Pope Benedict is visiting Croatia this weekend. He didn’t even wait for his plane to touch down before treating us to another roll-your-eyes remark. Chatting with reporters about Croatia’s application to join the European Union, Benedict said “One can understand there is perhaps a fear of an overly strong centralized bureaucracy … .” So we have the head of the Vatican criticizing an “overly strong centralized bureaucracy”? That’s like Lady Gaga criticizing someone for being overly flashy …Benedict went on to complain about Europe’s “rationalistic culture that doesn’t sufficiently take into account the history – the richness of history and the richness of the diverse history” that Croatia offers. Here he ventures onto dangerous ground, because the Catholic history of Croatia is not something worth boasting about.
At the end of World War I, the southern portion of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Croatia and Serbia, was formed into a new country called Yugoslavia, the Land of the Southern Slavs. Some Croatian politicians, who had wanted a country they could control, chafed under the new arrangement. They quoted 19th century politician Ante Starčević, who is now considered the father of Croatia: “The Serbs are a breed fit only for the slaughter house.”
The antagonism between Serbs and Croats went back nearly a thousand years, to the “Great Schism” between the church leadership at Constantinople and the church leadership at Rome. The theological substance of the Great Schism was absurd; what was really at stake was political control over the richest institution in Europe. On the geographic frontier of that Schism lay what is today the border between Serbia and Croatia: the Serbs were Eastern Orthodox, the Croatians Roman Catholic. There had been no history of antagonism between the peoples on either side of the line beforehand, but there was plenty of it afterwards. Wars were fought; tens of thousands died. A whole Crusade, whose participants signed on to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslims, was diverted instead to Constantinople to plunder the Eastern Orthodox riches.
Multi-religious Yugoslavia was formed despite the vigorous lobbying of the Vatican, which at the 1919 Versailles Conference had pressed for an independent, Catholic-dominated Croatia. The new multi-religious Yugoslav government tried to get along with the Vatican, going so far as to sign an agreement to pay for Church properties nationalized 150 years earlier, which even the Catholic monarchy of Austria-Hungary had refused to do. Nonetheless, militant Catholic Croatians formed a terrorist organization called the Ustashi, which among other endeavors assassinated the king of Yugoslavia in 1934.
After World War II broke out in 1939, Pope Pius XII began calling Croatia “the outpost of Christianity,” implying that those who lay beyond the “outpost” – the Serbian Orthodox – were not even Christians. “The hope of a better future seems to be smiling on you,” he added, “a future in which the relations between Church and State in your country will be regulated in harmonious action to the advantage of both.”
He got that right. The Ustashi and the Nazis quickly formed a natural alliance, and after assisting in the German conquest of Yugoslavia the Ustashi was duly rewarded with control of an independent Croatia under the leadership of Ante Pavelic, mastermind of the 1934 assassination. The Catholic press was overjoyed: “God, who directs the destiny of nations and controls the hearts of kings, has given us Ante Pavelic and moved the leader of a friendly and allied people, Adolf Hitler, to use his victorious troops to disperse our oppressors and enable us to create an Independent State of Croatia. Glory be to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler, and infinite loyalty to our Poglavnik [Führer], Ante Pavelic.” The newspaper of the Archbishop of Sarajevo added:Until now, God spoke through papal encyclicals. And? They closed their ears . . . Now God has decided to use other methods. He will prepare missions. European missions. World missions. They will be upheld, not by priests, but by army commanders. The sermons will be heard, with the help of cannons, machine guns, tanks, and bombers.
The new “Independent State of Croatia” was first announced from the pulpit of Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb. This was appropriate because of the close intertwining of the Church and the state, which adopted Catholicism as the state religion. The goal of the partnership was announced by Zagreb Radio on July 29, 1941: “In the Independent State of Croatia there are no Serbs and no so-called Serbian Orthodox Church … There can be no Serbs or Orthodoxy in Croatia, the Croats will see to it that this is made true as soon as possible.”
In close cooperation, the Franciscan order and the Ustashi embarked on a crash “convert or die” campaign against the country’s Orthodox minority. Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb, who welcomed the return of the assassin Pavelic and served in his government assembly, preached that “Schism is the greatest of evils in Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. In it there is no moral, no principle, no truth, no justice, and no honesty.” The Archbishop of Djakovo pressed to end the Schism at once:
Up until now I have received into the fold of the Catholic Church several dozens of thousands of Serbian Orthodox. Follow the example of these brothers of yours, and send, without further delay, your request for your prompt conversion to Catholicism. By being converted to the Catholic Church you will be left in peace in your homes.
