Thanks to the kindness of a friend, I have been able to retrieve many notes locked in old floppy disks. I shall publish some of them as I manage to render them into a readable form. I begin with that much abused man, Cardinal Stepinac.
In
“Disputed Barricade: The Life and Times of Josip Broz-Tito, Marshal of
Yugoslavia” (Johnathan Cape, 1957), Sir Fitzroy Maclean described Ante Pavelić’s
return to Croatia “in the baggage train of the invading German armies” and goes
on to note:
“Pavelić’s
henchman, Colonel Kvaternik, had publicly proclaimed Croatia’s independence
amid scenes of genuine enthusiasm some hours before the first German troops
actually entered Zagreb. In particular the change had been welcomed by many of
the Catholic clergy, whose attitude had always reflected the Vatican’s dislike
of Belgrade and who now looked forward to enjoying a privileged position in a
Catholic country, freed for ever from the influence of their hated Orthodox
rivals… Among the first to pay his respects to the Poglavnik (or leader, that is Pavelić HMcL) was Monsignor Stepinac, the Catholic Archbishop of Zagreb and
Metropolitan of Croatia. In a Circular [sic, should be Pastoral HMcL] Letter of April 26th the
Archbishop formally called upon the clergy to render loyal service to their new
rulers. ‘These are events’ he wrote, ‘which fulfil the long dreamed of and
desired ideal of our people… respond readily to my call to join in the noble
task of working for the safety and well-being of the Independent State of
Croatia.’” [p124]
This,
of course, was before the nature of the Pavelić regime had been revealed in all
its vile barbarity. And it was barbarous. Maclean goes on to tell us:
“The Ustaše vied to outdo each other,
boasting of the numbers of their victims and of their own particular methods of
dispatching them. The aged Orthodox Bishop of Plaški was garrotted by his
assassins. Bishop Platon of Banjaluka was prodded to death in a pond. Some Ustaše
collected the eyes of the Serbs they had killed, sending them, when they had
enough, to the Poglavnik for his
inspection or proudly displaying them and other human organs in the cafes of
Zagreb. Even their German and Italian allies were dismayed at their excesses.
Pavelić, who saw Croatia once again in
its historic role of Antemurale
Christianitatis and himself as the defender of Western civilization in the
struggle against Eastern barbarism, attached considerable importance to
obtaining the official and open support of the Catholic Church for his policy
of racial and religious Gleichschaltung.
But in this he does not seem to have been as successful as he had hoped. The
rank and file of the Catholic clergy in Croatia were, he confided to Ciano in
December 1941, ‘very favorable’ to his regime; the higher ecclesiastical authorities
considerably less so ‘indeed some of the Bishops were… definitely hostile.”
[p162]
And
among those who were by that time "definitely hostile" to the
Government of the Independent State of Croatia was Archbishop Aloysius
Stepinac. Maclean writes:
“…the Metropolitan, Archbishop Stepinac,
had, in a Pastoral Letter issued in April 1941, welcomed the Independent State
of Croatia and called upon the clergy to serve it loyally. But, as time went
on, his initial enthusiasm seems to have given way to a sense of serious
misgiving. No-one was more anxious than he to see the Orthodox population of
Croatia converted to Catholicism and the last traces of Byzantium removed from
Croat soil. ‘The Schismatics’, he had written some months earlier, ‘the curse
of Europe — almost worse than Protestants…’ But the means by which the new
regime was seeking to achieve these ends could scarcely meet with his
approval.” [p162]
And
what were these methods? Maclean makes it abundantly clear:
“The Ustaše’s favourite method of
religious unification was, as we have seen, the wholesale massacre of the
Orthodox population. But in their more merciful moments, they would sometimes
offer their victims immediate conversion to Catholicism as an alternative to
annihilation. A priest would be produced and, while armed Ustaše looked on,
whole villages would be received into the Church simultaneously. Soon,
throughout the country, Catholic priests were besieged by crowds of panic-stricken
men, women and children, clamouring for admission to the Church of Rome, in the
hope that they might thus succeed in saving their lives.
