Pastor Burns did not hesitate to dictate his agenda according to what was whispered to him in Serbia: he demanded that Kosovo review the state rule that obliges Patriarch Porfirije to notify the Kosovar authorities at least 72 hours in advance of visits to Kosovo. “His Holiness should enjoy the right of free entry into Kosovo, to fulfill his pastoral duties, to visit the faithful and to pray in the historic monasteries of the Serbian Orthodox Church. He should not be treated as a political threat, nor be forced to overcome unnecessary political obstacles every time he wants to visit the holy home of the Serbian Orthodox faithful,” Pastor Burns wrote in X. “I am especially grateful for the attention [of the US administration] to the Serbian Christian community, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the protection of its sacred heritage,” Burns added after his visit to Kosovo and Serbia this week.
And former Kosovo Foreign Minister Petrit Selimi stressed that the blame for this situation lies not with Pastor Burns, but with Kosovo’s own institutions. “Kosovo diplomacy has collapsed in Washington. I do not blame Pastor Burns for being misinformed, but with our government for reducing our presence in Washington, for abandoning interfaith diplomacy, and for destroying in five years what Kosovo has built over decades. This is a mess,” Selimi wrote in X. Kosovo has a fairly respectable reputation for standards of interfaith tolerance and harmony between communities, but Patriarch Porfirije often uses his visits to Kosovo to promote an agenda of denying Kosovo’s independence.
Patriarch Porfirije and his clergy rarely go without an incident in Kosovo, prompting the reaction of the Kosovar authorities, which Serbia then uses to victimize itself before the international community, especially the United States. Otherwise, beyond the unfounded claims of Pastor Burns, no official report compiled by the institutions of the European Union or in the periodic assessments of the Council of Europe has recorded any incidents of a religious nature in Kosovo.