Hundreds of thousands of Orthodox did not convert “without further delay,” though, and thus were not left in peace in their homes. Ustashi Education Minister Budnak announced that “We shall kill one part of the Serbs, we shall transport another, and the rest of them will be forced to embrace the Roman Catholic religion.” Mass slaughter ensued, often under the exuberant leadership of the Franciscans. Father Dionis Juricev boasted that:I have succeeded in cleansing other regions and have rid them of everyone, from infants to old men, and if it is necessary I shall do the same thing here. It is no longer considered a sin to kill a child of seven if he interferes with the Ustashi law and order. Although I wear the robes of a priest, I am often obliged to resort to the machine gun, and the minute anyone is against the state or the Ustashi who are in power, I make good use of it, right down to the cradle.
Even the Nazis were appalled by the Catholic brutality. German General Lothar Rendulic estimated that the “beastly persecution of the Orthodox” took over half a million lives – about an eighth of the entire population. A Berlin newspaper criticized Germany’s own staunchest ally in 1944:
An extraordinary ecclesiastical struggle is going on in Croatia. The Ustashi Government is persecuting the Orthodox Church and is trying to convert as many Orthodox people as possible to Catholicism by means of intimidation and all kinds of devices. At the opening of the so-called Croat Assembly, Pavelic said that religious freedom did exist in principle, but that it did not include the Orthodox Church.
Archbishop Stepinac did nothing to rein his clergy in, whining that “We cannot be held responsible for some of the dare-devil fanatics in the ecclesiastical ranks.” Pope Benedict today will make a public spectacle of praying at Stepinac’s tomb.According to United States government reports, after the war, the Vatican became the proud possessor of all the wealth stolen from the half a million murdered Orthodox – the Fourth Crusade, redux. It used part of this money to organize the “ratlines” enabling the Ustashi leaders to escape to Catholic Spain and Argentina. The butcher Ante Pavelic lived comfortably in Madrid until he died in 1959. Lawsuits seeking recovery of the stolen property have been dismissed, solely due to the absurd fiction that the Vatican is a “sovereign nation” that cannot be sued.
The Bible says that God punishes the children of sinners to the third and fourth generation. Humanists don’t do that. Still we must never forget, or ignore, the crimes committed by the God experts, because those experts and their ways of thinking are still with us today.[Ustashi pictures from Reformation Online]
10 comments:
I can not belive that an inteligent person can write such lies. You have to study history and try to find and understand the truth. Do not be such an ignorant.
@Anonymous I have found that Luis is a very talented historian with sound references to support the details of his posts. If you imagine that he is incorrect on any point at all feel free to provide your evidence and reasoning for your views. We want our stream of comments to be used to find the truth. A global condemnation with no evidence and no particulars at all is not helpful.
This is a terribly biased and inaccurate post. If I tried to address all of its false or unsupported statements, my comment would be much longer than the post itself. Instead, I will briefly present the relevant history as it actually happened.
Although I believe arguments should speak for themselves without regard to the speaker's identity, in this case I'll establish some personal credentials first. I am a Croatian-American; I was born and grew up in Croatia, back when it was part of Yugoslavia. My family's ethnic and religious background is mixed. I can safely say that I know and understand the history of that region far better than the author of the post.
The thousand-year antagonism between Serbs and Croats is a myth with no basis in history. No Croat-Serb conflict is recorded in history before the 20th century. On the contrary, Croats sent troops in 1389 to help the Serbs at Kosovo Polje (when they lost to the Ottomans) and later, in 17th and 18th century, Serbs fleeing the Ottoman Empire settled in the border region and, along with Croats, helped defend the border of the Hapsburg Empire. I challenge the author to find a single episode supporting the assertions in the 4th paragraph regarding Croats and Serbs.
The author's story of the formation of the first Yugoslavia has only tangential connection to reality. Only its western part had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Serbia and Montenegro had been independent for a few decades, and parts of the Ottoman Empire before that. Unification of the Southern Slavs had been agreed upon by certain elites, but when the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs formed from the southern end of the Empire, its parliament at first rejected unification with Serbia. However, when Italy invaded, seeking former Austrian territories as a reward for joining the Entente in the war, the newly formed state was defenseless and needed Serbian help. This weak position led to rushed unification at very unfavorable terms, with the Serbian dynasty ruling the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as a unitary country with no regional or ethnic autonomy. The kingdom, which was not named Yugoslavia until a decade later, was formed in December 1918, so it was already a done deal by the time the Versailles conference began. There was no way the Allied Powers would diminish the power of their small, but important, ally Serbia by breaking up its Kingdom.
Oh, and "the Vatican" did not exist at the time. The Papal State was abolished during the unification of Italy in the 19th century, and was re-established during Mussolini's rule.
