St Justin (Popović) of Ćelije

Biography

Born at Vranje in 1894 on the feast of the Annunciation, Justin studied at Petrograd, Oxford and Athens, taught dogmatics at Belgrade, and wrote a three volume Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church and the twelve volume Lives of the Saints. Under the communist government he was confined from 1948 to the small convent of Ćelije, where he served, wrote, and received the disciples who became the renewers of Serbian theology.

He reposed in 1979, again on the Annunciation, and was glorified by the Serbian Church in 2010, a canonized saint of a canonical Church whose sharpest writings are against ecumenism.

The controversy

• Twentieth century ecumenism and the preparations for a 'Great and Holy Council': Justin's memoranda to the Serbian hierarchy (notably 1971 and 1977) warned that such a council, prepared in that spirit, would produce not healing but division.

Position taken

• In The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (1974) he taught that the ecumenist movement amounts to a universal heresy, a relativizing of the one Church confessed in the Creed.
• Yet he neither broke communion with his Church nor countenanced a rival church: his resistance was doctrinal, public, and within, the pattern of confession without schism this library defends.