Dubious claims about Vatican takeover of Serbian Orthodox Church properties in Kosovo
This is the fifth and final article in a series of in-depth analyses I’ve been writing in partnership with the Western Balkans Anti-Disinformation Hub on the changing nature of Orthodox and other religious disinformation approaches in the Balkans.
This one is a little bit different from the Moscow-centric articles I’ve done before, as it focuses on the Vatican relations with Kosovo, an under-researched and under-reported theme.
Relations between the Vatican and Serbia have long been marked by mistrust and second-guessing, often fueling misinformation. Serbian nationalist commentators used the warming up of relations between Kosovo and the Holy See to link it to threats to the property rights of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo.
Written by: Dr Andreja Bogdanovski, Analyst
The analysis was first published by Truthmeter and Antidisinfo.
At the end of 2025, Kosovo’s President, Vjosa Osmani, met Pope Leo XIV in a private audience, inviting him to visit Kosovo and reiterating Prishtina’s long-standing goal of securing Vatican recognition of Kosovo’s independence, declared in 2008.
From St. Peter’s Square, following her meeting with the Pope, she posted a video message in which she referred to “ancient Dardania”, noting that Kosovo had given the world important figures such as Skanderbeg, Mother Teresa, the Emperors Constantine and Justinian, and many others. Coincidentally, on the same day of her visit (15th of December), Serbia’s first-ever Cardinal, Ladislav Nemet, had a separate audience with the Pope.
While pointing to historical considerations – particularly important for the Vatican – it is the fra gile relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church that make the Vatican’s political involvement in Kosovo unable to realize its full potential.
While the recognition of Kosovo’s statehood by the Holy See, a much-desired issue for many Kosovo politicians, remains a future objective, the Vatican has been improving relations at the religious and pastoral level. In 2018, Pope Francis elevated the apostolic administration of Prizren (a temporary structure) to the Diocese of Prizren-Prishtina.
The legacy of the previous Pope in the Western Balkans includes not only what he accomplished but also the actions he refrained from taking, such as the Vatican’s continued refusal to recognize Kosovo’s independence, a gesture appreciated greatly by Serbia’s political leadership.
Diplomatic manoeuvres to keep Rome’s support
Despite Pope Francis’ repeated willingness to visit Serbia, such a trip never came to fruition due to a lack of consensus within the Serbian Orthodox Church – an unofficial requirement for a papal visit to an Orthodox-majority country.
“We have an interest in the Pope being on our side”, Serbia’s Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić said in January 2024, before criticizing the Serbian Orthodox Church for hesitating to invite the Pope – an invitation the Serbian authorities view as a key foreign policy tool to maintain Vatican support on the issue of Kosovo’s status.
When Kosovo opened a special mission office to the Vatican last January, President Osmani hailed it as “a new chapter in relations with the Holy See”, causing uneasiness among Serbian state officials.
Serbia’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Sima Avramović, downplayed Kosovo’s move, explaining that it essentially represents a form of a “Liaison Office” with no diplomatic status.
Relations between the Vatican and Serbia have long been marked by mistrust and second-guessing, often fueling misinformation. Serbian nationalist commentators used the warming up of relations between Kosovo and the Holy See to link it to threats to the property rights of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo.
It won’t be any other Orthodox Church taking over these properties, but it will be the Catholic clergy in Kosovo and Metohija, which has long been showing interest in doing so, commented Aleksandar Raković from the Institute for Recent History of Serbia, for Politika, in May of 2024.
Accusations of meddling by Kosovo Catholic clergy in Serbian Orthodox affairs have been on the increase recently. In July of 2025, the Serbian Orthodox Church issued a strongly-worded reaction to a Catholic priest holding a service near the archaeological site of the Holy Virgin of Hvosno monastery (Studenica Hvostanska) in the northeast of Kosovo.
The Raška-Prizren diocese of the SOC called these Catholic actions “deplorable”, stating that they have violated the Law on Special Protective Zones in Kosovo. In the statement, it described the act as quasi-political and wanting to stir up nationalist tensions:
Without any historical or legal basis, he [Fr. Kolaj] referred to the historically well-documented Serbian Orthodox monastery as ‘ethnic Albanian and Illyrian’, the statement said.
Not long after the event, the Serbian Ministry of Culture issued a statement describing the incident as an attempt at historical revisionism.
