Police on Wednesday forced dissenting clergy out of hundreds of churches returning control on them to mainstream Orthodox leaders and triggering protests by human right groups and opposition parties.
In several places police scuffled with dissident priests and briefly arrested two of them in one Sofia Church.
The dissenters have been occupying more that 200 churches, monasteries and chapels since their 1992 split from the Holy Synod of Orthodox leader Patriarch Maxim, whom they have accused of ties to the former Communist regime. Maxim, who has been heading the church since 1971, has dismissed the allegations and calls to quit invoking a rule, under which patriarchs serve for life.
He has recently asked prosecutors to restore him rights over property held by the dissenters saying they were illegally making money from it. He has cited a 2002 law that declared his Synod the only owner of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church property.
But Krasimir Kanev, head of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group, blasted the law for “allowing the church be run like a political party.”
“The one who wins majority takes everything _ the property and the souls of the faithful,” he said.
"As the Holy Synod learned that those who had split from the church had started to sell some of its property, it was our duty to alarm prosecutors,” Maxim’s Metropolitan Natanail said.
“We must assist the petitioner _ the Bulgarian Orthodox Church _ and restore her infringed property rights,” Sofia city prosecutor Boyko Naydenov said. “When there is usurpation we must intervene. The parties may litigate about property later in court.”
“Police acted lawfully on prosecutors’ orders,” an interior ministry spokeswoman told the BNN. “There has been no violence, nobody was arrested.”
But the private bTV channel showed footage of police struggling with a resisting priest and dragging him to a car in front of Sofia’s St. Paraskeva church.
“They can take me out of here only dead,” the priest Kamen Barakov cried. “Let the world see what democracy and what laws we have.”
The bTV said priests had barricaded themselves in several churches across the country and refused to quit. It gave no other details.
The Union of Democratic Forces, an opposition center-right party, said in a statement that police raids had “led to clashes and clergy have been arrested.”
“The brutal actions of the law-enforcement units are not a means to solve disputes in the spiritual community,” the statement said. “Temples are not a place for violence.”