RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Intelligencija versus democracy in South-Eastern Europe in the middle of XX century (1933-1953)

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza" - STORIA MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA - ()

Research Unit Leader

Rita Tolomeo

Description

The research Unity is composed of five researchers which will operate in strict collaboration, but at the same time everyone will treat a specific theme. Giuliano Caroli will try to reconstruct the political history of the ephemeral experience of the Croatian independent state. Rita Tolomeo will examine the specific ecclesiastical role of Stepinac and his relationship with the Holy See, as well as his dimension of intellectual in the southern Slavic area. Cinzia Maggio will study the relationship between Stepinac and the government ustasha that created the roots, at least partly, for the following persecution by the Tito’s communist regime: particularly the cultural aspect of such relationship will be investigated, that is the connection created among the ecclesiastical summit, the intellectual class and the cultural institutions (as the Matica Hrvatska). Valentina Stazzi will examine in detail the judicial story of the trial against the head of the Croatian Catholic Church and the reactions in the intellectual class. Laura Fortunato will examine the echoes of the trial abroad and especially in the Catholic intellectual world.

The Croatian public opinion and the scholars know very well Stepinac, but he is ignored in the West. Many years had gone away from the trial that brought his name on all the newspapers and an awakening of interest has been only on the occasion of discussed recent beatification. So, we want to give the following biographical sketch, including some critical notes.

Stepinac, man of culture and faith, acted in really difficult times for Croatia; he lived under two antithetic political regimes: Ante Pavelic’s "Indipendent State of Croatia" and Tito's Communist regime. In both experiences he was actually involved in the same way. Being priest from the 26th October 1930, in 1934 he was chosen as coadjutor to Archbishop of Zagreb, Antonio Bauer, though Stepinac was the younger member of the archiepiscopal Chancellery. For a lot of days the national press wrote about him. Also the German and Hungarian newspapers, and the Bohemian press too, spoke about this young ecclesiastic who, thirty-six years old and after only four priesthood years, on the 28th May 1934 had been designated Archbishop's coadjutor with right of succession. His episcopal consecration was suited by the general enthousiasm by the Croatian people. Since the first day of his pastoral ministry, there were exceptional difficulties for him and for the Yugoslavian Churches. His activity and his methods to do apostolate were very modern: he used the radio, the loudspeaker in the squares, the press, the visits even in the lost villages and modern organizations among workers and pupils. He worked at the same time in the field both of the faith and politics. His activity was carried out in the context of the "Indipendent State of Croatia", started in April 1941. Stepinac sympathized with it, because he believed that Pavelic's regime was the realization of Croats' ambitions to the religious, ethnic and political unity. In September 1946, Tito's Communist regime organized a trial against Stepinac. They charged him by collaboration with the ustasha government, by complicity with the crimes by it perpetrated, above all by the killing of the Orthodox Serbs, and by resistance and conspiracy against the Communist regime.
Stepinac's support to the ustasha regime is one of the most controversial questions regarding him: did he give that support because it was a political movement that aimed to the Craotia independence or, to contrary, did he share the ustasha ideology and the crimes done in its name? The positions of the croat Archbishop’s prosecutors and supporters, in the past and in the present, are totally dichotomous. His opponents stressed that he wanted that a large part of the Croat catholic press became an important support to the ustasha regime. In few newspapers, like the "Straza Hrvastska" (the Croat guard), "The Croat voice", the "Catholic Journal" ther were many praises to Poglavnik Pavelic and to the Fascist ideas. The was also ythe praise expressed by the Croat Archbishop when the massacres done by Ante Pavelic and his regime against Serbian, Jews, orthodox bishops and popes were already well-known. Two catholic periodicals, "Katolicki List" and "Hrvatski Narod", confirmed this fact. The Catholic press also supported the "Krizari" (crusaders), a group of former ustasha, that carried out the armed resistance against Tito's Communists. Stepinac's prosecutors thought him responsible to have favoured and supported the activity of Krizari, blessing their flags, granting some of them in the archiepiscopal chapel, exalting their symbolism, as happened during the pilgrimage to Marija Bistrica in 1941 and in 1944. More important, Stepinac, since the beginning, received very warmly Ante Pavelic, giving out a pastoral that incited to give full support to the new State, because it was representative of the Catholic Church. The ustasha government had many values, according to the Archbishop; he wrote so on 24th May 1943 into a letter to cardinal Maglione. So Stepinac was accused to have collaborated to the forced conversions, and at the same time to have had narrow links with a lot of exponents of the ustasha government. Besides, according the prosecutors, the collaboration between Pavelic and Vatican was realized by him. So the Croat Archbishop had to become hated by the Tito's Communist regime; it had aimed to a clear separation between State and Church in Croatia and to the fight against every opposition to the Communist new order, included the Catholic one. The tension between the Communist government and the ecclesiastic authorities and, in particular, with Zagreb Archbishop was growing up even before the end of the war. But it was the collective letter of the yugoslav episcopate to make it to explode. TStepinac was the first to sign the letter written to Croat people in March 1945, had. In that letter, further to the protests for the violence of the ustasha regime, an open reporting was contained against yugoslav partisans’s excesses and, more in general, against the religious persecution acted by the Communist regime: the civil wedding became obliged, religious teaching in the schools was threatened and priests and believers were killed in mass. Because of this letter against Stepinac was organized a "very wicked trial", as Pio XII defined it Pio XII. Sixteen years of hard labour conviction concluded the trial; this punishment was transformed into house arrest, that led him, between imprisonment and illness, to the decease. The Croat Archbishop was accused to be "a traitor and a criminal". The same charges were casted against all the Croat clergy, accused to be composed of "enemies of people, Fascists, reactionaries and traitors", as were all people who did not sympathize with the communism. Stepinac and his supporters used that trial to confute all the rough charges of collaborationism, bringing as proof different talks and speeches where Stepinacit had sentenced the horrors and the crimes made by ustasha in the damage of Serbian, Jewish and iof every other racial or religious minority. In the 20th November 1941, few months after the constitution of the new Croatian Independent State, Stepinac had already sent to Pavelic a long reporting letter about those violence acts. The relationship between them was not cordial, according to Stepinac's defenders. Neither the main exponents of the ustasha regime loved him, because they thought he was the person responsible of the failed recognition of the new State by the Holy See. Referring to the informations in the Catholic Croat press, the Stepinac defenders remembered that it had been submitted to censorship in ustasha period, as happened during every authoritative regime. There was no censorship under communist regime, only because the catholic periodicals have been compelled to interrupte their pubblications. At the trial Stepinac spoke in the name of the Church: it was not against to recognize more rights to the workers in Croatia, or to do the “right reform”, but it asked for itself the same possibility of communism to profess its ideas. Because of the trial, the Croat Archbishop seemed to incarnate the person who reveales, in opposition to the Tito's regime, the persecutions against Church and Catholicism. Stepinac was compelled to descover the communist methods to take the power in Yugoslavia, that included the sistematic elimination of every opponent to regime. Stepinac who was, according to his defenders, a disliked man to Pavelic and Germans, resulted an hated person by the Communists too.
To bring new elements on the case Stepinac we want to widen the field of the historical research with new documentation, like that stored in the Italian Foreign Office Archive or in the Military Archive of Rome. Also, an interesting documentation could come from the new openings of Vatican Secret Archive, above all from the Archive of the Sacra Congregazione dei santi, and fron the Zagreb Chapter Archive. Referring to the relationship between Croatian Catholic Church and the Yugoslavian Communist party are very important the Soviet Archives and the Public Serb and Croatian Archives.