The death of Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Pavle brought an outpouring of condolences from sister churches, other denominations and religions and government leaders around the globe, and his funeral brought to Belgrade representatives of the top echelons of the Eastern Orthodox Christian community.

Yet, for all the display of fraternity, the state of Orthodox Christian churches in South Eastern Europe inevitably is intertwined with the politics of the individual countries and of the region as a whole.

After the death of Pavle, even before the first reports emerged with speculation about who among the reportedly 30 bishops qualified to succeed him would take his throne, there were those who sought to portray him as a saint and those who sought to demonise him.

The church he had led since December 1990 has been caught up in all of the most vexed issues of Serbia’s recent history, from Milosevic to Kosovo. Even as he lay too ill to actively lead his church, those who had stewardship of the Serbian Orthodox Church were outspoken on issues from eventually-aborted plans for a gay parade in Belgrade (likening it to Sodom and Gomorrah) to the November 2009 local elections in Kosovo (which the church joined the government in Belgrade as condemning as illegitimate and calling on ethnic Serbs in Kosovo not to participate).

There is another long-standing and seemingly intractable schism in which the Serbian Orthodox Church is involved, the existence of a Macedonian Orthodox Church, a breakaway in Skopje rejected by all other Orthodox Christian churches, labelled by its detractors as a Tito-era communist project.

Like other Orthodox churches in the Balkans, the Serbian Orthodox Church sees itself, probably not inappropriately, as the soul of its country. Back to Kosovo; the issue of the unilateral declaration of independence in Pristina in February 2008 is more than a disputed issue of international law; Kosovo, say those in Serbia who reject Kosovo’s independence, is also a cradle of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The question may arise whether in choosing a successor to Pavle, the Holy Synod would want to see the church led in a direction different from his. It is quite likely that the vast majority of those who admired him, who see in him a humble man who worked for peace while living for Serbia, would want anything but a change of direction.

Bulgaria: Red and blue
There are two levels at which to consider the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, of which Maxim has been Patriarch since 1971; its public voice and its inner voice.

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church in recent years has made headlines when, as it has done time and again, it has chosen to speak out on figures in public culture. In January 2002, it successfully campaigned against Bulgarian National Television showing The Last Temptation of Christ, which it described as blasphemous.

A year later, it railed publicly against Harry Potter. In 2006, it campaigned, this time unsuccessfully, against cinema showings of the Da Vinci Code. The church made headlines around the world by lashing out at Madonna in August 2009, calling on Christians to boycott her Sofia concert because of her "open violation" of Christian symbolism, compounded in this case by performing on a day holy in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church calendar.

This episode got the church even more coverage than when the then-newly elected Metropolitan of Plovdiv, in a radio interview, described the Pope as a heretic. That is the public voice. The church’s inner voice is caught in an internal argument about what will become of the church when Maxim, who is in his 90s and in poor health, dies.

A still-unresolved schism in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church arose from a post-communist government’s attempt to oust him. Maxim’s detractors see him as symbolising the communist regime’s subversion of the church, and even though the question of the "Alternative Synod" went to the European Court, it has resulted in nothing further than a ruling that Bulgaria had violated the rights of Inkonentii, leader of the Alternative Synod, and his followers. The rift remains unhealed, and it is an open question whether an immediate successor to Maxim would be able to heal it.