From http://web.archive.org/web/20030416185921/http://www.home.earthlink.net/~velid/cf/cs/psg3.html
Pavelic comes to the Zagreb Cathedral on the day of the opening of the Sabor
[National Legislature]; he is being received by Stepinac (1942)
Stepinac's Personal Culpability
As archbishop of Zagreb and military vicar to the armed forces and the Ustashe, Stepinac was the de facto head of the Catholic Church in Croatia during the Second World War. In a regime that counted its Catholicism as the core of its national identity, the Archbishop's importance and influence in the events that transpired there during and after the war were substantial.
There is no question that he initially welcomed the establishment of the Ustashe state as the fulfillment of centuries of Croatian aspirations for independence. In a pastoral letter published less than a month after the founding of the NDH, Stepinac consecrates and legitimizes the new regime:
"For as confused as today's fateful events may be, as varying as the factors may be that have influence on the course of events, one can nonetheless see the working of the divine hand." [16]
He likewise lauded the enactment of Catholic dogma into law that marked the initial stages of the regime. He looked with particular favor on laws that meted out the death penalty for abortion and 30 day in jail for swearing. [17] There is no doubt either that he welcomed the elimination of religious tolerance. In a diary entry that details his first meeting with the poglovnik Stepinac notes with evident approval the coming suppression of rival faiths.
"...The Archbishop gave his blessing for his work.... When the Archbishop had finished, the poglavnik answered that he wanted to give all his help to the Catholic Church. He also said the would uproot the sect of Old Catholics which was nothing more than a society for divorce. He went on to say that he would not show tolerance toward the Orthodox Serbian Church because, as he saw things, it was not a church but a political organization. All this left the Archbishop with the impression that the poglavnik was a sincere Catholic and that the Church would have freedom of action, even if the Archbishop did not delude himself into thinking that all these things could happen easily." [18]
The religious intolerance of the Ustashe continued to be a major factor in Stepinac's support for the regime throughout the war. At one point, he complained bitterly that the Italian fascist troops that were occupying a portion of Croatia during the war were allowing so much religious freedom that it was threatening the stability of the state. To the Bishop of Mostar Stepinac wrote,
"The Italians have returned and resumed civil and military authority. The schismatic Churches have immediately come to life again, and the Orthodox priests, in hiding up till now, have reappeared in freedom. The Italians seem to be favorably disposed toward Serbs and severe toward Catholics." [19]
He addressed a similar complaint to the Minister for Italian Affairs at Zagreb,
"It so happens that in the Croatian territory annexed to Italy a constant decline in religious life is to be observed, and a certain discernible shift from Catholicism to schism. If that most Catholic part of Croatia should cease in the future to be so, the blame and the responsibility before God and history will lie with Catholic Italy. The religious aspect of the problem I am discussing makes it my duty to speak in such plain and open terms, since I am responsible for the religious well-being of Croatia." [20]
Stepinac also explored the possibilities for enriching the church at the expense of its dispossessed Orthodox rivals. The Archbishop specifically petitioned the poglavnik to hand over the Orahovica Serb monastery to Trappists whom Hitler had expelled from their monastery at Reichenberg.
Hesitation and Second Thoughts
Although Stepinac was fully in accord with the clero-fascist agenda of criminalizing dissent and driving it underground, he became rather less sanguine about actual genocide. In his sermons after1942 there are veiled protests against the extreme methods the Ustashe were employing to eradicate the Serbs, particularly when these methods clashed with matters of religious doctrine. He directly challenged the authority of the Ustashe government to determine policy concerning baptism and conversion. As part of their program of ethnic cleansing, the Ustashe government wanted to limit options of conversion for those elements of the population that they had targeted for death (primarily Serbian Orthodox intellectuals) and this the Archbishop refused to sanction. Stepinac eventually questioned the sincerity of the mass conversions conducted at the point of the gun. He later personally intervened to save a number of individuals, both Orthodox and Jewish, from the Ustashe. [21] This level of opposition from such a key church official prompted Pavelic to secretly petition the Vatican for Stepinac's removal. [22]
On the basis of such sporadic acts of humanitarianism in the later years of the war some latter day Croatian nationalists have petitioned the Israeli Yad Vashem to include Stepinac on the role of Righteous. Their request was has been denied twice. A representative of Yad Vashem noted that "persons who assisted Jews but simultaneously collaborated or were closely linked with a Fascist regime which took part in the Nazi orchestrated persecution of Jews may be disqualified for the Righteous title."
