Belgrade, September 7, 2022
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Yesterday, September 6, His Holiness Patriarch Porfirije of the Serbian Orthodox Church made a special statement on the urgent issue of EuroPride.
EuroPride is a pan-European LGBT event hosted by a different city ever year, and this year it is planned to be held in Belgrade on September 12-18.
The event has proven to be a scandal for traditional Serbian society, and the Orthodox faithful have taken to the streets several times now to prayerfully protest the imposition of LGBT values.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić announced late last month that EuroPride won’t be held as scheduled on September 12-18 due to the “significant crisis in Kosovo,” although the organizers of the event have indicated that they intend to hold it anyways.
Pat. Porfirije’s new statement reads in full:
Brothers and sisters, dear friends,
Not only in Serbia, but also everywhere where the Serbian people live, many debates, disagreements, disputes, and conflicts have been caused by the announcement that an event known as EuroPride would be held in the capital city of Belgrade. This topic is artificially imposed upon us and completely contradicts the system of values of our people, as well as our brothers and sisters of other religions and peoples with whom we live. Representatives of traditional churches and religious communities directly have testified to me about this. Therefore, I consider the cancellation of this event to be correct.
In the souls of us Orthodox Christians, the teaching of the Church is expressed already on the first pages of the Bible, where it is written that God created man as two sexes, male and female, which means that marriage and family, from the beginning of the world to today and to the end of the world and the present age, is defined as the union of love between a man and a woman with their children. We fully understand the fundamentally justified great concern of our people, who, in the crude promotion and imposition of policies and ideologies aimed at destroying the pillars on which our identity has been built for centuries, in order to make everything fragile, relative and fluid, feel a deep and systematic threat to all the fundamental values to which they have been faithful for centuries, especially the sacred institutions of marriage and family.
For these reasons, we have repeatedly cited in direct conversation with the highest representatives of the state the reasons why we consider it necessary and justified to cancel EuroPride.
At the same time, I remind you that the Church of Christ respects the freedom given by God to every person and therefore is against any form of violence, public stigmatization, or persecution of anyone. Evil isn’t cured and isn’t defeated by violence—it is only multiplied in this way.
We pray to Christ the Lord that through the prayers of St. Sava of Serbia, at a time when our fatherland and people are facing various trials and problems, He might deliver us from this, which is harmful and unnecessarily imposed on us.
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