How Politika amplified tension
When Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić met with the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, in Belgrade (2024), he reiterated Serbia’s appreciation of the Vatican’s non-recognition of Kosovo, but also used the opportunity to express Belgrade’s expectations when it comes to the protection of SOC’s heritage in Kosovo, placing it high on the list of Serbian priorities.
For Serbia, it is of vital importance to ensure the protection and restoration of the Serbian religious and cultural heritage [in Kosovo], Orthodox cemeteries, as well as endangered cultural monuments, especially Orthodox churches and monasteries under the protection of UNESCO, Vučić stated on his social media account.
The frail situation of the rights of the Serbian church and its status in Kosovo is offering a platform for frequent attacks from Belgrade. Serbian newspaper Politika in May 2024 falsely claimed that Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti is “offering Serbian Orthodox temples to the Vatican.” The story was subsequently reported across the Balkans, including by Russian outlets Sputnik Srbija and RT Balkan.
The Politika article relies mainly on quotes from Aleksandar Raković, known for his support for the unification of “Serbian lands” in the Balkans, and Ratko Dmitrović, a journalist and publicist. Politika presented Raković’s view that the Catholic church in Kosovo is the brain of all operations aimed at seizing Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries.
This can be seen based on the publications [Kosovo authorities] have been publishing recently in Prishtina and their activities abroad, which aim to show that our Serbian, medieval shrines either arose on the ruins of some of their Catholic medieval ones, or that some of their shrines were taken over by the Serbs, Raković stated.
Dmitrović commented that the Vatican is not bound by time limitations in its aims and strategies and is using the Serbian Orthodox Church as an “unwilling Christian ally”. The Vatican, according to him, has two main objectives in Kosovo:
The first is aimed at stopping the spread of Islam, which has been a constant… and the second level is missionary work, i.e., the conquest of new believers and a new space where Catholicism will dominate, stated Dimitrović.
He added that the emigration of Kosovo Serbs has worked in Rome’s favor, and the Vatican is primarily interested in taking over the smaller Orthodox churches in Kosovo.
But the article, which gained traction in Serbia, was rebuked by Andjela Milivojević, a journalist who wrote for Kossev.info about the manipulative nature of the text published by Politika. She characterized it as “a case of disinformation and clickbait headlines”, without the newspaper providing any concrete evidence to back up the sensational headline.
Apart from his stance on the issue, Raković does not offer any evidence or official documents to support the accusation that Kurti offered to hand over Serbian churches to the Vatican or that there is an official government policy to do so, Milivojević wrote.
Despite the rejection of such assertions, the narrative of the Vatican’s purported interest in Serbian churches and monasteries remains widely circulated. Similar to the Raković and Dimitrović stance on the matter, an RT Balkan article from June (2025) quoted law professor Zoran Čvorović, who claimed once again that the threat to Serbian church property is “much greater” from the Catholic Church in Kosovo, which he described as “seriously organized”, than from “some kind of Albanian or Kosovo Orthodox church.”
Fear and framing
Politika’s headline from May 2024 alludes to an imminent and existential danger to SOC churches from the Vatican, which is portrayed as working behind the scenes, in the form of a plot, interested only in territorial and political expansion in the Balkans. This characterization is a repetition of conservative Orthodox and nationalist views about the Catholic Church in this part of the Balkans, weaponizing history and suggesting that the SOC church erasure in Kosovo is agreed upon by the Vatican and the leadership in Prishtina.
Incidents such as the 2023 renaming of a Serbian Orthodox church in Gornje Vinarce, on which works had been carried out, as a Catholic Church by Kosovo authorities, have raised concerns. However, they do not point to a systematic or Rome-backed attempt to seize Serbian Orthodox church property, nor to any secret Vatican-Kosovo deal.
Fitim Gashi, a senior researcher at Sbunker, explained that the Serbian Orthodox Church plays a significant political role in framing Kosovo narratives.
The hands-on involvement of senior SOC clerics in the media discourse portraying Kosovo as an “existential church/national issue”, criticizing Kosovo institutions and using religious language that “dovetails” with political narratives, creates, he argued, a “fertile ground for religiously framed disinformation about Catholic ‘threats’.”
Those statements do not usually repeat the crude ‘Vatican takeover’ conspiracy word-for-word, but the Church’s emphasis on existential threat provides fertile soil for that message to spread in media close to the SOC, Gashi shared with Antidisinfo.
This article was developed in partnership with the regional initiative Western Balkans Anti-Disinformation Hub, implemented by the Metamorphosis Foundation with financial support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The contents of the article are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the project partners and donor.
https://antidisinfo.net/