IN THIS ISSUE
1. STEPINAC’S RED HAT IS BLOOD-RED.
Stepinac’s
Red Hat Is Blood-Red
By
Sherwood Eddy
(The
Christian Century, January 14, 1953)
WHY has Marshal Tito broken with the Vatican over the bestowing of a cardinal’s red hat on Archbishop Stepinac? Why did the pope make him a cardinal? Why has there been so much protest from Roman Catholics, and from some Anglicans, against the invitation which [Prime Minister] Anthony Eden extended to Tito to visit England? Why does Cardinal Spellman [of New York] dedicate American high schools to Stepinac as a martyr-saint? Why was he imprisoned? For all such questions our American Seminar party, which talked with Tito and Stepinac only last July, has some answers.
The Stepinac story really started nine centuries ago, with the schism of 1054, when popes and patriarchs denounced and excommunicated each other and the churches of the East and West were severed. During centuries of warfare in the Balkans, the fires of religious hatred were stoked high, often with the encouragement of foreign powers. Yugoslavia, a federated kingdom which came into being after World War I, tried to subordinate this religious rivalry of Croatia and Slovenia Roman Catholic, Serbia and Montenegro Eastern Orthodoxóto a political unification.
Pavelic and the Ustashi
In Croatia there was an ancient Catholic terrorist organization, the Ustashi. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the Ustashi who murdered Yugoslavia’s King Alexander (a Serb) at Marseilles in 1934. This assassination was everywhere regarded as a portent of the war that fascism was later to let loose on Europe. When, in 1941, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia, Pavelic and his Ustashis were at hand to take over the “Independent State of Croatia” which Hitler established as a means of destroying Yugoslavia.
The war was waged with frightful cruelty in Yugoslavia. Aside from the operations of the German army, it was largely a guerrilla war, with the Ustashis, often led by Roman Catholic priests, battling the Partisans under Tito. As part of this conflict, a thousand Orthodox and Protestant churches were destroyed, fifteen hundred church leadersóOrthodox and Protestantówere killed, three Orthodox bishops were murdered (one after long torture), hundreds of Serbian Orthodox priests and monks were massacred, and when Ustashi power was at its peak, 200,000 Serbs under forcible mass conversion accepted Roman Catholicism as the only hope of saving their lives.
Where was Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb while all this was going on? Standing side by side with Pavelic, giving his Hitler-organized Quisling government of Croatia his blessing, doing everything in his power to put an end to Yugoslavia. Tito testifies that on April 28, 1941—only 22 days after Hitler’s invasionóthe archbishop issued a pastoral letter to all Roman Catholic priests in Croatia asking them to collaborate with the Pavelic fascist regime.
I have in my hands the awful document, “Memorandum on the Crimes of Genocide Against the Serbian People by the Independent State of Croatia,” submitted by the president of the Independent Democratic party of Yugoslaviaónot a follower of Titoóto the United Nations. It tells of “tens of thousands of Serbs slaughtered in concentration camps” and gruesome atrocities too terrible to repeat. Apparently the Nazis, who were the real power in the “Independent State of Croatia,” wanted a pure Aryan population to survive in certain districts, and accordingly were chiefly responsible for the massacre of the 60,000 Jews who were killed. And apparently the Roman church leaders wanted a pure Catholic population, and accordingly were chiefly responsible for the death or forced conversion of tens of thousands of Serb Orthodox Christians. Pavelic at any time could have stopped the killing of the Jews. And Archbishop Stepinac could have stopped the killing of the Christians. But neither did so.
The archbishop, in sermons, proclamations and pastoral letters, upheld the “Independent State of Croatia,” while the Catholic press persistently attacked the Western powers and the United States as a “decayed democracy and Jewish plutocracy.” The organ of the archbishop in January 1940 said in an article on “Catholicism and National Socialism”: “The church and state must co-operate.... Persecutions will be used against the opponents of National Socialism.” The entire Catholic press was permeated with race hatred against the Jews and the Orthodox Serbs. This they called the “renaissance of human dignity,” but it involved “the deliberate mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.” Says the memorandum presented to the United Nations, “The Ustashi program of mass murder resulted in the death of over 800,000 personsóSerbs, Croat antifascists and Jews.”
Protest to the Archbishop
Dr. Privislav Grisogno, a Catholic member in the former Yugoslav cabinet, wrote in protest to Archbishop Stepinac in February 1942: “Our Catholic church has participated in these crimes, worse than pagan, in two ways. First, a large number of priests, friars and organized Catholic youth actively participated in all these crimes: but more terrible, Catholic priests became camp commanders and ordered or tolerated the horrible tortures, murders, and massacres of a baptized people. One Catholic priest slit the throat of an Orthodox Serbian priest. . . The bishops gave their consent, by acquiescence at least . . . One bishop has decried the fate of the innocent Christian Serbs who have suffered more than the Jews of Germany. I write this to save my soul and leave it to you [Archbishop Stepinac] to find a way to save your soul.”
On November 17, 1941, Archbishop Stepinac convened a bishops’ conference in Zagreb to give canonical sanction to the forcible mass conversion of the Serbs. The apostolic administrator in his “Directive” in the Bishopric News (No. 2, 1942) wrote: “Our work is legal because it is in accord with official Vatican policy . . . that the Eastern Orthodox Church be converted to the Catholic faith.” Three ways out were offered the Serbs: “to accept the Catholic faith, to move out [of Croatia], or to be cleansed with the metal broom [shot].” Roughly a third were converted and thus saved, a third driven from the country, and a third put to death.
