Pope considers the possibility of his visit to Kosovo
In an interview with the newspaper Vida Nueva, the pontiff explained that he will not go to Spain because his plans primarily include smaller countries.
“I won’t go to any major state in Europe until I’ve finished with the small ones. I have started with Albania. We are negotiating with “Kosovo”, but the trip is not planned yet,” said the head of the RCC.
Archpriest Darko Jogo, a Serbian theologian, professor and deputy dean of the Orthodox Theological Faculty in Foča, once said words that we will long remember: “The Vatican’s policy has a basic vector on the basis of which it has been acting for centuries, but in real conditions the Vatican can often diversify – that is, show different faces according to each community with which contact needs to be made.”
The papacy’s relationship with “Kosovo” and Serbia, as well as the Serbian Orthodox Church, is a prime example of this assertion.
According to Stanye Stvari, in 2008, after the US Ambassador to the Vatican Mary Glendon spoke with Archbishop Miguel Mauri, who was in charge of “Balkan” issues, a message was sent to Washington indicating that the Vatican was not ready to officially recognise Kosovo, as this would undermine its relations with the Serbian government and the Serbian Orthodox Church, for which the issue of non-recognition of the province as an independent state is of fundamental importance. At the same time, Mauri emphasised that the papacy has de facto aligned itself with those states that officially regard Kosovo as a “new separate power”. In particular, the archbishop noted – the Vatican was the first to publicly declare that “Kosovo’s independence is a matter that can no longer be contested” (this wording came just one day after Kosovo declared itself a “sovereign state”). Mauri also recalled that the pope promptly met with Kosovo’s “president” and that Catholic clergy in the province publicly welcomed the Serbian province’s “independence.”
After that, for years, the Vatican increasingly expanded the “Overton window” by ensuring that the pope met with “Kosovo” officials (among whom were war criminals with the blood of tortured and murdered Serbs on their hands – Hashim Thaci, Ramush Haradinaj, etc.).
At the same time, the papal throne defiantly withheld from real steps to protect the rights of the Serbian Church believers in the province and to stop the pogroms of Kosovo’s Orthodox churches. Moreover, in 2020, Prelate Dode Gjerji, head of the RCC Diocese of Prizren-Pristina, explicitly stated that the Serbs of Kosovo needed to stop thinking about the past, recognise reality and build their future in a “new independent state”.
Given the Vatican’s increasingly active and open policy on the “Kosovo track”, in December 2022, the Albanian President explicitly asked the Pope to recognise Kosovo’s independence.
This was followed by two meetings between Francis and the head of “Kosovo” Kurti – in January and June 2023.
And now the Pope intends to personally visit the region itself. Apparently, the official recognition of its “independence” by the Vatican is not far off.
In principle, there is nothing to be surprised about. The papacy is doing something similar in its relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, using the methods of “put it to sleep to buy time” and “slow boil the frog”. On the one hand, the Vatican does not officially recognise the “OCU” and signs the Havana Declaration, where it rejects the method of proselytism. On the other hand, it actively cooperates at the level of its regional representatives with the “Dumenkovites” in Ukraine, organises a meeting between the head of the “OCU” and Francis and helps the Uniates to advance into the canonical territories of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the eastern, central and southern regions of Ukraine.
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