This presented Archbishop Stepinac with
a decidedly awkward problem. Canon law expressly forbade the admission to the
Church of anyone who had not been duly instructed in its doctrines, or whose
motives for wishing to enter it seemed dictated by self-interest, or were
otherwise open to suspicion. The conditions were quite clearly not being
fulfilled. What is more, the officiating priests were in many cases operating
without proper authority from their ecclesiastical superiors. Taking a long
view (and the Church has always taken a long view), there was a serious risk
that what was happening might do the Church more harm than good, a risk that
its reputation might suffer, a risk that under changed circumstances (and
circumstances might always change) the mass conversions might be followed by
mass backslidings. These and other dangers were all too evident from the
reports he was now receiving from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina.” [pp 162/3]
Archbishop
Stepinac, as he amassed the reports arriving from throughout the country,
discussed matters both with the other members of the hierarchy and with his
priests. It should be noted that here at least in part Maclean misrepresented
Mgr Stepinac. There was no question of Mgr Stepinac wanting “the last traces of
Byzantium removed from Croat soil”. For
one good and simple reason: one of His Excellency’s bishops was in fact a
Catholic of the Slav-Byzantine rite in full communion with Rome, Mgr Simrak,
Bishop of Krizevci. Obviously, so too were many of his priests. In 1939 there
were estimated to be about 55,000 Catholic Yugoslavs of the Byzantine rite
consisting of a nucleus of Croatised Serbs. In 1464, Matthias Corvinus, King of
Hungary, drove the Turks out of part of Bosnia and established on the border
military colonies of refugee Serbs of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In 1611
these people came into “unambiguous communion” with the Holy See and their then
Bishop, Simeon Vretanjic, was recognised as a “ritual vicar” (ie, pertaining to adherents of that
Byzantine rite now in communion with Rome, HMcL)
of the then Bishopric of Zagreb. The Tablet, Vol 188, No. 5556, 2 Nov 1946
@p229 states:
(Bishop) Simeon’s profession of faith
was received by St Robert Bellarmine; and he lived at the Monastery of Marca,
which was a centre for Serbian reunion, of which there was some talk at the
time, several individual Bishops, who had fled from the Turks into Hungary,
being reconciled. In 1739 Marca was burned down by brigands, and when these
Byzantines were in 1777 given a diocesan Bishop, his See was fixed at Krizevci
(Kä¢rä¢s, Kreutz, Crisium) in Croatia, not far from Zagreb. He was at first a
suffragan of the Primate of Hungary, but since 1920 of the Archbishop of
Zagreb.
During the eighteenth century there was
a migration of Rusins from the Podkarpatska Rus to the Backa and elsewhere, and
another of Galician Ukrainians to Bosnia and Slavonia at the end of the
nineteenth, and there are Rumanian and Macedonian Bulgar elements also in this
heterogenous collection, held together by the Catholic faith and their common
Eastern rite. In 1939 they were found in five more or less ethnic groups in
various parts of Yugoslavia, the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Krizevci
covering members of his rite throughout the country. Only the original Serbs
are completely Croatised; the remainder conserve at least their language of
origin.”
Mgr
Simrak died aged 63 in Zagreb on 9 August 1946 as a consequence of his
imprisonment and mistreatment in one of Tito’s prisons. The Tablet Vol 188, No.
5554, 19 Oct 1946 @p196 notes that:
“He
(Mgr Simrak) had been imprisoned at Crisio by the partisans, on May 12th, 1945,
when his episcopal ring was taken from his finger and he was forbidden to offer
Mass. One of his canons was at the same time imprisoned, in a small windowless
cell; we do not know what has become of him.”
