Archbishop Jovan of Ohrid
Encyclopedia : A : AR : ARC : Archbishop Jovan of Ohrid
Zoran Vranishkovski (so-called Archbishop Jovan of Ohrid) was born on February 28, 1966 in Bitola, Republic of Macedonia where he completed primary and secondary school education. He finished his studies at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Skopje in 1990 and enrolled the Faculty of Theology in Belgrade the same year (graduated in June, 1995) when he started his master’s studies. He is now working on his doctoral dissertation: “The Unity of the Church and the Contemporary Ecclesiological Problems”.
Vranishkovski become a monk in February 1998 and in surprisingly short time, in July 1998 was promoted into a bishop.
In March 2000, he was elected to be a Bishop of Veles eparchy. As the negotiations between the Macedonian Orthodox Church and the Serbian Orthodox Church suspended (Macedonian Orthodox Church declared itself autocephalous in 1967), Vranishkovski formed a schismatic group recognized by the Serbian church as the Orthodox Ohrid Archbishopric. Macedonian Orthodox Church cut-off all relations with the clergy of the group. Vranishkovski was jailed for 18 months for defaming the Macedonian Orthodox church and harming the religious feelings of local citizens. [link].
The Macedonian State Religion Commission denies the group to be registered as a religious group saying that only one group may be registered for each confession and that the name was not sufficiently distinct from that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church. Macedonian church had acquired documents confirming direct involvement of the Serbian government in financing the activities of the group, seen as interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign state by the Macedonian President Crvenkovski. [link]. Macedonian President also rejected the request of the Head of Serbian Orthodox Church for abolition of Zoran Vranishkovski (set as a main condition for resumption of negotiations between two churches by the Serbian Patriarch). Vranishkovski is convicted about misappropriate usage of a large sum of money donated to the Macedonian Orthodox Church. [link]
References
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.