NEWS STORY: Controversy swirls around Croat candidate for sainthood

c. 1998 Religion News Service ZAGREB, Croatia _ On the eve of Pope John Paul II’s visit here, thousands of Croats pressed into the capital city’s cathedral Thursday (Oct. 1) for a service honoring one of their most revered clerics, Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, officially considered a martyr to communist persecution. The thunderous voices of a […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

ZAGREB, Croatia _ On the eve of Pope John Paul II’s visit here, thousands of Croats pressed into the capital city’s cathedral Thursday (Oct. 1) for a service honoring one of their most revered clerics, Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, officially considered a martyr to communist persecution.

The thunderous voices of a men’s choir filled the vast, spare Gothic cathedral here as worshippers filed by the grave of Stepinac, reopened just two days before the pope is scheduled to beatify him _ the penultimate step toward sainthood.”It’s great satisfaction for all Croats,”seminarian Miroslav Markic of Zagreb said of the beatification.”He refused to separate the church of Croatia from Rome (under communist pressure). Without him, I don’t know if we would be here.” But controversy continues to swirl around Stepinac’s role during World War II, when Croatia was ruled by the murderous, pro-Nazi Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelic.


Who was Cardinal Stepinac? Was he the man credited with saving numerous Jews, Serbs and Gypsies from extermination, as the church contends? Or was he, as some critics argue, an Ustasha collaborator, the man shown smiling in photographs with Pavelic? The communist government convicted him of being the latter, and it was in their custody he died in 1960.

Even if Stepinac is something in between hero and villain, some commentators wondered at the pope’s timing in beatifying the cardinal in the currently polarized climate of the Balkans.

Television in Croatia’s neighbor, Serbia, continues to vilify Stepinac, and the European office of the Nazi-hunting group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has urged the Vatican to delay the beatification pending a further historical review. It cited the”bitter memories and current religious sensitivities”in the former Yugoslavia.

The issue is especially relevant today as Croatia, since gaining independence in the early 1990s, has adopted some of the symbols of the Ustasha-era regime, including its flag and currency. The issue will be revisited in the upcoming trial of Dinko Sakic, a commander at Croatia’s notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, arrested in Argentina after more than 50 years of hiding.

But the Vatican remains convinced Stepinac acted heroically.

Born in 1898, Stepinac played a large, public role through many of the most turbulent Balkan decades. He fought for the Austrian empire, which ruled Croatia during World War I, then joined an anti-Austrian force. He went to seminary in Rome, where he was ordained a priest in 1930.

During World War II, Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia as the Balkans were engulfed in some of that war’s fiercest fighting.

At first, Stepinac supported the independence won by the fascist Ustasha,making him a hero among Croatian nationalists.”I would have been remiss had I not recognized and acknowledged this desire of the Croatian people enslaved by the former Yugoslavia,”he said at his trial in 1946, when Croatia made up a part of the post-war Yugoslavia forged by maverick communist Josip Tito.


At the same time, he is on record numerous times _ in sermons and in letters to Pavelic _ denouncing the genocidal brutality which the Ustasha government was perpetrating with little need of encouragement from their Nazi patrons. Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were systematically targeted.”The Catholic Church does not recognize the races that rule and the races that are enslaved,”he said in a 1943 sermon.”The Catholic Church only recognizes races and nations as creations of God.” Stepinac directed his priests to agree to convert any Jews or Orthodox Serbs who sought to obtain a Catholic identity for protection. Stepinac said the church’s role is”primarily to save lives. When these times of madness and savagery are over, they who converted out of conviction will remain in our church while the rest will return to their own faith.” In one famous incident, when the residents of a Jewish retirement home faced the threat of being arrested, Stepinac moved them all into a church-owned estate, where they stayed until after the war.

In 1946, the victorious communists arrested Stepinac and accused him of war crimes. He defiantly told the court that convicted him,”my conscience is clear.” After serving five years in prison, he was placed under house arrest, where he eventually died in 1960.

A group called the Coordination of Jewish Municipalities in Croatia said in a statement Wednesday:”The Jews in Croatia are grateful to Cardinal Stepinac for advocating the salvation of many Jews.” But a leader of the Jewish community in Bosnia, another of Croatia’s neighbors, called the beatification”counter-productive.” While the focus of criticism has been on the fascist era, Croats interviewed on the streets of Zagreb spoke more of Stepinac’s resistance to communism, which sought to restrict the church and sever its ties to Rome.”He was a very brave man in the period of communism,”said Andjelina Mamic, 20, a student from Djakovo.”It wasn’t easy to be like he was.” Asked if the beatification might exacerbate tensions with Serbs, she said,”people who recognize good things will accept this. If there was someone in Serbia like (Stepinac), it would be for me the same.” A 23-year-old economics student, who asked not to be named, said she believed Jewish groups recognize Stepinac’s deeds. But she added,”as for the Serbs, I have nothing to say about them,”while a middle-aged man most concisely expressed the national pride brought out by the beatification:”I’m very happy. I’m Croat.” DEA END SMITH

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