“MACEDONIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH (MOC)” IN FORMER YUGOSLAV STATE

Abstract

After World War II, multi-religious and multi-national socialist Yugoslavia faced the need to resolve the complex national issue or actually to bring it into accord and make closer to the internal, but also to the international goals and interests of the Yugoslav state. Its atheistic-secularist nature basically conditioned its relationship to the religious communities in the state, whose “potentials” should be controlled, directed and used in a desirable way. The state, actually, supported the secular (non-church) principle by which every nation should have its own Church, striving in time directly, consistently and firmly to exert influence on its application in practice as such. Taking such activities, it disregarded the church reasons and needs, what particularly made a negative impact on the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC). The Roman Catholic Church (RCC), as the second church (religious) community in the country by the number of its believers, recognised that its interests coincided with such endeavours and activities of the state. It discretely supported the political process of gaining of “autocephaly of the Macedonian Orthodox Church” (MOC).