Having
consulted his fellow bishops and priests, in November of 1941 Mgr Stepinac
addressed a letter to Ante Pavelić. Maclean writes that:
“The tone of the Archbishop’s letter was
studiously moderate. He was careful, in particular, not to hold the Poglavnik responsible for the misdeeds
of his henchmen. But, for all that, it was not the sort of letter that was
calculated to please a man of Pavelić’s temperament, already irritated by the
numerous appeals and protests which Monsignor Stepinac had from time to time
addressed to him: begging him to spare the lives of hostages and to put a stop
to mass executions; criticising his new racial laws, and asking him to grant
special treatment to Serbs and Jews who had entered the Catholic Church and to
excuse the latter from wearing yellow armbands. His sermons, too, had contained
a number of pointed allusions to ‘those who, while glorying in being Catholics
or even possessing a spiritual vocation, nevertheless abandon themselves to
passion and hatred and forget the essential Christian rule of love and
charity.’ In fact it was not long before Dr Pavelić had conceived a hearty
dislike for the tall, thin, stubborn, ascetic-looking prelate in his massive
palace next to the cathedral. ‘That sniveller,’ the Poglavnik was heard to exclaim a few weeks later, after hearing
Stepanic preach at St Mark’s Church on the occasion of the opening of the new
Croat Assembly, ‘That sniveller is trying to give me a lesson in politics.’”[p166]
What
had the Archbishop written? Dated November 20, the letter began by explaining
that the annual Conference of the Catholic hierarchy had reached certain
conclusions, “notably”, quotes Maclean:
“that questions appertaining to
conversions to Catholicism were a matter for decision by the Roman Catholic hierarchy
and by no one else; that only the Roman Catholic hierarchy could appoint ‘missionaries’
to preside over conversions; and that only those might enter the Church who did
so from genuine conversion and of their own free will… It was impossible to deny
that horrible acts of cruelty and violence had been committed, he noted. (The reports
he had received from his Bishops were sufficient proof of that. HMcL) It is
essential to take a strictly realistic view. Even the Orthodox Church has its
genuine adherents, who cannot automatically change their views or their nature
overnight. A purely mechanical procedure is for this reason apt to have
unfortunate results… In this manner houses are built on sand, and not on rock,
and when the rains descends and the wind blows nothing is left of them but ruins.”[p165]
His
Grace did not blame the Government for what had happened regarding it rather as
“the work of irresponsible elements who did not realize how much harm they were
doing.” The Poglavnik’s “decision to establish peace and justice merited the
gratitude of all.” But the Church, for its part, was bound to condemn the
crimes and excesses which had been committed and ”to demand the fullest respect
for the individual, regardless of status, sex, religion, nationality or race.”
In conclusion, he ventured: “We are sure that you share our view and that you
will do everything in your power to check the violence of isolated individuals
and to ensure that control is vested in the responsible authorities. Should
this not be the case, any attempts to convert the Schismatics will be in vain.”
Stevan
K Pavlowitch in the Nations of the World (Ernest Benn Ltd, London 1971)
writes:
“Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb was no
Ustasha sympathizer. He was a traditional Catholic prelate, a Nationalist
Croat, and an anti-Communist. As such, he initially welcomed independence, but
his increasing uneasiness about the Ustasha regime quickly led him to
hesitations which paralysed the Catholic Church in Croatia almost as much as
the Peasant Party. Serious misgivings were especially felt by the hierarchy
about the government’s campaign of conversions, carried out according to
principles and with means that had little to do with religion. After the
archbishop’s protests against violence and the disregard of established canonical
procedure, the government’s continued policy of conversions for racial ends,
which made martyrs and pseudo-converts, which used the Catholic Church and
tinged it with infamy, caused a collective remonstrance, addressed in November
to the Poglavnik.” [p113]
After
the declaration of the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, His
Holiness Pope Pius XII had in May of 1941 cordially received the former Duke of
Spoleto, now known as King Tomislav II, as Head of State, and the Poglavnik, Ante Pavelić, as the Head of
Government of a Catholic country. In addition, Mgr Marcone, “a robust-looking
Benedictine” according to Maclean, was sent to Zagreb as Papal Legate, NOT as
Nuncio since historically the Holy See does not grant recognition to states
formed during a conflict while that conflict remains unresolved by
international treaty. Maclean records that Mgr Marcone “joined with gusto in
the official life of the new capital.” Pressed by representatives of the
Independent State of Croatia in Rome to grant diplomatic status, the officials
of the Secretariat of State “though friendly and sympathetic, were inclined to
be evasive and to talk at length of the Vatican’s neutral status.” Maclean
continues:
“There were also signs that some, at any
rate, of the cardinals had received unfavourable reports of what was happening
in Croatia. Cardinal Maglione, the Cardinal Secretary of State, spoke of ‘not
very nice stories’. And Cardinal Tisserant, the heavily bearded Cardinal
Secretary for the Eastern Congregation [he means the Congregation for the
Oriental Church; the Prefecture had been reserved to the Holy Father himself at
the erection of that Congregation by Benedict XV, but this is no longer the
case; it should be noted here that Cardinal Tisserant had a measure of direct
responsibility for Mgr Simrak and his Slav-Byzantine rite See], had, in
conversation with Pavelić’s diplomatic representative in Rome, made some very
wounding remarks about the alleged ‘independence’
of the Independent State of Croatia and about Croats generally, and had gone on
to comment most unfavourably on the atrocities committed by the Ustasha.
