Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

1991–95 war the Church used the strongest form of national bishops’ conferences
messages to the world and the faithful to condemn Serbian crimes.
Concurrently, the Church utilized private channels and individual Church
leaders’ statements (but not official bishops’ conference messages to the
world) to condemn Croatian crimes against Serbs civilians in Croatia and
Bosnia and the Croatian military involvement in the Bosnian war. In the
1990s, the Archbishop Bozanić voiced a mild antiregime criticism of corruption
during Tudjman’s tenure, but the bishops’ conference never released
any epistle or similar official statement against the HDZ regime. Finally, the
church utilized all available methods (private clerical criticism, the church
press, and national bishops’ conference letters to the public) against the leftcenter
government that replaced the HDZ in power in 2000. Thus in the
final analysis, the Catholic Church in Croatia condemned much more
strongly and unambiguously the democratically elected left-center government
in post-communist Croatia than it had the crimes of the pro-Axis NDH
regime and Cold War–era Croatian nationalists’ terrorist attacks. Accordingly,
in Yugoslav history, the conference of Catholic bishops would officially
and most strongly attack only governments they considered illegitimate,
such as the Serbian-dominated government of the interwar kingdom, the
communist government of the former Yugoslavia, and the post-2000 leftcenter
government in Croatia. This rationale and practice are even more
strikingly clear in the history of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Of course,
it is not a new discovery that political parties backed by religious organizations
enjoy the extraordinary privilege in the possibility that even most
brutal mass murderers among their members can become saints, or at least
the churches can help their crimes to be forgotten.
In the long run, the successful “return” of Croatia to the West, which,
in spite of the national church’s resistance, began with the elections of
2000, was crowned by two events in November 2000. First, the Sabor, amid
protests from HDZ delegates, passed the resolution of Croatia’s intention to
join the European Union. The resolution affirmed Croatia’s willingness to
collaborate with European institutions, including the International War
Crimes Tribunal. Then, on November 2001 10 in Washington, D.C., an official
state meeting took place between the US president, George W. Bush,
and the Croatian president, Stipe Mesić. On this occasion the American
president (whose administration was in place at the time that diplomatic
pressure was put on the Vatican to curb clerical nationalists in Croatia)
emphasized the Western character of Croatia and announced its forthcoming
admission to the NATO alliance. Thus, contrary to scenarios that would
have sustained the myth of “The Thirteen Centuries of Christianity in the
Croat People,” it was not the Catholic Church that brought Croatia back in
the orbit of Western civilization but a regime led by former communists that
the Church had resisted in an attempted coup.
To conclude, the history of Church-state relations in postcommunist Croatia
had several milestones: 1990, 1992, 1997, 1998, and 2000. In 1990,
the twilight of balkan idols 201