The Orthodox Ohrid Archbishopric got a request from Mr. Srdzan Panic from Belgrade to publish the following answer to the letter that Nahum, a heretic bishop from the schismatic MOC, sent to many bishops of the Orthodox Church. The letter was sent several days before the Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church in September this year, with an intention to postpone the defrocking of the heretical bishops of the schismatic “MOC”.

Mr. Srdzan Panic speaks several languages, among which Macedonian. At this moment he is preparing an application to the Yale University in the United States. Also, he is very well acquainted with the church conditions in the Republic of Macedonia and he has had a correspondence with Nahum. Since Nahum refused to publish his comment on the Internet presentation of the schismatic MOC, he addressed the editors the Internet presentation of the Orthodox Ohrid Archbishopric with a request to publish his answers to the above mentioned letter that Nahum had sent not just to the bishops of the Orthodox Church, but also to the media.

Although the Orthodox Ohrid Archbishopric has no custom of publishing letters and responses to heretic texts, especially not to heretics such as Nahum, but because of the seriousness of the argumentation and answers which Mr. Panic gives, we decided to publish parts of Nahum`s letter to which the answers refer to. The integral text of Nahum’s letter to which Mr. Panic gives answers can be found on the Internet presentation of the schismatic organisation MOC.


Comments on the letter that Nahum – a heretical bishop of the schismatic MOC – sent to the bishops of the Orthodox Churches worldwide.

Nahum: What is the tactics of the former Metropolitan of Povardarje according to the events related to him in past two years? Let us all remember: first he causes some kind of incident, and when the official state authorities (not church) react according to the current Law and condemn his behaviour, then he and several of his followers present them selves to entire world, especially to the sisterly Orthodox Churches, as martyrs for the faith, at the same time smearing the Episcopate of the Macedonian Orthodox Church

Mr. Panic: As we can see from the very beginning of this writing, we are dealing with pure pharisaic and hypocritical behaviour. You, Most Reverend Nahum are the ONE who put his signature on the Nis Agreement, and YOU are the one that refused the union, and now, with an intention to justify your self and your (good) deeds you started with calumnies against a Bishop of the Ecumenical Church. Yes, he turned to the sisterly Churches, because salvation is in communion and not in the self-willed individualism and the wilful separation from the body. He is a martyr of the faith, and I assume that you know what for. Martyrs (oi martoirez) are witnesses, confessors of faith, not only sufferers. So, martyrs are the ones who confess the Real Faith, ready for anything that the slanderers have prepared for them, ready to do anything for God, even to shed blood.

Concerning the calumnies of the Episcopate of the MOC, there is no need to waste words on that, because many of you, first of all you and Peter, did not even want to sit at the same table with the abovementioned, and not to even mention communion in the Eucharist. You yourselves are aware, and you yourselves know that the former Metropolitan of Kumanovo is not worthy (anaxioz) to wear the Episcopal pall because (even the wider public knows) he has been an accomplice in a murder, that he is a married man and that he even has children. I think that you are familiar with the decisions from the local councils, and you know the apostolic regulations which tell us how an Episcope MUST be.

Nahum: It is one thing when the Court authorities persecute and trial someone with no reason, but it is quite another when they persecute and trial him for trespassing into someone else’s property, or because of a public insult on religious basis, or for some other criminal act.

Mr. Panic: Trespassing into someone else’s property. Yes, you said it yourself, it is not a calumny. So the MOC GOVERNS the territory of Macedonia, it holds monopole over the human souls and plays with their salvation. An insult on religious basis, if someone strikes you on one cheek, you turn the other one as well. But no, you turned all your powers towards the destruction of someone because of what he said. It was not without reason when people came up with the following saying: The truth burns the unjust as a burning flame.

Nahum: In the Republic of Macedonia there are quite a few religious organisations, and none of them usurps the property of another one and none of them, in its religious calendars and media, neither printed nor electronic, insults the highest representatives of another religious community. If this happens then the executive and court agencies will, certainly, react. Sometimes because it is their official duty, and sometimes at the request of the one who was damaged, depending on the act. We all saw how the Bulgarian state protects the property and integrity of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Mr. Panic: This is not worth a comment. The temple of God, the icon of the plan for salvation is not human property. People do not hold it in possession, they only use it for one purpose only, the Eucharist. They can have other purposes as well, they can be used as conference halls, concert halls etc. (I hope you understand what am I talking about). The usurpation of the temples in Macedonia happened some 50 years ago and it is still happening. The churches build by king Milutin…to whom do they belong? Marko’s monastery…to whom does it belong? They are not Serbian, if this is what you expected me to say, they belong to the Christ our Lord, and they should be used for serving Liturgies, but served to lead to salvation, and not to the fire of hell.