Stepinac's stance on these issues was in fact far from consistent. For instance, in his May 1943 report to the Vatican on the state of affairs in Croatia, he still points with pride to the large number of converts (240,000 is the number he mentions) as a positive accomplishment of the regime that would be lost if Croatia were to fall. During the same visit, he even went so far as to defend the anti-Semitic laws of the NDH. Lobkowicz, the Ustashe representative to the Vatican, describes the Archbishop's reasoning,
"According to information from various sources and according to the Archbishop's own statement, he made a very positive report about Croatia. He revealed that he had kept quiet about some things with which he is not at all in agreement in order to be able to show Croatia in the best possible light. He mentioned our laws against abortion, a point very well received in the Vatican. Basing his arguments on these laws, the Archbishop justified in part the methods used against the Jews, who are in our country the greatest defenders of crimes of this kind and the most frequent perpetrators of them." [23]
Stepinac and the rest of the clergy enthusiastically welcomed the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 as a Christian Crusade. Katholicki List remarks:
"With the whole cultured and the whole Christian world we welcome the necessary operation on the body of mankind in the belief that the German army will succeed in extracting this poisoned tooth of the Comintern, and drain off poison from the healthy organism of human society." [24]
The following year Stepinac reaffirmed his identification with the cause of the Axis:
"The whole civilized world is fighting against the terrible dangers of communism which now threatens not only Christianity but all the positive values of humanity ....Until recently the church was virtually alone in seeing this danger to the whole civilized world..." [25]
Stella Alexander charitably suggests that such a "blinkered view of the world" showed that Stepinac "found it hard to grasp that anything beyond the boundaries of Croatia, always excepting the Holy See, was quite real." [26] In fact such views were typical of Catholic clergy all across Europe at the time, their pro-Axis views fueled by an anti-communism so fanatical that even Hitler was an acceptable ally. [27]
After 1943, when it had become clear that the tide had turned against Germany in the East, Stepinac's unbridled hatred of communism took over as the key motivating force in his increasingly desperate support for the regime. The idea of Croatia as a Catholic bulwark against Orthodoxy was gradually supplanted by a notion that Croatian independence must be preserved at any cost as a fortress against godless communism.
Stepinac's relationship to the Ustashe in the later years of the regime thus forms a general pattern of private protest and public support, of lauding the goals but balking at the means. Ultimately, his actions show that his support for the goals of Croatian nationalism and clerical fascism was the more powerful motivation. Throughout the duration of the war, he continued to lobby for the NDH with the Vatican, participated in a large number of public ceremonies sanctifying and celebrating the Ustashe state, and accepted military awards from the regime up to the date of its final defeat in 1944. At the same time he tried to ameliorate the consequences of his support by saving victims here and there and lobbying the regime for a gentler implementation of its policies. When defeat was inevitable, he took charge of the Ustashe archives and some of the regime's looted gold. [28]
The Verdict
Some time after the war Stepinac was put on trial by the Communist government of Yugoslavia after repeated requests to the Vatican requesting his removal were ignored. He was tried for collaboration with the Ustashe and for his support of the ex-Ustashe Krizari (Crusaders), a terrorist group then conducting intermittent raids on Yugoslav territory. Although the conduct of the trial was no doubt biased, the guilty verdict was entirely justified. Stepinac was not merely an anti-Communist dissident. During the war he had aided and abetted an invading enemy and presided over a national clergy that had supported and engaged in genocide; after the war, he supported the actions of terrorists attempting to destabilize the government. At his trial his only defense was "My conscience is clear" a phrase that rings oddly hollow when juxtaposed to the day to day realities of the Ustashe state. What kind of "saint" could have a clear conscience in the face of the horrors that had been committed in the name of his religion and by people under his own supervision? Only a morally bankrupt individual would feel so little responsibility and so little remorse. Only a morally bankrupt church could take such a man for a saint.
Stepinac indeed suffered from the same kind of moral blindness that afflicted the Catholic Church as a whole during this period. The Vatican, in general, and Msgr. Montini (later Paul VI) [29] in particular, were extraordinarily well informed about what was happening in Croatia and about the culpability of members of the clergy in the atrocities. Yet the Church chose to remain silent and to this day the Catholic Church has never even acknowledged, let alone condemned, the atrocities committed by its representatives. In fact, pope after pope has done the very opposite. After the war, the Church concealed fleeing war criminal Ante Pavelic from Allied authorities in the Vatican itself until this fact was discovered by American intelligence. They then helped the former Ustashe dictator flee to Peron's Argentina via the so-called Vatican Ratlines. [30] On his deathbed in Franco's Spain in 1959 Pavelic even received a personal benediction by then pope John XXIII. The current pope, John Paul II, has refused repeated requests to visit the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp on his visits to Croatia, preferring instead to exchange greetings with former Croatian head of state and holocaust-denier Franjo Tudjman and to make a saint of the highly compromised Stepinac.
The recent beatification of Stepinac continues this pattern of responsibility denied and crimes sanctified. What is most inexcusable about elevating Stepinac to sainthood lies in this covering up of evidence of the crimes of the Church, in this rewriting of history, and in the Church's miserable failure to learn anything from such horrible mistakes.
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