Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

money laundering, profiteering, speculations in real estate, and financial
scandals. 29 Tudjman’s daughter was allegedly involved in criminal appropriations
of national wealth. 30 Leaders of the HDZ from North America
accused Franjo Tudjman and Gojko S ˇ usˇak of stealing millions of dollars
donated by the Croatian diaspora for the defense of Croatia against Milosˇević’s
aggression. The transfer of the money from America into Tudjman’s
and S ˇ usˇak’s possession was carried out through the Catholic Church, which
often served as a channel for similar operations. 31 Tudjman’s son Miroslav
was accused by a newspaper of stealing a number of secret files from the
police archives and the ex-president’s residence. 32
Small wonder that anti-Tudjman voices also came from the Catholic
Church and other religious circles. I noted earlier that Cardinal Kuharić
criticized Tudjman’s Bosnia policy and the Croatian army’s cruelty to Serb
civilians during the war in Croatia. Kuharić’s successor, Archbishop Josip
Bozanić, attacked privatization laws and was momentarily celebrated as a
hero by the desperate opposition media. The Christian ecumenically oriented
theologian Peter Kuzmić, who had earlier figured as a friend of the Catholic
Church, wrote about the Church’s “uncritical equation of Catholicism, national
identity, and patriotism” and pointed out that some religious leaders,
prominent prelates, and Church media often overtly threatened non-
Catholics, secularists and liberals, or atheists who criticized the Church, calling
on the state to prosecute them and mobilizing public opinion against
anyone who dared to criticize the Church. 33 The theologian Bono Z. S ˇ agi
wrote about “post communist neocommunism,” in which the Church supports
another ideological monopoly and does not apply the same moral standards
to those in power and the people. 34 The eminent priests Stjepan Kozˇul
and Josip Čorić attacked in their sermons and articles the regime’s corruption
and Church leaders’ inaction. Eminent Catholic laymen such as Ivo
Banac, Krsto Cviic, Boris Maruna, and others also publicly criticized the
Church for contributing to the failure of democratization in Croatia and the
country’s international isolation. The Catholic priest-sociologist Ivan Grubisˇić
said in an interview that “the Church today, as well as earlier in history,
was tempted by the offer of high social status, wealth, and power ...[and]
the Church could not resist the temptation.” 35 Grubisˇić also condemned in
interviews the Church’s manipulations of national history, in process, in his
view, since the Great Novena of 1975–84, and Tudjman’s confidence in
hardline Croat nationalists returning from exile in 1990 to assume, without
merit and qualifications, high posts in the government. 36 As a matter of fact,
antiregime criticism from clerical and lay Catholic circles in Croatia, if observed
in comparison with that of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was quite
remarkable. Yet it is cold comfort for Croatian Catholicism to be somewhat
less bad than Serbian Orthodoxy.
Church leaders have been consistent in their support of Tudjman and
HDZ. The only “controversy” of sorts among Church leaders concerning the
Church’s support for the Tudjman regime occurred in 1996. In anticipation
the twilight of balkan idols 193