Nahum: It is well known that a Bishop cannot officiate in somebody else’s eparchy without the permission of the home bishop. Even the bishops of the Macedonian Orthodox Church cannot officiate in the Bitola cathedral temple without the permission of the bishop Peter, and how much more this applies for the former Metropolitan of Povardarje who has been defrocked by the Synod of the Macedonian Orthodox Church.

Mr. Panic: Just remember how your first Archbishop of Ohrid violated the canons of the Orthodox Church and held a service in a temple in Ohrid without the blessing of the current bishop of Ohrid and Bitola Vicente. Remember how this so-called archbishop rebuffed the obedience to the Church and declared him self a prelate, of course with the help of the Intelligence Service (UDBa) and the Communist party, the very same that was finishing the job of the Bulgarian occupiers, totally destroying the remains of the already wounded churches. Once again you use double demagogic measures in your monologs. A demagogy, which is not lying, but telling partial truths, being much worse that clear lying. And finally, the Metropolitan John is a canonical Exarch the Patriarch and he has the blessing of the entire Assembly of the Serbian Orthodox Church to hold in his jurisdiction the Church on the territory of the Republic of Macedonia. You might not remember that the territory in the Republic of Macedonia is under church jurisdiction of the Serbian Orthodox Church since 1920, but this is remembered and respected by all Orthodox Churches.

Nahum: And what to say on the things he talks and writes about, together with his followers, against the Bishops of the Macedonian Orthodox Church in the written and electronic media? This just speaks of him, but in the further text we will analyse briefly this moment as very interesting and very indicative. We will see that these are acts of a desperate man who is trying to get the attention of the Orthodox public to himself, trying to hide the cruel fact about him, that he is a shepherd without a flock, which is known to all.

Mr. Panic: His Eminence, the Metropolitan of Povardarje kyr John attracted the attention of the Orthodox public the very day when he renewed the Church unity with the catholic Orthodox Church, and there is no doubt about it. All reactions of the Orthodox public are turned to him, the only True and real bishop of the Orthodox Church in Macedonia. We are not talking about a shepherd with out a flock, but a shepherd with a small, confident flock, which follows him as their BISHOP, and which is ready to stand up before the judge on the Judgement Day.

Nahum: The latest information we have, regarding his last provocation, is that he is starting a court procedure against the bishops from the Synod of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and that he hasn’t got the necessary permission from the Holy Assembly of the Serbian Orthodox Church. According to the nature of his latest moves, it is obvious that he is trying to induce the Bishops from the Synod of the Macedonian Orthodox Church to do the same thing against the Serbian bishops, participants in this court. Such a move would allow him to further present the Macedonian Orthodox Church as a schismatic organisation lead by shepherds who do not want canonical and eucharistic unity with the Serbian Orthodox Church and the other sisterly Orthodox Churches – and that he is trying to procure a permission from the Assembly of the Serbian Orthodox Church to initiate a trial procedure against all the bishops from the Synod of the Macedonian Orthodox Church. Of course, this would lead to a further separation and estrangement of the Episcopacies of the two local Churches.

Mr. Panic: You keep repeating the stories of information and disinformation. That is not the task of a shepherd. The shepherd is supposed to take care of his flock, and not to worry about who does what, and what kind of information he can receive. It is ridiculous, but at the same time pitiful, that You, Your Eminence, start stories about some sort of information instead of taking care of your flock. No one has to try to show the Macedonian Orthodox Church as schismatic, because even you yourself are absolutely familiar with the fact that it IS schismatic. Do you want canonical unity or not? Do you have personal interests …Have YOU signed the document in Nis, or maybe I did it, but I don’t remember now? Your actions just decrease YOUR possibility to be accepted in the unity with the Church. Remember, that you are not in a situation to put to trial some bishop, because you, first of all, do not have the 12 bishops necessary to put to trial another Bishop. So we are talking about a further wilful division of the Church in schism with the rest of Orthodox ecumene, and not about a division between two local Churches, because in this case, and you know it yourself, just one is a local Church, and other one is known by the Orthodox world as a schismatic organisation with whom no one communicates.

Nahum: It is absolutely devastating that all this is happening at a time when we are closest to a mutual agreement, after the coordination of all the theological details of the Nis draft document.

