A NUMBER, AN ENVELOPE, AND A QUESTION: WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE HEARING
THURSDAY, JULY 30 — THE MAILBOX.
The day after this Court itself mailed notice of the August 3 hearing to Fr. Dragoslav Kosić's address, a handwritten note was found taped inside his mailbox: "Do Not Deliver, St Sava Serbian Cathedral, Take Back." The mail carrier told his wife directly, in person, that she could not leave mail there, and left without delivering — despite being asked if there was anything for them. Fr. Dragoslav never received notice of the hearing as a result.
[INSERT PHOTO: mailbox note, July 30, 2026]
This is the second time mail to this address has been blocked. The first, in January, ended with a letter returned marked "Not Known, Unable to Forward" — despite Fr. Dragoslav having lived there the entire time. Two blocks, seven months apart, each time coinciding with something the sender or recipient needed to know. Readers may judge for themselves what would have happened had Fr. Dragoslav simply not shown up on August 3 — no objection, no hearing, no witness, nothing left to rule on but a case no one contested.
AUGUST 3, 2026 — THE HEARING.
Magistrate George F. Lonjak denied the Motion to Stay in Case No. 26CVG03349. Fr. Dragoslav Kosić — pro se, on medical leave nine months, with no salary for the same nine months — had asked the court to pause the eviction until the Holy Synod in Belgrade decides the canonical appeal parishioners filed on their and his behalf on January 9, 2026, and which the Synod's own office confirmed in writing on January 23, 2026 it would take up. That appeal has still not been decided. The magistrate proceeded anyway.
We are told the magistrate was displeased that his prior decision had been objected to at all. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions about a court's reaction to a party — any party — exercising a right the law plainly gives them.
BUT SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED THAT DAY — BEFORE THE HEARING EVEN STARTED.
Before the case was called, counsel for the Trusteeship approached Fr. Dragoslav directly. According to the parishioners that were today in the court room , the exchange went like this:
"Father, if we were to offer you 6700 (67 hundreds), would you accept it and walk away from this?"
Sit with that number for a moment. Fr. Dragoslav has gone unpaid for nine months. Nine months of salary, at even a modest clergy stipend, is many multiples of $6,700. The offer was floated before the day's outcome was even known — not as a reward for a win already secured, but as a way to make the hearing itself unnecessary. Readers may wonder for themselves what the offering side believed nine months of no paycheck would make a man willing to accept.
He said no.
We are told the reaction to that "no" was something close to disbelief.
AND THERE WAS ANOTHER MOMENT, IN THE SAME ROOM, WORTH RECORDING.
Also before the hearing began, a letter addressed to Fr. Dragoslav — returned, undelivered, in the same pattern already documented in these pages — was sitting at the Trusteeship's own table. Their attorney was overheard suggesting to two members of the Trusteeship present that they were free to open it if they wished. They did not — at least not visibly. Both, it seemed, were aware that opening someone else's mail is a federal offense.
What became of that envelope afterward, we did not see. We leave that to the reader's imagination.
ASK YOURSELF WHY.
Why does a side confident in its position feel the need, before a hearing even begins, to offer money for the other man to simply disappear? People who trust the process to vindicate them do not typically need to make the process unnecessary in advance. And why does the same side's own attorney appear untroubled by a piece of someone else's undelivered mail sitting on the table in front of him?
This is not the first time this exact question — why does the other side want this over so badly, so quickly? — has been worth asking. Two weeks ago, this outlet reported that the Trusteeship's own attorney acknowledged, in open court, possessing internal notes from a closed session of the Holy Assembly of Bishops in Belgrade — records the Church's own Constitution requires be kept under oath of secrecy, in the Synod's archive, nowhere else. We heard that acknowledgment ourselves, in the courtroom, and it is preserved on the audio recording accompanying this article. We asked then how a civil eviction lawyer in Parma, Ohio came to hold notes from a private ecclesiastical session held across an ocean. We are still asking.
Today, Fr. Dragoslav asked too. He put the question to the attorney directly, in the courtroom, in front of everyone present: how did he come to possess those notes?
The attorney's answer was not spoken. He looked down, and said nothing.
Readers may draw their own conclusions about what a lawyer's silence, and his eyes on the floor, tend to mean when the question is one he cannot answer.
We do not know why an attorney so confident he would prevail that morning would still feel it necessary to, unprompted, float a cash number to a man he had every reason to believe would refuse it out of principle. We simply note that it happened, in the same courtroom, on the same morning as the ruling itself, following the same pattern of urgency this case has shown for months: notices that never arrive, mail that gets blocked not once but repeatedly, and now, an offer to make the most inconvenient witness in the room simply go away — made before anyone even knew for certain how the day would end.
THE APPEAL STILL STANDS.
Parishioners' canonical appeal to the Holy Synod remains pending, exactly as it has since January. The Synod's own office confirmed receipt in writing seven months ago. We are still waiting for an answer — the same answer the Trusteeship's attorney apparently hoped $6,700 could make unnecessary to wait for.
We will keep waiting. And we will keep asking why some people seem so unwilling to.
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