Jovan Vraniskovski
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Jovan Vraniskovski or Archbishop Jovan (John) VI (Macedonian: Архиепископ Јован Вранишковски) (born 28 February 1966 in Bitola, Republic of Macedonia) is an archbishop in the Republic of Macedonia. Vraniskovski studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Skopje in 1990 and enrolled the Faculty of Theology in Belgrade the same year (graduated in June, 1995) when he started his master’s studies. He is now working on his doctoral dissertation: "The Unity of the Church and the Contemporary Ecclesiological Problems."
Vraniskovski became a monk in February 1998 and in July 1998 was promoted into a bishop.
In March 2000, he was elected the Bishop of Veles Eparchy. As the negotiations between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the unrecognised Macedonian Orthodox Church suspended (the latter declared itself autocephalous in 1967 with the endorsement of the then communist authorities), Archbishop Jovan is the head of the only Canonical Orthodox Church in Macedonian; the Orthodox Ohrid Archbishopric. Macedonian Orthodox Church cut-off all relations with the clergy of this recognised Church. Archbishop Jovan suffers political prosecution from the authorities. He was jailed for 18 months for misuse of church funds [1]. He was on trial for embezzling 325,000 euros of funds from the Macedonian Orthodox Church, but declared innocent.
The Macedonian State Religion Commission denies the group registration as a religious group stating that only one group may be registered for each confession and that the name was not sufficiently distinct from that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church, which is a position completely at odds with world Orthodoxy.
