Church and state in Croatia

Christian Century, Nov 8, 1995

ON A BRIGHT, summer-like October Sunday, 3,500 Croatian soldiers took part in the military's annual pilgrimage at Our Lady of Marija Bistrica, a Croatian Catholic shrine outside Zagreb. As Cardinal Franjo Kuharic held mass, the uniformed soldiers basked in the sun, just as they basked in the national euphoria over their stunning recapture of Serb-occupied territories in Croatia this past summer.

The blitz of rebel Serb-held western Slavonia in May and the so-called Krajina region in August established Croatia as a formidable military power in the Balkans and revived the flagging fortunes of Croatia's nationalist leadership. Popular support for the offensive was overwhelming, and the Catholic Church contributed to the patriotic fanfare, applauding the action as a noble liberation of Croatian territory. The rebel Serbs had held the territory since 1991, driving almost all of the Croats from their homes and plundering Croatian property. More than 600 churches as well as 70 monasteries and convents were damaged or destroyed.

But critics charge that the church's response was "excessively jubilant" and inappropriate for a religious institution. The church, they say, breached its critical distance from the state, blurring a relationship that has been in flux since the collapse of the communist system six years ago.

"Understandably, the church hierarchy supported operations Flash and Storm," said philosopher and human rights activist Zarko Pukovski, referring to the offensives. "But instead of acting as a critical moral voice, it fed into a nationalist fervor which the government has used to cover up human rights abuses committed by the Croatian army."

Until the Marija Bistrica pilgrimage, the church, like the government, kept silent about or explicitly denied reports of the Croatian military's intimidation of Serbian civilians and the destruction and looting of Serbian houses. A European Union monitoring mission reported that more than 60 percent of Serb dwellings in the south and 30 percent in the north were partially or completely destroyed. Elderly Serbs who could not flee were beaten, robbed and even murdered. "This can only be called ethnic cleansing," commented UN spokesperson Rida Ettraashany in Zagreb.

At first the Catholic Church, including Cardinal Kuharic, rushed to Croatia's defense. Commented the Catholic weekly Glas Koncila: "Minorities must have their rights. Why can't the world public see that the majority must also have its rights? In Croatia, the majority Croats, whether under the former monarchy or Tito, were truly deprived of their rights, condemned to extermination." The editorial continued: "Croatia did not carry out ethnic cleansing. Instances of ethnic national hatred that indeed occurred were by far less numerous than such instances in Germany against Turks and other foreigners, in Slovakia against Gypsies, or in France against people from Northern Africa."

Kuharic's sermon at Marija Bistrica effectively reversed church policy. "[These acts] can surely be of no honor to the Croatian army," he said. "No one who committed them can call themselves a patriot. We must condemn all of those people who offended Croatia and the Croatian nation with those acts. They offended those soldiers who respected the honorable and dignified principles of defense and refrained from acts of revenge and hatred."

Democratic critics of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman welcomed Kuharic's words, even if, they said, they came too late. "The Catholic Church in Croatia always wants to be on the side of the winner," said Igor Markovic, an editor of the liberal weekly Arkzin. "But at the same time it doesn't want to be seen as a patron of the state or an apologist for human rights violations."

Since the fall of communism, the powerful Catholic Church in Croatia (80 percent of Croatians are Catholic) has struggled to define its relationship to the state. During the first democratic elections in 1990, the church hierarchy appeared to throw its weight behind Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Community Party. But as the regime's popularity began to wane, the church backed away from the president.

"The church saw that it was a mistake to link its fate with the popularity of a singular political party," explained sociologist Srdjan Vrcan. "Since then it has tried to position itself above the political system rather than within it." The Catholic Church's break with Tudjman became public in the spring of 1993, when it openly protested Croatian and Bosnian-Croat participation in the newly erupted war against the Bosnian government army. (Until that spring the Muslim-led Bosnian government army and Bosnian-Croat forces had fought together in a strategic alliance against the Bosnian Serbs.) In an open letter to the Bosnian-Croat leadership, Kuharic denounced the extremists and Croatian nationalist intentions of creating an ethnically homogeneous Bosnian Croat-controlled territory, which its architects hoped eventually to annex to Croatia proper.