his family, including his mother was locked up in the house by Serbian forces and burned. He, who at that moment was the commander of the 43rd Drina Strike Brigade of the BiH Army, received an order to "cleanse" the village of Bučje, where Serbs lived. With great efforts, he managed to prevent the crime and arrange for the peaceful surrender of the locals.

"Our people in Trebinje protected a woman, her mother-in-law and two small children who they found in a cave near Nevesinje," continues Bishop Grigorije. "They spent the entire war in Trebinje, and later reunited with their family in Bijelo Polje. One of those children was born in a cave - now he is an imam in Mostar."

I ask, however, what a miracle would look like that depends on people - not only on God - so that the need for revenge of that boy whose parents were killed does not flare up, but is transformed into something that creates life and does not destroy it.

The Bishop answers that we often forget that even in the Old Testament, the Lord says that vengeance is His, but that man wants to take matters into his own hands and feels important, holy and that he has the right to do so. It's hard to wrestle with that, and that's why you need to be smart so that it doesn't come to war.

"Our attempt at reconciliation stems from the fact that we know the horrors of war," he concludes.

And when he says "our" and "we", Bishop Grigorije means those who are similar to him and advocate for "deep, peaceful religious dialogue". He also remembers how he attended the ordination of Mata Uzinić as a bishop in the Dubrovnik Cathedral and how later there were many people in the "Klarisa" restaurant, but Uzinić invited the bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church to speak.

"I said what was on my heart," says the bishop. "About the attitude towards Dubrovnik, its beauty, the wounding of the city, the pain and the need for tears that can wash away every sin. People were confused. And if Archbishop Uzinić had not immediately accepted such an offer and had not responded to it immediately, the next ten years would have been different. And over time we sent deeper and more sincere common Christian messages. Every January we were together - if we prayed in our church, he preached, if they prayed, I preached. We stood together before the face of God, it was shocking and it affected both us and other people, the clergy and believers."

The bishop also mentions the words of a certain old man in Konavle, who traded on the Trebinje market and who said that there had been wars before, so after two or three years people would continue to live and cooperate, and now 30 years have passed and it still hasn't happened. the war ended: "It is a strange phenomenon among people, this inability to overcome problems. Failure to face the events that happened to us and around us is also to blame for this. Of course, it is too complicated - who is to blame, who started the war and who ended it, how fair is Dayton and whether it is respected... But these are all topics that, in my opinion, distract people's attention from those of life - how to live well, better and more humane."

DISTANCE FROM THEMSELVES DID NOT WORK FOR ANYONE

A special and important topic is the work of the Interreligious Council (IRC) in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bishop Grigorije says about his activities in the MRV: "I came there to replace the old metropolitan (Metropolitan Nikolaj Mrđa, 1927-2015) in Sarajevo. We have established this principle - if somewhere a church or a mosque or a synagogue is attacked, then we all go out and together send a message of peace and condemn that act. Attacks on religious buildings have almost completely stopped. We decided in 2017 that, in addition to the politicians, we, the religious representatives, would visit the execution sites of Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats and Jews. Cardinal Puljić was already an old man and I remember how he went up to Kazan (the place where during the siege of Sarajevo an unknown number of people were killed and thrown into a pit, most of them Serbian civilians, and whose perpetrators were members of the BiH Army), it was ice , dangerous and slippery, he was wearing shoes and I asked him three times if he could, and he said that we will not give up. Then we went to Vlašić, where Serbs, policemen from Prijedor, killed two buses of women and children. Then to Križančevo Selo, where Muslims killed Croats, and then we were also in Kruščice, where there was a concentration camp where opponents of the NDH were burned during the Second World War - Jews, Serbs, Muslims..."

Bishop also says that much more could have been done on that basis. But that "weak politicians did not have the courage for that".

He also mentions that when the new reis-ul-ulema came to Sarajevo, he talked to him for a long time and openly, and then suggested to him that they create two commissions that would investigate mutual crimes in the last hundred years. Reis-ul-ulama accepted it. Those commissions for illuminating the truth would consist of historians as well as ethnologists, psychologists, theologians, philosophers... Later, the new Metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church came, and Bishop Grigorije went to visit Germany. His idea has not yet taken off.

"It is my deep conviction," says the bishop, "that all crimes should be brought to light." And the crimes and the criminals and the tools with which those people were killed because that blood must somehow be brought out into the sun, shown to people. I can see it on the example of Berlin: next to the Reichstag there is a Jewish monument to the victims of the Holocaust, then a monument to the Roma victims of the Second World War... Well, there is an open-air museum, the former headquarters of the Gestapo. People have to face it. If it is pleasant - it is not, but there is no other medicine."

I ask if he is afraid that the blood given will ask for more blood.
"That work would make sense only if it is joint and based on expertise, not on the basis of propaganda, and the desire to justify his, and blame Second", says the bishop. "It's hard to define it - it's a confrontation, not with one's crime, but with our crimes and our craziness. But that country will not progress if there is no such thing. Ghosts will appear again and they will seethe in people again. When it comes to Bosniaks - of course we are of different faiths and that they want their own nation, and no one can and should not dispute that - but not only are we from Adam, but we are one people. The upbringing, religious and home, may be different, but until yesterday we were the same. With the Catholics, no matter how we look at it, we are one faith. There are differences in education and upbringing and in that need for distance, and yet no one has managed to distance themselves."

ONLY EXCLUSIVENESS IS OFF

Bishop Grigorije points out that in order to establish a relationship with another, it is important that a person really believes in his faith and respects the faith of others, that he has knowledge about it, and above all - that he be honest, even at the cost of disagreement. Because that honesty inspires respect. And as I usually do, I ask about the price of agreement, when he is attacked by of their own: "There are attacks that, no matter how unpleasant they are and no matter how much they entail suffering and blows, only confirm that you are on the right path," replies the bishop. "However, I am not the one who advocates openness or the one who supports the opposite and perhaps has a narrow awareness of God, Orthodoxy, and Serbia. Reflection on people is important. And they - in a situation where everyone says what comes to their mind, without arguments and serious awareness - remain confused. Already swept away by wars, deaths, troubles - they are still worshiped. That's a sin! I thought about it a lot. But as the years go by, I think it is very important that we speak openly and honestly and that people are then in a situation to choose between two directions - one that is exclusive and the other that is open-minded and open-minded. My main thesis, seen from the liturgical practice of our Church and theology, is that only exclusivity is excluded. Because the liturgy teaches us that it receives, accepts, contributes, transforms everything, and not - exclude this, exclude that..."