Skopje, September 12, 2026
tiveriopol.mk
His Grace Bishop Jacob of Stobi has published a lengthy open letter defending the Macedonian Orthodox Church-Ohrid Archbishoprics’s opposition to a comprehensive sex education curriculum, after the country’s Ministry of Education withdrew the program following public backlash.
Bishop Jacob calls the withdrawal a welcome step, but says it’s far from enough. “When society loses its moral orientation, the Church’s silence is a betrayal,” he writes, arguing the controversy exposed what he describes as the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Macedonia’s liberal-progressive establishment. He accuses critics of resorting to hysteria instead of argument once the Church and concerned parents pushed back.
Much of the letter is a point-by-point rebuttal of several commentators who criticized the Church’s involvement in the debate. Bishop Jacob takes particular issue with a journalist who questioned whether the Church or science should guide state policy, arguing the framing itself is a manipulative false choice. He also responds to a university professor whose social media post mocked parents and grandparents opposed to the curriculum as an uneducated “societal disease,” calling her remarks elitist and contemptuous of ordinary believers. Bishop Jacob also accuses a third critic, a professor who argued that without formal sex education children would learn from pornography or the street, of hiding an ideological agenda behind a false medical justification.
At the heart of his argument, Bishop Jacob draws a sharp line between legitimate reproductive health education, covering anatomy, hygiene, and protection from exploitation, and gender ideology, which he says teaches children their bodies are arbitrary and their identities are subjective constructs. He says the Church has no objection to protecting children from real harms but firmly rejects the idea that gender identity is a scientific matter rather than what he calls an anthropological or ideological stance.
Bishop Jacob frames the dispute as a broader battle over who has the right to raise Macedonian children: parents and the Church, or the state and outside ideological influence. He praises the country’s governing party for what he calls its consistent, uncompromised stance on family issues, and endorses recent comments from the prime minister describing large families as a patriotic act. Bishop Jacob adds that having children, entering monastic life, and sacrificial service to the Church or homeland are all, in his view, forms of patriotism.
He closes by insisting his criticism is directed at an ideology, not at individuals, and says the Church has never existed at peace with the world, calling opposition and controversy simply part of its calling.
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