Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

movie, starring Martin Sheen as Father Jozo Zovko, Michael York as Zovko’s
lawyer Milan Vuković, Morgan Fairchild as Sister Fafijana Zovko, and Frank
Finlay as the Bishop Z ˇ anić, was shown with modest success in the United
States, western Europe, and elsewhere. In the movie, the Croats are portrayed
as pious and peaceful Catholics eager to join the Western democratic
world but prevented from that and oppressed by Orthodox Serbs and communists.
Herzegovinian Franciscans were featured as good shepherds admired
by their flocks so that the local bishop (a negative character in the
movie) envies them. The Madonna, and the whole of Medjugorje, were,
paradoxically, presented as forces of peace and freedom. In the meantime,
the Madonna of Medjugorje had clearly affected Catholic-Orthodox relations
negatively and disrupted stability in the vulnerable multiethnic Bosnia-
Herzegovina. The Medjugorje apparitions of the 1980s were not a “peace
and prayer movement,” as the Western media stubbornly reiterate, but a
prelude to partition, war, and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
122 balkan idols