Indeed, the tone of his remarks had been so critical and so ironical that
Lorković [Mladen], the Ustasha Minister of Foreign Affairs, had been moved to
scrawl the words ‘Oprez! Neprijatelj!’ — ‘Look out! An enemy!’ — across the
foot of the dispatch reporting them.”[p167]
Pavlowitch
writes:
“In May 1941, the Pope had received Pavelić,
and he had sent a legate to Croatia, but the Holy See had not recognised the
N.D.H. (the Independent State of Croatia) and continued to maintain diplomatic
relations with the exiled Yugoslav government. Fully aware of the facts, and
with an anti-Ustasha lobby in the Vatican itself, the papacy maintained a
reserved, and at times even disapproving, attitude towards the boastful
Catholicism of the Ustashas.”
Regretfully,
however, Pavlowitch notes that the papal attitude notwithstanding, at least
some of the “Catholic leadership, and many clerics continued to give them (the
Ustasha) enthusiastic support.”
Maclean
notes that reports reached Archbishop Stepinac of “priests being actually
threatened with physical violence by the panic-stricken crowds who besieged
their presbyteries because they would not admit them fast enough to the
Church.” He goes on to observe:
“This presented the Archbishop with yet
another problem: whatever the exact provisions of Canon Law, could he, in all
conscience, condemn these unfortunates to certain death by refusing them
admission to the Church? In a circular dated March 2nd, 1942, he gave his
clergy discretion to overlook ‘secondary motives’ for wishing to enter the
Church, providing the essential motive was also present in the candidates,
namely, a genuine belief in the Catholic faith ‘or at any rate genuine — (genuine!)
— good will’. And even where these conditions did not appear to be fulfilled,
the priest was authorised to ‘pursue the matter further’. Thus, mainly from
humanitarian motives, the door was opened a little wider than strict
interpretation of Canon Law would perhaps have permitted and the number of
conversions to Catholicism multiplied still further.”[p168]
Maclean
relates that by the end of 1942:
“… the attitude of the senior Catholic
clergy still left much to be desired. Archbishop Stepinac remained, it is true,
scrupulously correct in his attitude towards the regime. He continued to attend
official functions and ceremonies; he had become Chaplain General to the Croat
Armed Forces; he accepted and wore the high decoration which Pavelić had
bestowed on him. But at the same time he continued to intervene on behalf of
the victims of the regime, while his letters and speeches and sermons became ever
more critical of the Ustasha, of their methods and of their racial theories and
laws. So critical, in fact, as to be almost defiant. ‘The Church’, the
Archbishop wrote to Pavelić in March 1943, ‘on learning that there were to be
fresh persecutions of the Jews, ‘does not fear any power in this world, when it
is a question of defending the elementary rights of men.’”[p201]
When,
later, Maclean comes to deal with the emergence of Tito’s “People’s Democracy”,
he has this to say:
“At the head of the Catholic hierarchy
during these difficult times stood Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac. Some of the
other clergy and bishops, notably Archbishop (Ivan) Šarić of Sarajevo, who had
been one of Pavelić’s most enthusiastic supporters, had found it advisable to
leave Croatia with the Germans. Stepinac, who had shown considerably less
enthusiasm for the Ustasha and had even sought to restrain Pavelić from some of
his worst excesses, remained to face the Poglavnik’s no less formidable
successor. His duty, as he saw it, was to his flock.
From Tito’s point of view, Archbishop
Stepinac represented an awkward problem. In June 1945, shortly after Stepinac’s
release from a fortnight’s imprisonment, the two men had met in Zagreb for the
purpose of finding a modus vivendi
between Church and State. Their meeting had not been unfriendly. Each had
expressed his understanding for the other’s point of view and his desire for an
agreement. ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’, the Archbishop had
said, ‘and to God that which is God’s.’ And they had parted with mutual
expressions of good will. But Caesar in the event had claimed a larger share
than the Church had seen fit to accord him and soon relations were more
strained than ever. In upholding what he regarded as his Church’s rights,
Stepinac showed himself adamant. Nor did he hesitate to make his views as
widely known as possible by means of his sermons and pastoral letters.
In Tito’s eyes such an attitude was openly
subversive of the Government’s authority. And subversion was not something he
was prepared to tolerate. He was thus confronted with a dilemma. Clearly, it
would be difficult to liquidate the Archbishop, as Mihaljovic had been
liquidated. On the other hand, there could be no question of allowing him to
continue his activities unhindered. In the end he decided to ask the Vatican,
through the Papal Nuncio in Belgrade, to replace Stepinac. But here he met with
an abrupt refusal. The Holy See, he was told, did not allow temporal
authorities any say in Church appointments. He had encountered an organization
as uncompromising as that to which he himself owed allegiance.
It had not been Tito’s intention to
force, at this stage, a showdown with the Vatican, which still commanded the
unswerving loyalty of several million devout Catholics in Croatia and Slovenia.
