Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

pentance, not merely a verbal condemnation of the crimes, and to promise
that such a crime will never happen again.” 115
After ignoring several Catholic Church leaders’ official and unofficial calls
for ecumenical meetings released between 1982 and 1986, the Holy Assembly
of Serb Orthodox bishops sent in June 1989 to the Catholic bishops’
conference a letter entitled “Preconditions for Ecumenical Dialogue.” This
letter was, according to a statement by the moderate Slovene archbishop
France Perko in an interview with an Austrian daily newspaper, “only another
unpleasant move within the Orthodox church’s ongoing anti-Catholic
campaign full of accusations and ultimate demands.” 116 The Serb bishops’
epistle expressed a strong resentment both over the past and present. On
the World War II controversy, the letter charged a genocide-denial, and regarding
the current crisis in Yugoslavia, Serb bishops accused the Catholic
Church of backing enemies of the Serbian people. “It is an astounding and
horrible fact that (during the Second World War) the Roman Catholic
Church hierarchy, led by the late Archbishop Stepinac (who was also the
military vicar of Pavelić’s army), could agree to collaborate with the Ustasˇa
regime,” the Serb Church leader wrote, and went on to say: “The Catholic
Church also actively collaborated in rebaptism [forcible conversion of Serbs
to Catholicism] that took place amid widespread violence and Serbs’ fear of
a biological extinction.” 117 On the current crisis, the letter argued that there
is “a tendency toward minimizing the crimes and not telling the truth about
the tragic fate of the Serbian Church and people clearly visible in the Catholic
weekly Glas koncila and the public statements of Catholic prelates, including
Cardinal Kuharić. ...TheSerbian Church does not demand penance
for someone else’s crimes—we only want your restraint from further insults.”
118 In the letter, the Serb bishops also complained about the language
policies in Croatia, the Vatican’s support for the secessionist Macedonian
Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church’s support of Albanian separatism in
Kosovo, and alleged antiecumenical statements and writings by Monsignor
Kolarić, the secretary for ecumenism of the bishops conference. 119 In the
letter concluding paragraph, Serb Church leaders implied that some kind of
an eleventh-hour rapprochement might be possible. Although they did not
specify concrete demands, Serb prelates had probably hoped that the worried
Croatian Church leaders, frightened by the aggressive Milosˇević and looming
ethnic war, would release a public apology to the Serbian Church and modify
their views on Kosovo, Macedonia, and other issues of the Yugoslav crisis.
The Catholic bishops’ conference of Yugoslavia convened at Zagreb on 12
November 1990 to compose an official response to the Serb bishops’ letter.
The Catholic reply was published in all major newspapers. On behalf of the
bishops’ conference, Cardinal Kuharić accused the Serbian Church of paying
lip service to “certain politics” (i.e., the politics of Serbia’s nationalist leader
Slobodan Milosˇević) rather than being concerned about discouraging tendencies
in the ecumenical dialogue. 120 Kuharić also delineated the new in-
the second strife 155