The Agony of the Church (1917)

Written in 1917, as Europe tore itself apart in the First World War, this passionate treatise asks a question that still haunts: what has become of the Church? Nikolaj Velimirović, then a young Serbian Orthodox bishop who would later become a saint, turns his searing intellect against the institutional churches of his day. He diagnoses an agony not of faith itself, but of the bodies that claim to carry it. The Church, he argues, has too often become indistinguishable from the nationalist and imperial powers that feast on blood. Velimirović contrasts the living Body of Christ with calcified institutions that have traded prophetic fire for political comfort. Yet this is no mere critique. It is a call to resurrection, an argument that true Christianity must transcend sectarian boundaries and national allegiances to embody the universal love and sacrifice it proclaims. Written in the midst of unimaginable suffering, with the author's homeland bleeding under occupation, the book pulses with a desperate hope: that the Church might remember its calling and heal what modernity has broken.