As the new country was dominated by Serbia, a great majority of Croats were opposed to it. In addition, Croats overwhelmingly preferred a republic to a monarchy. In the 1920s, roughly 3/4 of Croats supported the Croatian Republican Farmers' Party, led by Stjepan Radić, a left-leaning populist leader and a champion of peaceful resistance, whom Americans might try to imagine as part William Jennings Bryan and part Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he was forced to abandon republicanism, Radić gradually succeeded in improving the position of Croats in the Kingdom, until he was assassinated in the Parliament by a Serbian deputy in 1928. King Alexander cynically used the instability that followed to dismiss the Parliament and establish a dictatorship. The assassin was sentenced to a comfortable house arrest, which gives you some clues about who stood behind it.
(Continued below.)
(Continued)
Only under the repression of Alexander's dictatorship did the ultranationalists known as Ustashas (singular Ustaša, plural Ustaše, meaning "resurgent" - I don't know where the American media got the absurd spelling "Ustashi", but that's clearly wrong) gain any traction. Their terrorist wing (led by Ante Pavelić) was supported by Mussolini and assisted the Macedonian nationalist group VMRO in assassinating Alexander in 1934. But they had little political support in the general Croat population, which, when they once again had a chance, overwhelmingly voted for Croatian Peasants' Party and Radić's less charismatic successor Vladko Maček.
When the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia, they established an ostensibly "Independent State of Croatia", de facto a puppet state, ruled by Ustashas. Most Croats were happy about the perceived independence, not happy about the government, but, as they were spared the war, the former sentiment prevailed for a while - until the brutality of the fascist regime became apparent. The state was proclaimed by General Slavko Kvaternik (a relative moderate whom the people respected more than Pavelić who was to become the head of state), certainly not by Archbishop Stepinac as the post implies. Also, the statement in the post that the Ustashas assisted in the German conquest of Yugoslavia is completely false. The Ustashas, who numbered at most a few thousand and were hardly trained in disciplined warfare, played no role in the invasion.
The role of Catholic Church in Croatia during the war was complex. Local priests filled the full spectrum, from helping the resistance to actively participating in Ustasha crimes. The leadership, especially Stepinac, was passive, sometimes criticizing the regime, but preferring it to what was emerging as the main alternative - the Communist-led resistance. The Church's compliance in forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism is often presented as a crime, but the fact is that it saved many lives. Two of my great-grandparents were among the "converted", which helped them live through the war and die of old age many years later. Tens of thousands of people were probably saved by the absurd ritual that nobody besides the ruling fanatics took seriously. World War II was not a proud time for the Roman Catholic Church (BTW neither was it for the Serbian Orthodox Church), but one should be careful not to oversimplify and judge some of its actions mindlessly.
(Continued Below)
(This is the first part of my comment, which somehow disappeared after I had posted it.)
This is a terribly biased and inaccurate post. If I tried to address all of its false or unsupported statements, my comment would be much longer than the post itself. Instead, I will briefly present the relevant history as it actually happened.
Although I believe arguments should speak for themselves without regard to the speaker's identity, in this case I'll establish some personal credentials first. I am a Croatian-American; I was born and grew up in Croatia, back when it was part of Yugoslavia. My family's ethnic and religious background is mixed. I can safely say that I know and understand the history of that region far better than the author of the post.
The thousand-year antagonism between Serbs and Croats is a myth with no basis in history. No Croat-Serb conflict is recorded in history before the 20th century. On the contrary, Croats sent troops in 1389 to help the Serbs at Kosovo Polje (when they lost to the Ottomans) and later, in 17th and 18th century, Serbs fleeing the Ottoman Empire settled in the border region and, along with Croats, helped defend the border of the Hapsburg Empire. I challenge the author to find a single episode supporting the assertions in the 4th paragraph regarding Croats and Serbs.
The author's story of the formation of the first Yugoslavia has only tangential connection to reality. Only its western part had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Serbia and Montenegro had been independent for a few decades, and parts of the Ottoman Empire before that. Unification of the Southern Slavs had been agreed upon by certain elites, but when the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs formed from the southern end of the Empire, its parliament at first rejected unification with Serbia. However, when Italy invaded, seeking former Austrian territories as a reward for joining the Entente in the war, the newly formed state was defenseless and needed Serbian help. This weak position led to rushed unification at very unfavorable terms, with the Serbian dynasty ruling the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as a unitary country with no regional or ethnic autonomy. The kingdom, which was not named Yugoslavia until a decade later, was formed in December 1918, so it was already a done deal by the time the Versailles conference began. There was no way the Allied Powers would diminish the power of their small, but important, ally Serbia by breaking up its Kingdom.
