Rules for Thee, Deception for Me: How the Board Violates the Very Parish Regulations It Cites

The letter dated August 18, 2026 — the one giving parishioners fifteen days to write a statement of repentance or face expulsion — is not a single letter to a single person. It went out to everyone the Board identified as having stood outside the church, apparently selected by going through photographs and picking out faces. Each copy closes the same way: three names — Fr. Dragan Vuković, Dragan Obrenić, and Katarina Derek — with the notation "/s/" under each. No handwritten mark. No digital signature with any verification behind it. No notary, no witness. Just three initials of a convention — "signed" — typed by whoever typed the letter, sitting above three names that were also typed by whoever typed the letter, copied identically onto every version mailed out.

That is worth stopping on, because a campaign this serious — sorting through photographs to build a list of people to threaten — deserves more scrutiny than the fifteen days it demands from each of them.

What "/s/" actually proves — and what it doesn't.

"/s/ Name" is a shorthand courts and offices use to indicate that a signature exists on some other version of a document, usually the original that was actually signed by hand or through a verified electronic system before being copied or transcribed. On its own, on a letter that was never accompanied by that original — and mailed out identically to every parishioner on the Board's list — "/s/ Name" proves nothing at all. It does not prove Vuković, Obrenić, or Derek sat down and reviewed each of these letters individually. It does not prove they approved this specific accusation, this specific fifteen-day deadline, or this specific threat of expulsion, for this specific person, out of however many received the same page with a different name typed at the top. It proves only that someone typed their names into a template and typed the notation that usually accompanies a real signature. Anyone with access to the letterhead and the photo list could have done that.

This is not a technicality invented for this article. It is the same basic principle that governs every signed document anywhere: a signature exists to prove that a named person actually read something and actually agreed to it. Without one — a real one — there is no proof of consent, no way to verify who actually authored or approved the letter, and no evidence of the intent the Regulations themselves require before a parishioner can be found to have violated them.

The Regulations themselves set a higher bar than three typed names — and this letter doesn't clear it.

Article 5 of the Diocesan Regulations is explicit: "All correspondence and certificates must be issued with the official seal of the parish." Not a signature alone — the seal. This letter has none. The letterhead carries the printed coat of arms of the Cathedral, but printed artwork on a template is not the parish's actual seal affixed to a document, and the Regulations do not treat them as interchangeable. No seal appears anywhere on the letter — not embossed, not stamped, not scanned in. A notice invoking the Regulations to threaten a parishioner's membership fails, on its face, a requirement the same Regulations set for it in plain language.

Article 57 explains why a secretary's name and a president's name appear together at all: it requires that official correspondence be conducted by the secretary and "together with the president of the Administrative Board, he signs" it jointly. That is a real requirement, and it is exactly why Katarina Derek's and Dragan Obrenić's names sit side by side on this letter. But a rule requiring two signatures is not satisfied by two typed names with no verification behind either of them — it is satisfied by two actual signatures, applied by the two actual people the rule names.

Article 54 raises the stakes further: it makes the parish priest and the Board president "legal representatives of the church community... before civil and church authorities" and names them, specifically, as "legal guardians of the seal." That is not a ceremonial title. It means the signature and the seal on a document like this one are not paperwork — they are the mechanism by which the Regulations attach personal legal responsibility to a specific person for a specific act. Skip the real signature and the real seal, and nothing in this letter is actually anchored to anyone who can be held to it.

Ohio law reaches the same place from a different direction. Under the state's Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, an electronic signature is only attributed to a person if it can be shown to actually be "the act of the person" — through a security procedure, a verification process, something. A typed "/s/ Name" with no such process behind it does not meet that standard. Ohio does not require a handwritten signature; it requires proof that the signature was genuinely theirs. This letter offers none.

This is the same selective reading of the Regulations documented before — just applied to a different article this time.

The pattern is now familiar: this Board cites Article 31 when it wants to demand a parishioner's obedience, and skips Article 45 when its own composition violates it. It cites Article 25 as a formality while five of six months of a suspended priest's guaranteed salary go unpaid. And now it invokes the Regulations' authority to threaten expulsion in a letter that ignores Article 5's seal requirement and Article 57's real-signature requirement entirely. The Regulations are not a source of authority this Board actually submits to. They are a prop it reaches for only in the paragraph where citing them helps, and ignores everywhere else.

Which means the Board is asking for something it never gave.

Each letter demands its recipient produce a written statement, personally accountable, expressing personal repentance — under threat of losing their membership if they do not. It offers, in return, three typed names and a shorthand notation that does not establish any of the three people behind them ever actually reviewed that particular letter, let alone the whole batch. If the standard the Board wants applied to a parishioner's conduct is genuine, verifiable, personal accountability, a form letter run off a photo-sorted mailing list does not meet that standard for its own authors.

That question is not rhetorical either. Dragan Vuković is the same priest already documented in these pages accusing parishioners of theft on the church steps before he had looked at a single fact, and recorded telling the Dean that Fr. Dragoslav Kosić's salary had been paid in full when it had not. Dragan Obrenić is the Board President already documented physically assaulting a parishioner. And Katarina Derek has already been caught fabricating accusations once before: she manufactured false claims against Nina Marković's parish membership, was exposed as lying by every attendee of the January 14, 2025 meeting where she made them, resigned her position over it — and the Bishop's response was to reward her with a seat back on the Board anyway, alongside her husband. A person with that record typing "/s/" under an accusation against someone else is not a neutral signature. It is the same pattern repeating with a new target.

If any of the three did not actually review or authorize this mailing, that is worth knowing. And if all three did, there is no reason they could not have said so with an actual signature and the actual parish seal, on an actual page, the way Articles 5, 54, and 57 already require of them.

A board willing to sort through photographs, build a list, and threaten every person on it with expulsion over an accusation it cannot prove any of them actually committed should be able to clear the much lower bar of proving the letters are actually theirs.