Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

terpretation of recent church history, according to which the Archbishop
Stepinac was an independent church leader who publicly protested against
Ustasˇa crimes and specifically against crimes committed in the Jasenovac
concentration camp. As evidence Kuharić quoted Stepinac’s wartime homilies
delivered in the Zagreb Cathedral and Stepinac’s letters to the Croat
fuhrer Pavelić.
From an emergency session held early in December 1990, the Holy Assembly
of Serb bishops released a statement on ecumenical relations with
the Roman Catholic Church in which the bishops:
having received the Catholic Church’s reply to our letter, this Sabor with
deep regret declares that the intolerant attitude on the part of some Catholic
clerics and Catholic intelligentsia in Yugoslavia toward the Orthodox
faith and the Serbian Orthodox Church, has brought ecumenical relations
in our country almost into an impasse. Nevertheless, this Sabor remains
open for a fraternal dialogue and will do anything it can to improve the
climate of interchurch relations. 121
The post–Vatican II ecumenical movement came to an end in 1990. The
traditional interfaculty ecumenical symposia, held every two years since
1974, was terminated in 1990 because of the Croatians’ absence in protest
of Milosˇević’s coups in the autonomous provinces and threats to the republics.
The “Ecumenical Octave for Christian Unity,” held in January 1990 in
Osijek in northern Croatia, was one of the last interfaith vigils before the
outbreak of the Serbo-Croat war in 1991. On 25 January 1991 the participants
met at an interfaith worship service, and on that occasion the Serb
Orthodox bishop of Srijem, Vasilije Kačavenda, pointed out that “Croats,
Serbs, and others, despite the different religions and nationalities in which
they were born, want to show that common worship could be the way for
mitigating the tensions and difficulties of the moment.” 122
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Untimely Commemorations
From June 1990 to August 1991, the Serbian Orthodox Church carried out
a series of commemorations in honor of “the beginning of the Second World
War and the suffering of the Serbian Church and Serbian people in that
war.” 123 Those commemorations came as a continuation of the September
1984 consecration of the Saint John the Baptist memorial church at Jasenovac.
These religious events coincided with Slobodan Milosˇević’s so-called
antibureaucratic revolution, that is, the Serb nationalistic mobilization carried
out through street protests and an aggressive media campaign. 124 Concurrently
the Serbian Church’s commemorations bred popular sentiments
of pride and self-pity as well as a lust for revenge. 125
In June 1990, the Holy Synod published the second landmark monograph