Cathedral: keep out!
Richard West
Zagreb Recent events in Poland have overshadowed the scarcely less bitter quarrel, here in Croatia, between a Communist state and a largely Catholic people; but here the regime and the Church are in head-on conflict. The first thing you see on aPproaching Zagreb's Cathedral is a big notice on one of the side gates: 'DANGER OF DEATH, ENTRY FORBIDDEN' — beneath a skull-and-crossbones. A similar sign adorns the gate on the north side. The Cathedral front carries two metal signs warning of danger of death, but without the 'ENTRY FORBIDDEN', or skull-and-crossbones. The excuse for these signs is the danger of falling masonry during repairs on the roof; inside the Cathedral one sees a display of three displaced stones, and a request for funds to reconstruct this ancient building. The Cathedral authorities do not want to frighten off worshippers. As ought to have been predicted, the signs have attracted countless people to whom the alleged risk of death gives the alleged risk of death gives Churchgoing a new excitement. A sign such as 'DANGER OF DEATH. ENTRY FORBIDDEN' in Montenegro, the most heroic and warlike of Yugoslav nations, would fill not only a Christian Cathedral but even a mosque, a Synagogue or a ju-ju hut. Even a timid Englishman like myself feels a certain excitement and pleasure going in or out of Zagreb's Cathedral's deadly West door. It is not really the falling stone that explains the warning signs and the pilgrims. It is the marble shrine to Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the former Archbishop of Zagreb, who was sent to prison in 1946 and died, still under house arrest, in 1960. The Shrine is covered with flowers and lit by a score of candles; worshippers kneel there for hours on end; some of the tributes suggest that the Cardinal, by his intercession, has powers to heal the sick. This new veneration for Stepinac surprises some Catholics almost as much as it Shocks the Croatian Communist Party; so does the recent sudden outburst of mutual abuse between the Church and State. Why should Stepinac become a figure of controversy 21 years after his death? And does the dispute pose a threat to the communist system, or even to Yugoslavia as a state? One cannot attempt a reply to such hefty questions without briefly considering the history of Church and politics in Croatia over the last 60 years. Croatia, which forms most of the north of Yugoslavia and the Dalmatian coast,was Part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire till 1918 when it was joined, rather unwillingly, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. The Slovenes are a smaller Catholic people, north-west of Croatia, who have tended to stay on the sidelines in the dispute between Croats and Serbs. The latter, whose little Kingdom had challenged the AustroHungarian Empire and helped to start the First World War, regarded themselves as the dominant force in the state. The Yugoslav king was a Serb; so were 90 per cent of the army officers; the Serbs held sway in those parts of the new Yugoslavia, notably Bosnia-Hercegovina, where Serbs, Croats and Muslims formed an uneasy mixture. The Serbian Orthodox Church did not attempt to proselytise or persecute those of other faiths, but the Catholic Church became a focus of Croat resentment against the Belgrade government. The new Yugoslav state was in conflict with the Vatican. This fact helped to identify the Church with the cause of Croatian separatism which also received backing from Mussolini, who had designs on Croatia and armed the Croatian terrorist group, the Ustashi. It was these men who murdered the Yugoslav King Alexander II — a Serb, of course — in Marseilles in 1934. Seven years later, a large number of Croats, I guess the majority, wanted to break away from the Yugoslav state and at first may have welcomed the German and Italian invaders.
The leader of the Ustashi, an unspeakable thug named Ante Pavelic, became the `Poglavnik', director, of independent Croatia, with the support of Nazi and Fascist advisers. His gangs embarked on the wholesale murder of Serbs, gypsies, Jews, and left-wingers, first in Croatia itself, then in Bosnia-Hercegovina and even in parts of Serbia proper. Unwisely (to say the least) Archbishop Stepinac appeared at various state functions in company with Pavelic and various of his Italian and German advisers; in private, he tried to curb the Ustashi terror. As early as May 1941 he wrote to Pavelic to protest at the murder of 260 Serbs in Glina. Two years later he called the Jasenovac concentration camp 'a blot on the Croat State'.
On the other hand, let it be said that Archbishop Stepinac did not complain in public, meaning in his case the pulpit, against the iniquities of the Pavelic gangsters; he did not slap down the Catholic Bishop of Sarajevo, who not only condoned but encouraged the massacre of the Serbs in Bosnia-Hercegovina; a friend of mine, one of the few Serbs in a village saved from massacre by the Ustashi because her father had been at school with Stephinac, said of the man who saved her life: 'He should have been hanged. If he could save our family, why couldn't he save the rest of the Serbs in the village?' Harsh words, but they express a widespread feeling that Stepinac lacked moral courage. Or rather that he employed his courage selectively. Like Monsignor Tiso, who actually led a breakaway state of Slovakia during the Nazi occupation, Stepinac weighed the cruelties of the fascists against their undoubted use to a Catholic political faction.
As soon as the Communists took power in Croatia, Stepinac became an outspoken foe of oppression, the champion of the people's right to Catholic education and Catholic political action. Marshal Tito at first tried to placate Stepinac; later he tried, through the Papal Nuncio, to have him replaced. Only in 1946, when other methods had failed, did Tito attempt to suppress Stepinac by charging him with collaboration during the war.
