Serbia honours the man condemned for Srebrenica. Innocent blood cries out.

Serbia held, on Monday 7 September 2026 in Belgrade, a state funeral for Ratko Mladic, the former military chief of the Bosnian Serbs, condemned by international justice for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. The funeral service was held at the church of Saint Luke in Kosutnjak, in the south-west of the city, where a crowd wrapped in Serbian flags, accompanied by priests, came in great number to approach the body. Tens of thousands of people, many from Republika Srpska and from every Serbian region, took part, and the man was buried with military honours, despite the warnings of the European Union.

Patriarch Porfirije of Serbia presided over the ceremony, concelebrated with many metropolitans and bishops, while President Aleksandar Vucic declined to attend. Before the coffin, the patriarch presented the deceased as a Christian who, according to the testimony of the priests who had visited him, had in his last years confessed his faults with humility, received the Body and Blood of Christ in Communion, and died holding the Cross to his breast.

Outside, voices were raised to denounce a « glorification of genocide » which « is not an honour, it is a shame », while the gathering was presented as « a reaction to Western pressure ». The event is thus contested in its very meaning: a large part of the Serbian Orthodox Church and of public opinion honours Mladic as a Christian and the defender of his people, while international justice found him guilty of the Srebrenica genocide.

The fifth commandment and innocent blood

The Church has never measured the death of a man by the flags that accompany it. The fifth commandment, « Thou shalt not kill », forbids above all the murder of the innocent, and the Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that there is scarcely a crime more detestable than voluntary homicide, by which one destroys in another the image of God. Scripture says it in a voice that does not fall silent: of the blood of Abel, God declares to Cain, « The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me from the earth » (Genesis 4:10). The murder of the innocent is among those sins that tradition ranks with the ones which cry to heaven for vengeance.

Honour and crime

By this measure, we must distinguish what no honour of state can confound. On the fate of the deceased’s soul we pronounce nothing: if he repented and found mercy, that regards God alone, and the Church has always separated the sinner, whom contrition can save, from the sin, which remains a crime. But the public act is judged: to grant a man condemned for the massacre of innocents a state funeral and military honours, and to present this tribute as an act of defiance, is no longer to mourn a dead man, it is to make of shed blood a banner.

Now to approve publicly the shedding of innocent blood, or to raise it into glory, is to make oneself complicit in what the fifth commandment condemns. That these rites were those of a Church separated from Rome changes nothing of the measure: the divine law, « Thou shalt not kill », binds all men.

What the faithful must hold

The faithful formed in the tradition let themselves be neither swept along by the fervour of a crowd nor hardened by hatred. They may pray for the repose of any dead man and leave the judgment to God; they never confound the mourning of a man with the glorification of his deeds. Innocent blood is not a banner, and no cause, no nation, no foreign pressure redeems the murder of the innocent. Where the world counts the flags, the Church listens to the voice that cries from the earth.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment « Thou shalt not kill ». Sacred Scripture, Genesis 4:10, according to the Douay-Rheims: « The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me from the earth ».