Belgrade - Tens of thousands of Serbs gathered in Belgrade Thursday for the burial of the leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, a former monk who leaves behind feuding bishops and an uncertain fight for the church's top post. During four days of mourning, thousands stood for up to 10 hours in a long queue to pay their last respects to the patriarch as he lay in state in the Saborna church in central Belgrade.
Thursday morning, a huge crowd lined the streets along the two- kilometre route leading the procession carrying the coffin from Saborna, where the Divine Liturgy was performed, to another church, St Sava Temple, to witness the patriarch's funeral service.
Pavle, a former monk and bishop of Kosovo, was famous for his humble manner and for his quips at the expense of his less modest clerics. He was laid to rest in a small monastery on outskirts of the capital, in accordance with his wishes.
Pavle died Sunday at the age of 95, after spending two years in a hospital. He left behind an increasingly powerful but divided church in which a power struggle is likely to intensify in the coming months.
The patriarch was too frail to leave his hospital suite. Despite his request to be relieved of his duties, the feuding bishops were unable to agree on his successor at a conference a year ago.
"The next patriarch will have two difficult tasks: to assess his authority among the believers who have already declared Pavle a saint, and to preserve the unity of bishops who already...showed excessive greed for power," the weekly Nin commented Thursday.
The bishops, who now have until February 15 - three months from Pavle's death - to elect the new patriarch, are split into two main factions, the reformist and the dogmatic, the former seeking quick reforms and the latter insisting on the status quo.
Those wings are themselves further fragmented. Issues of contention include troubled relations with other churches, funding, and the balance of the church dioceses within Serbia's borders and those outside them.
Any leader of an eparchy with at least five years of service is a possible candidate.
"We need the new patriarch to be a visionary, because the church faces great challenges," the head of the church's university, Radovan Bigovic, told TV B92.
Besides internal squabbling, the church has yet to come to terms with the new reality of the secession of Albanian-dominated Kosovo, Serbia's heartland province and home to many ancient shrines.
Pavle assumed the throne 19 years ago, at a time when the Serbian Orthodox Church enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and influence on the wave of nationalism promoted by Slobodan Milosevic, who had then emerged as the nation's undisputed leader from the ranks of the disintegrating Communist Party.
Milosevic, though himself uninterested in religion, had strongly supported Serbs' interest in their church after it had been neglected by the Communist regime for more than four decades.
Pavle and other clerics had been criticized by human rights activists over their role in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their refusal to distance themselves clearly from war crimes committed by Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Following Milosevic's fall, the Orthodox Church became even more influential, its representatives joining secular institutions and taking part in state affairs, such as the failed, United Nations- moderated negotiations on Kosovo in 2006-2007.