Mr. Panic: In Nis document there is no narration of any theological positions. The Nis Document is a perfectly clear Legal or Canonical Act that does not contain theology, but it inaugurates the canons. If the name of the Church is theology to you, or if it is theology whether the Metropolitan will wear a white or a black epanokalymmavkion, take a little Theology, it will not you, take it and read a little what Theology is, but please, start from the preface. Do the same with the canonical books.

Nahum: It is clear to all of us that the purpose of this behaviour on their part is to win over as many members of God’s congregation from the Bishops of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and to attract them to themselves. This is clear. But, why do they do that in such a violent, unspiritual way, and not in the only way that the God-Man showed us?

Mr. Panic: Do you really think that your way is spiritual? You order heavy machinery, and with all demonic forces you attack the Altar of God with destructive intentions? I admire you “shepherd of Christ’s flock” on your inquisitional zeal for the Church, and your readiness to destroy the place where Bishops, in all unity of Orthodoxy, made an offering to the altar of the God Father, while you, spit on that place with your presence only. You should be ashamed with your

Nahum: The God-Man Christ saves mankind not through giving orders from the heaven and through demonstration of power, as a Ruler and a Judge, but to the contrary, Christ announced Himself to us trough loving empathy, by receiving our fallen human condition (except for sin), He made it his own, and thus conquered evil, sin and death. Why, we once again wonder, don’t they follow the example of the God-Man Christ Who is the only and irreplaceable criterion of our endeavour, especially the monastic?

Mr. Panic: Aren’t you ashamed, so because of love of Christ, you demolished his altar? A clever man would have no comment on this. I must admit that this letter is to me, may God forgive me, as if I was having a correspondence with the great zealous Jesuit Ignatius Layola who was also ardent worker for the Church and for the same reasons, similar to Yours, he burnt thousands of innocent people at the stake. Who knows, maybe one day, they will celebrate you for of your zeal for the schismatic parasynagogue, they might even build you out of clay.

Nahum: We will receive the answer to this question in the brief analysis of their spiritual profiles as people. All of them are people who, in several years of their spiritual life, changed three or four eparchies and five or six monasteries. It is humane to accept that in the first eparchy and in the first monastery they had some justified reason for leaving. But what did they miss in the other ones? Didn’t the holy fathers say: “The one who does not succeed in one place, usually does not succeed”!

Mr. Panic: Your Eminence, You should remember that YOU were in the monastery Grigoriou on the Holy Mount Athos, and that you rushed away from that place without the blessing of your spiritual father to the alleged Episcopacy and glory. Healer, heal yourself. You are not talking only of other people here, because in most cases the author starts from himself, and as it seems so does he in this case. We all remember that zealous monk Nahum from the monastery Grigoriou, he was a wonderful monk and hermit, and see now what fame and pride can make of a monk.

Nahum: As our Elder used to say, the spiritual order for beginners imposes in case we leave our spiritual father, and still haven’t obtained God’s gift of the prayer of heart and mind (as they haven’t) are obliged to look for a new spiritual father who will spiritually guide us until we have purified our heart and God’s grace has appeared in it, until the moment we discover the place of the heart and God’s gift of inspiration of the prayer of the heart and mind. After that we are free. There is no other way. But the people we analyse, consciously or unconsciously, affected by the unhesychastic spirit, have sought for monasteries in which they, themselves, will be spiritual fathers and they looked for Bishops who will listen to them, and not places and spiritual fathers to whom they would be obedient. And, certainly, they didn’t find this. This is why they changed so eparchies and monasteries, so that they would, in the end, administratively change the Church. Will they stop there? Will that be the end? Our people say: A tree replanted more than once bears no fruit. This is why these people do not have an inner confidence and they cannot, with their personal fruits, attract someone, but instead they use slanders and lies, trials and judgements. But the fruit of the spirit is: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faith, meekness, restraint. Against such there is no law (Gal. 5:22). Did you see?... Against such there is no law. According to the tradition of the holy fathers, all of these gifts are assembled in the perfect gift of God’s prayer of the heart and mind.

When we speak of the prayer of the heart and mind, according to the teaching of our Elder, it is interesting to know the following: as far as the dogmas, the canons, the liturgical and ascetic-hesychastic life of our faith and Church are concerned, they have been written they can be read and learned, even the theoretical part about the prayer of the heart and mind.

Mr. Panic: And who is “Your Elder” Mr. Nahum? Is he the very humble and highly respected elder from the monastery Grigoriou, to whom you stuck a knife in the back…or did you find another?