Oh, and "the Vatican" did not exist at the time. The Papal State was abolished during the unification of Italy in the 19th century, and was re-established during Mussolini's rule.
As the new country was dominated by Serbia, a great majority of Croats were opposed to it. In addition, Croats overwhelmingly preferred a republic to a monarchy. In the 1920s, roughly 3/4 of Croats supported the Croatian Republican Farmers' Party, led by Stjepan Radić, a left-leaning populist leader and a champion of peaceful resistance, whom Americans might try to imagine as part William Jennings Bryan and part Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he was forced to abandon republicanism, Radić gradually succeeded in improving the position of Croats in the Kingdom, until he was assassinated in the Parliament by a Serbian deputy in 1928. King Alexander cynically used the instability that followed to dismiss the Parliament and establish a dictatorship. The assassin was sentenced to a comfortable house arrest, which gives you some clues about who stood behind it.
(This is the third and last part.)
The Ustasha regime was brutal, but using that as an argument against the Catholic Church is a fallacy. One can find enough sins in the Vatican without resorting to generalizations from the worst individual examples, as the author does. And the sentence "Even the Nazis were appalled by the Catholic brutality" is both fallacious and offensive in the way it substitutes "Catholic" for "Ustasha". I have seen a different version of this fallacy before - substituting "Croat" for "Ustasha" is an oft-used expression of anti-Croat bigotry. The version in the post is new to me, but no less vile.
Besides, the assertion that the Nazis were appalled by their puppets' brutality is preposterous. Really? The Nazis, who operated the death camps and summarily executed schoolchildren? Everyone's BS detector should go off at such claims. If the Nazis were appalled at something, it was more likely the inefficiency or untidiness of the Ustashas' murders, not the brutality. It is also odd that the author relies on a German general's estimate of the number of Serb victims of Ustashas, when far more credible studies are available. The quoted number ("over half a million") is an exaggeration. 300-400 thousand Serbs were killed in WWII on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. That number includes those killed by the Nazis.
The author gets some more trivial facts wrong, too. For example, Pavelić did not live in Madrid after the war, except for his last few months. Until then, he lived in Argentina.
Excellent article. But allow me to add a couple of notes. We know a great deal about the nasty rivalry between the Croats and Serbs, dating largely from the split between Rome and Constantinople a millenium ago. Seldom mentioned are the Bogomils, a religious group resembling today's Unitarians or the Deists of Tom Paine's day, a sect dating to the tenth century. They were caught between the Eastern and Western churches are seem to have been persecuted by both. When the Muslims took over centuries ago the Bogomils of Bosnia converted to Islam for reasons of safety. So in the 1990s both the Croats ans Serbs got after them.
Remember the 1992 siege of Sarajevo? Well, when Spain's "Catholic Monarchs" expelled the Jews in 1492, many settled in Italy, Greece, what became Bosnia, and elsewhere in the Arab world. Some Jews in Sarajevo survived the Nazi Shoah to experience the siege of Sarajevo. 1992 was the 500th anniversary of the 1492 expulsion, so the Spanish government,now democratic and liberal, announced that it was sending planes to Sarajevo to pick up all Jews of Spanish origin, who would be taken to Spain and would become Spanish citizens upon arrival.
Around the same time in Washington the Spanish and Israeli embassies sponsored concerts featuring Ladino (i.e. Jewish Spanish, or Sephardic) music. At about the same time I was speaking at a Humanistic Jewish service in Florida. The accompanist, a harpist, and I performed some Ladino music, which I just happened to have in my briefcase.
Ladino is interesting. When my kids were pre-school we were shopping in the Indianapolis city market. After making a purchase my wife and I looked for the kids and found them conversing with a woman at a poultry counter, in what I took to be Spanish (We were raising them bilingual). I could not place the woman's accent, so I asked where she was from. She replied "Greece", which meant that she was Jewish and was speaking 500 year old Ladino/Spanish, which was perfectly intelligible to our kids.
I find it astonishing that anyone today would either deny that the Vatican existed in 1919, or
defend forced conversion as a good thing. I guess we’ll have to disagree about that.
When a state declares Catholicism the state religion, and the Church hierarchy both embraces that state and participates actively in governance, from legislation to education to ethnic cleansing, then yes, I treat the two as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
@Luis: You are twisting my words and introducing new fallacies. Is that all you can answer to the slew of falsehoods I pointed out in your article?
@Ed: What "nasty rivalry between the Croats and Serbs, dating largely from the split between Rome and Constantinople a millenium ago" are you talking about? Did you read my comments? (I apologize that they are out of order; 2nd part before the 1st.) I extend the same challenge to you as I did to Luis: cite one example of a Serb-Croat conflict before the 20th century.
Sorry, "@Ed" should have been @Edd.
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