Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

of the 1996–97 local, regional, and presidential elections, Church leaders
debated the corruption issue and the Church’s relations with the HDZ at
the regular autumn session of the national Bishops’ Conference in Djakovo
on 3–5 October 1996. The conference’s chairman, Franjo Cardinal Kuharić
(who exceeded 75 years of age and was to retire in 1994) insisted on the
Church’s independence from the ruling party and government and urged
the Church press and clergy to publicly criticize the regime’s corruption,
class tensions, impoverishment and unemployment, growing crime, and police
ineffectiveness. He also insisted that Croatia back the legal authorities
and sovereignty of Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to the well-informed Zagreb
weekly Globus, a personal existed animosity between Tudjman and Kuharić.
37 While most bishops vacillated, the retired metropolitan of Split-
Makarska, Archbishop Frane Franić, rose as the most outspoken opponent
of Kuharić Franić campaigned in the media, calling on the Church to forge
the same kind of relations with the HDZ as the Church in Western Europe
had done with Christian democratic parties during the Cold War. In Croatia,
Franić argued, communism was not completely defeated and might be back
under the guise of social-democratic and liberal parties. Eventually, the year
1997 brought a great victory for Tudjman’s and Franić’s views and policies.
The pope sent Kuharić into retirement, and the HDZ emerged triumphant
in the elections. Tudjman was re-elected, the Church-state symbiosis was
fortified from the parish to the national level, and the Church reasserted
itself as the regime’s trusted ally. Only briefly did Kuharić’s successor, Bozanić,
warm the hearts of the opposition by his criticism of corruption and
privatization; he did not propose any change in the established system and
was on better personal terms with Tudjman than his predecessor. Tudjman
thus won the battle on the domestic front but seemed to be losing abroad.
All things considered, in spite of a few liberal voices, since the 1980s,
clerical zealots and extremist ethnic nationalists seem to have exerted a
strong influence in the Catholic churches of Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina. It was the quarrel of the churches in the 1980s and the impact
of the 1991–95 was that turned most of the clergy in parishes and monasteries
into zealots. Regarding church leadership, the situation in Croatian
church remained ambivalent—or at least more complex than in the Serbian
Orthodox Church, which was staffed by extremist nationalistic bishops and
monks with only a few moderates among theologians and parish priests.
Recently the Vatican has been striving, as always to “balance” its policies
concerning new bishops’ appointments. Thus, after 1989, the Holy See tried,
first of all, to rejuvenate the Croatian episcopal elite and boost bishops’
intellectual and educational background. Most of newly appointed bishops
during the 1990s in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were highly educated
prelates between the ages of 45 and 55. In addition, new church leaders
were selected according to the following three criteria: episcopal candidates
were sought among, first, those who had excelled in anticommunism before
1989; second, those who had distinguished themselves as ecumenical the-
194 balkan idols