Nahum: This is why we never heard from the spiritual fathers of the Serbian Exarchate a word about the prayer of the mind and heart. This is why we never read from them something about the prayer of the mind and heart. This is why no one, ever or anywhere heard or read anything about the prayer of the heart and mind.

Mr. Panic: This is not because there isn’t any, but because you seem to have forgotten to read spiritual literature, and God knows if you even read the church calendar. Read:

and there is a lot more that you should read.

And, in the end, just a few more things. You, Most Eminent Nahum ( I refer to you like that because you are still not defrocked, but according to your life and your acts, you have already defrocked yourself) have fallen in a deep delusion. First, you abandoned your spiritual father and the Mount Athos without a blessing. The Hagiorites (the monks from Athos) cursed you for eternity and, in fact, your delusion is just a demonstration of that curse. You have no blessing for spiritual guidance or pastoral work. One can tell this by the fact that your spiritual children leave you when they find out the truth about you. You will see that in the end you will end alone, just with a few nuns with whom you have “deeper” relations. And it’s a separate story where You got such a “blessing” to gather up female monastics. Out of decency we will say nothing of this, but not only God, know that there are many other people who know more of this and there is nothing hidden that won’t come out. The few people around you have only two reasons for that. They are either on good positions and you pay them well, or they are still beginners in the spiritual life and are psychologically, that is sentimentally attracted to You. You might manage to keep the former because they have interests and they charge for their services. But the latter, when they grow up they will hate you, because you kept them for so long in delusion. This is a not prophecy, but a spiritual law. The schism does not have grace and your endeavour hasn’t got God’s blessing. Even worse, you are under the curse of your spiritual father from Mount Athos. This, my dear bishop, is an unforgivable sin. And it becomes even greater when you delude and seduce others to follow your sins. What the Gospel says for those is that it would be better for them to hang a rock around their neck and jump in the deep sea.

I dare advise you that the only solution is to repent, to reject the heresy and the schism in which you have befallen to fall before your Patriarch and ask for forgiveness. Publicly, of course, because in the Church everything is public, at least Christ teaches us so. That is not just my advice, but the advice of many bishops with whom I have had the chance to talk about you. You haven’t stuck a knife only in the back of your spiritual father, the highly esteemed archimandrite George Kapsanis, the abbot of Grigoriou, but to many Bishops from the other Orthodox Churches. Your stories that you are, oh, a great hesychast are a subject to mockery. I am telling you this most openly, knowing that you have no communication with the other Orthodox Churches and that you do not know what people speak of you. This is your greatest delusion, which gave birth to your heresy. You consider yourself to be the greatest hesychast and you imagine that you are one of the twelve Hagiorites who live the life of hermits near the peak of Athos. You probably heard that hesychasts never impose themselves and that they never reveal what they are. Contrary to this you praise yourself so much that man might even wonder if you have even started the spiritual endeavour. People will judge you as a proud and conceited boaster having no idea that your disease is much worse than the abovementioned. You, my dear bishop, are in delusion. Delusion is the worst possible spiritual disease. It’s when someone imagines that he is a great spiritual father, like You do. Even this is not enough. He starts to criticize everybody else, and on the basis of the criticism of the others he builds his identity and his position in the Church. Thus, you criticize all the Bishops in the Orthodox Church, that none of them engages in the prayer of the heart and mind, that none of them is a hesychast, and because You are the only one and this makes You different from them, this is the reason why they cannot understand your humbleness. Well excuse me, but in the Orthodox Church we call this delusion.

And Your participation in the terrorist act of burning the monastery in Nizepole, do you call this hesychasm? You send masked and armed bandits to burn the monastery, and then, with peaceful conscience you give people lessons in hesychasm. This is a delusion on the verge of a mental breakdown.

It wasn’t so long ago so we have forgotten that You conspired unity of all the schismatics. You support the contacts with the schismatics in Ukraine, Bulgaria and even those poor people in Montenegro. You have no problem to be in union with the married Philaret of Kiev since you have several Philarets in your synod. By this you have only shown that this is where you belong.

Dear bishop, forgive me for the hard words, but the orthodox people expected a lot from you when you were on Mount Athos. You have ceased all relation you had with Mount Athos and it is no wonder that you got stuck so deeply in delusion. Come back to the church, dear Bishop, and please leave your delusion because your doom is not just your own. Besides you many other fall.

Humbly before God,
Srdzan Panic