Controversies surrounding the Catholic Church in Wartime Croatia, 1941–45

Abstract

Since the Second World War, there has been considerable controversy surrounding the wartime role of the Vatican and Catholic Church in Europe. In Croatia, this controversy has centred on Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb who was convicted in 1946 by a Yugoslav People’s Court of war crimes. The article attempts to outline the debate and weigh the available evidence. The argument presented in the article is that Stepinac was neither the war criminal and Ustaša supporter alleged by the Yugoslav authorities, nor the outspoken critic of that regime that many of his defenders claim. The Stepinac who emerges in the article is rather a more complicated individual who presided over a politically divided episcopacy and clergy, which on the one hand undeniably wanted a Croatian state (not to be confused with wanting an Ustaša state) but was also deeply troubled by the circumstances surrounding its birth and many of its racist policies. Although Stepinac repeatedly voiced his objections in private and increasingly denounced racist policies and violence in principle in his sermons, taken together these protests per se do not represent a systematic public denunciation of the Ustaša regime. The two main charges brought against him at trial – high treason and complicity in the Ustaša policy of forced religion conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism – appear to be ill‐founded; the first was politically premised and there is no serious evidence that Stepinac and the Church orchestrated the policy of forced conversion or even collaborated with the secular authorities in implementing it. Given the controversial nature of the subject matter, debate will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future.

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