Although Stepinac was sentenced to 16 years, the trial was not a success for the Communists. Like Drazha Mihailovic, the Serb guerrilla sentenced to death at about the same time, Stepinac took the chance to make an eloquent and convincing speech from the dock, saying his conscience was clear. To Catholics he became a martyr; and even those who disliked Stepinac knew that his crime was not that he fraternised with the fascists, but that he refused to fraternise with the Communists. In 1952, the Vatican gave the imprisoned Archbishop a cardinal's hat. Yet, and this is the puzzling thing, the trial of Stepinac did not long damage relations between Yugoslavia and the Church. Tito signed a Concordat with the Vatican. A stop was put to the minor persecution of Catholics in matters like theological schools. The Church also enjoyed considerable freedom of speech. As long ago as the middle Fifties, in Sarajevo, I heard Tito denounced from a Catholic pulpit as a Napoleon who thought himself mighty on earth; if Tito's name was not mentioned the meaning was clear. And when, in the Sixties, the Belgrade government faced unrest in Croatia, with universi ty demonstrations, strikes and petitions of intellectuals, the Church stayed apart from the argument; indeed was blamed for so doing by some. Certainly Tito did not want to cross the Church.
The cordial relations between Church and State continued after Tito's death. In December last, Cvijetin Mijatovic, Presi dent of the collective state Presidency, met the Pope, got on well with him and invited him to the country to see the shrine of Marija Bistrica in its tercentenary year. So what has gone wrong?
The blame rests almost wholly on one man, Jakov Blazevic, President of the presidium of Croatia, and the Republic's most venerable warhorse. Unfortunately for Croatia, this same elderly bigot was once the youthful bigot and lawyer who made his name back in 1946 as state public prosecutor against Stepinac. For BlAzevic, this was his finest hour; and no doubt he has for years been boring cronies with tales of his own wit and forensic subtlety against the wily Archbishop. This would not have mattered, had Blazevic not written his memoirs, of which the third volume, deal ing with Stepinac, appeared early this year.
On 27 January, in a speech to launch his collected memoirs, BlAzevic devoted his whole address (broadcast live on radio) to an attack not just on Stepinac but on the Catholic Church, its priests and even its laity.
This speech was good publicity for the Blazevic book but it enraged most Croats. On 30 January 800 priests attending a pastoral conference expressed their unanimous backing for Archbishop Kuharic. On 10 February, the 21st anniversary of Stepinac's death, a congregation of 7,000 attended Mass in Zagreb Cathedral, the building one enters 'in danger of death'. And Blazevic renewed his attacks. Having used the state radio in order to plug his book, he has now had it serialised in Croatia's main daily newspaper Vjesnik. The book is appalling, not just for its bias and bigotry but for the old Stalinist language employed. Stepinac is reviled for his `kulak' origins and for having served in the Austro-Hungarian army: did Tito not do the same? The old Peasant Democrat Party is put in inverted commas although it received considerably more support from peasants and democrats than did the Croatian Communists. The unfortunate Vjesnik, which normally is quite a good paper, has had to run other attacks on the church as well as the bitter meandering of Blazevic.
It is tempting to see in this clash between Church and a Communist state, some parallel with events in Poland, where a Polish Pope drew crowds of millions, and strikers of the new Solidarity movement were photographed on their knees in the Lenin shipyard. But the comparison should not Iv pushed too far. The Yugoslays admire the Poles and sympathise NI;■ith their struggle, but they have no need to identify. The Yugoslays got rid of the Russians in 1948. Since then they have won most of the basic freedoms for which the Poles still agitate. But the difference goes deeper than that The Catholic Church in Poland is indistinguishable from the spirit of nationhood. 'Hail Mary, Queen of Poland!', the crowds sing to the Virgin who once, so millions really believe, commanded the Polish arnlY in battle. The present Pope is leader, in all but name, of the Polish nation. In Yugoslavia, on the other hand, the Catholic Church only forms 40 per cent of the nominal Christian community. Even in Habsburg times, the Church was not identified with Croat of Slovene nationalism, which was a secular movement. The Church identified with the supra-national Empire, which once was the Holy Roman Empire. The difference between the Polish and Yugoslav churches goes deeper still. The huge authority of the Polish Church rests its always having refused to meddle with temporal politics: it kept apart from the right-wing regimes before the war; it refused all truck with the Nazis and with the Communists. It has remained aloof frdhl politicians, which does not mean it has.beerl, merely craven. The Polish clergy risked their lives, not merely their livelihood, 9 protect the Jews; putting to shame most 01 their colleagues in Germany or Croatia. To understand the behaviour. Archbishop Stepinac, we, in the British Isles, do not have to look very far. Let me explain this by quoting from Zarko Vimpulsek , who was president of the judges at the Stepinac trial and wrote an introduction to Blazevfc's book, also reprinted in Vjesnik. A party of English Quakers had been there observing proceedings. One at least had interviewed Stepinac later, in prison, Judge Vimpulsek met this man ('whose name I do not remember') and asked if he thought Stepinac guilty. The Quaker (a cocoa millionaire, no doubt), answered, according to Vimpulsek: 'He is absolutely guilty. As you know, England is not used to Occupation. The last time was in 1055 [sic], under the Normans. If the Germans had succeeded in occupying us, and the Archbishop of Canterbury had invited Fascists into his residence and let himself be photographed with them, my English people would have sentenced him to death'. This bellicose Quaker (how would he have resisted invasion?), rather misses the obvious point. What if the Nazis has invaded England and then gone on to invade Northern Ireland? What if the IRA had then formed an Irish government, using this help to get rid of their English oppressors? And what if the Archbishop of Armagh, not Canterbury, had posed for photographs with one of the IRA's German advisors? Is that inconceivable? After all, the Irish nationalists looked for help to the Germans in both world wars. And even the present Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh does not condemn the Irish murderers of the English with quite the severity that, one might have hoped, Stepinac would have condemned the Croat murderers of the Serbs.
And was Stepinac, in going along with the Fascists, worse than our modern 'liberation theologians' who are prepared to condone and even support various left-wing terrorist gangs in Asia, Africa and now Central America? Perhaps all clergymen should learn from the Poles, and refuse to dabble in politics.
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