The Franciscan Filipovic admitted that on his orders 40,000 were killed in the concentration camp at Jasenovac. Various fanatical priests proudly reported to the archbishop the numbers they had forcibly converted (2300, 6000, etc. ). One curate charged 180 dinars for each conversion, so that in a single Serb village he collected 80,000 dinars. The confiscated property of the Orthodox Serbs, their monasteries, real estate, gold and jewels, amounted to some millions. According to Archbishop Stepinac’s report to the pope on May 8, 1944, 240,000 Serbs were converted. Such an opportunity for the Roman Catholic Church had not come in centuries.
After the War
Well, the war ended. Hitler’s Nazi regime crumbled, Pavelic fled, first to Italy and then to Argentina, and there is much evidence that at the end Stepinac was leading not only the church but what was left of the “Independent State of Croatia.” With the victory of the Allies, Yugoslavia was restored. Tito became its chiefóa Croatian Communist who was presently to declare his independence of Moscow. The Vatican realized in how dangerous a position the wartime activities of Archbishop Stepinac had left the Catholic church, and so in October 1945 sent an American, Bishop Joseph Patrick Hurley of St. Augustine, Florida, to Belgrade as nuncio. An American might win Tito’s favoróor at least dull the edge of his resentment.
Yugoslavia had its own war crimes commission, which was proceeding
against
those accused of collaborating with Hitler and Pavelic or of being
implicated
in the wartime massacres. (It was after conviction for the former crime
that Mikhailovitch was executed.) Tito says that he informed the
Vatican
of the nature and volume of the evidence against Stepinac and warned
Bishop
Hurley that if the Zagreb archbishop was not transferred from
Yugoslavia
he would be obliged to arrest and try him. “I gave Bishop Hurley a file
of documentary evidence of the archbishop’s crimes,” he says. “We
waited
four months without receiving any reply. Then the authorities arrested
Stepinac and brought him to trial.”
Stepinac’s Trial
Archbishop Stepinac was arrested in Zagreb on September 18, 1946, and
tried
on September 30. For ten days he was confronted by scores of witnesses,
testifying to the atrocities perpetrated by the Ustashis, and by
numbers
of documents telling the same horrible stories or linking the accused
archbishop
to Pavelic and his terrorists. The official indictment contained 51
pages
of charges. I have before me five typewritten pages containing the
testimony
given by Jednak Ljuban. This may be taken as a fair sample of what the
court heard.
He was, Ljuban
testified,
in the church at Glina — into which 700 Serbs were driven — hiding
behind
the altar, lying there as if he were already dead. “They went from one
to another knifing everyone. My turn came. One kicked me in the head
and
said, ‘Everything is ready here.’” Ljuban saw one man tortured as his
eyes
were burned out; then his head was bashed in and he was thrown among
the
dead bodies in a pit. Over the pit stood the Ustashis with hammers and
axes to make sure that all were dead. But Ljuban was not dead. At night
he crawled out of the pile of corpses, hid in his uncle’s house for six
months, and lived to appear as a witness at the Zagreb trial.
No serious attempt was made to deny the charges, verbal or documentary,
leveled against the archbishop. When Stepinac took the stand he spoke
only
three minutes, merely saying that he was innocent and telling the court
to work its will with him. He was found guilty of treason against the
government
of Yugoslavia and of responsibility for atrocities against Serbian
Orthodox
Christians, killed or forcibly converted. On his conviction he was
sentenced
to 16 years’ imprisonment. I have never found a person in Yugoslavia
who
expressed doubt about the justice of that conviction.
After our seminar
group had spent a remarkable hour in Zagreb with Marshal Tito last July
28, I asked him whether we might see the archbishop, who had recently
been
released from prison after serving five years. We motored to his native
village of Krasic, where he had been paroled, and talked with him for
an
hour. We found a gaunt, peasant-born man, no longer permitted to
function
as the primate of his country’s seven million Catholics, but saying
mass
daily without interference in the village church.
A Sincere Fanatic
Stepinac gives the impression of being a transparently sincere but
bigoted
fanatic and ascetic, who would have made an ideal Grand Inquisitor in
the
Middle Ages. I think he would have sent Joan of Arc to the flames as a
heretic, and with a clear conscience. Today, he can feel that a Serbian
Orthodox priest or layman deserves a worse fate. When I asked him what
hope of salvation there is for us Protestants, he said it was a problem
for which he did not see the solution. Our fate, apparently, he was
willing
to leave to God. But not that of thousands of Orthodox Christians who,
in his days of power, were given the choice between conversion and
death.
After examining
scores of witnesses and reading great numbers of documents, after our
conversation
in Krasic, I am left with no shadow of doubt of the guilt of
Archbishop,
now to be Cardinal, Stepinac. There is ten times more evidence against
him than was ever brought against Alger Hiss. . . I find myself morally
compelled to state the facts in this case as, after the most careful
examination,
I find them. The red hat of this new cardinal will be blood-red.
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The enemy
lurks
like a lion in his den; he lays in our path hidden traps and snares, in
the form of impure and blasphemous thoughts. But if we continue
wakeful,
we can lay for him traps and snares and ambuscades that are far more
effective
and terrible. Prayer, the recitation of psalms and the keeping of
vigils,
humility, service to others and acts of compassion, thankfulness,
attentive
listening to the words of Scripture — all these are a trap for the
enemy,
an ambuscade, a pitfall, a noose, a lash and a snare.
– St. John of Karpathos
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