A further period of cold war would have suited him better. But if the Vatican
wanted a showdown, he was ready for one. Withhout further delay he gave
instructions for the Public Prosecutor to prepare a case against Stepinac as a
collaborator with the enemy during the war as an active opponent of the present
regime. Material, of a sort, was not lacking.”
And
with that wry comment Maclean then goes on to deal with the Stallinesque Show
Trial of Archbishop Aloysisus Stepinac. But who was this Tito, persecutor of
both Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac and the Catholic Church?
In
June of 1937, the Comintern envoy to the Yugoslav Communist Party (the CPY)
leadership, Milan Gorki, was summoned to Moscow. Arrested at the Lux Hotel in
the apartment of his comrade D Manuilsky, he was accused of sabotaging Popular
Front tactics, of being a friend of Nikolai Bukharin (executed on 15 March
1938, this coincide with the Anschluss of Austria) and of committing
“deviationist errors” in his pamphlet Novim Putenma. His wife, Betty Glen, was
also arrested and she was accused of being an agent of the British Secret
Intelligence Service. Needless to say, they were liquidated. The new envoy sent
by Moscow to Yugoslavia was one Josip Tito-Broz.
Born
on 25 May 1892 (perhaps) in the village of Kumrovic on the Croat-Slovene
border, after his primary education Tito had become an engineering apprentice
at Sisak. There he later joined the Engineering workers Trade Union and so
automatically became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia. After
military service, he worked in factories in Slovenia, Austria and Bohemia. He
was said by his official biographer, V Didijer, to have “impressed his
employers with his skill, and his mates with his strongly developed feelings of
working class solidarity.”
On
the outbreak of WWI, he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He claimed
that he had been arrested in 1914 for spreading anti-war propaganda.
Nonetheless, he took part in the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia in the
Autumn of 1914. Later, he served on the Eastern front, but did not, like so
many of his comrades, surrender to the Russians. Wounded, he was taken prisoner
and was held for a long time in POW camp. He did not volunteer for the Volunteer
Divisions of Yugoslav POWs. After the overthrow of the Czar, Tito escaped to
Petrograd and later claimed that he took part in the July demonstrations, was
arrested hiding under the Neva bridges and was imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk
fortress prison for three weeks before being shipped back to Siberia.
He
later claimed that he supported the Bolsheviks when they came to power and
fought for three days in the Czech Legion before becoming a member of the
Yugoslav Section of the Bolshevik Party. He returned to Yugoslavia in August
1920 with his Russian wife and worked as skilled mechanic. At the same time he
worked as an agitator for the Bolsheviks within the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia. His progress from then on was entirely predictable. In 1924 he
joined the District Committee of the CPY in Croatia. By 1927 he was member of
the Party Committee for Zagreb. In June of that year the Zagreb Party Committee
ensured that he became the Secretary of the Metal-workers’ Union for Croatia,
which was one of the strongest affiliates of the Industrial Trades Unions of
Yugoslavia.
In
February of 1928 at the conference of the Zagreb Party Organisation he was the
leader of the anti-fraction group. In the Spring of that year, he was sentenced
to two weeks in prison for his part in the break-up of the First of May indoor
meeting organised by the Socialists and was arrested again in June for
organising the riots in Zagreb. When he appeared in court in relation to this
charge, he was represented by Dr I Politeo whose other clients in the criminal
courts would later include the murderer of Interior Minister Draskovic and
Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac!
Didijer
says in his preface to With Tito through
the War: “In no other country in the world, in no Communist Party outside
the Soviet Union, was the devotion (to the Soviet Union and to Stalin
personally) so powerful as in Yugoslavia during the War.” And that devotion was
to be reflected in the adoption by Tito of Stalinist jurisprudence. Fred
Singleton notes in his Twentieth Century Yugoslavia that at the end of WWII “a
new revolutionary republic had come into being with a new kind of legality…
Archbishop Stepinac had also compromised himself and his Church by his failure
to condemn Pavelić and by his refusal to
co-operate with the new regime.”[p 106, my emphasis]
It was to be this
refusal to co-operate with the regime in its endeavours to destroy his Church
that was to seal the fate of Archbishop Sepinac. Dr Politeo was in theory
allowed carte blanche to call witnesses
in Tito’s defence. The Prosecutor at the trial of Mgr Stepinac in theory had
similar rights. There was one major difference. In practice the prosecutor was
allowed to exercise his rights, Dr Politeo wasn’t.
