Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

the Church helped the HDZ to win elections. In 1992 the Vatican was first
to grant international recognition to Croatia. In 1997, the Church again
assisted the new electoral victory and consolidation of power of the HDZ.
In the same year Croatia and the Holy See agreed on treaties by which
Catholicism became the de facto state religion in Croatia. In 1998, Pope
John Paul II came to Croatia for the beatification of Cardinal Stepinac and
the symbolic legitimation of the system in which the new saintly candidate
became the most revered patriotic icon. Finally, after the democratic elections
of 2000, the Church took part in a right-wing coup attempt aimed at bringing
the radical ethnonationalistic HDZ back to power. Accordingly, trends in
Croatian Catholicism since the end of the communist era have followed the
pattern of Balkan politics and resembled much more the Serbian Orthodox
Church than, for example, the Catholic Church in neighboring Slovenia. In
Slovenia, domestic Catholicism assisted the postcommunist democratic transition,
restrained from ethnic nationalistic politics, and did its part in the
story about the most (and the only) successful new democracy among successor
states to the former Yugoslavia. Yet, as noted earlier, it is fair to say
that the happy, ethnically homogenous Catholic Slovenia never shared the
same problems, fears, and concerns as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and
Serbia.
202 balkan idols
Jerusalem Lost: The Serbian
Church, the West, and the Failure
of the Serbian Revolution
Since 1990, Serbs and Serbia have been at war not only with all non-Serbs
in Yugoslavia but also with the West. On 24 April 1990, the local bishop
from Kosovo and future patriarch Pavle visited Washington. He argued before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the principal sources of
the problem in Kosovo were Islamic fundamentalism, Albanian nationalism,
and the legacy of Tito’s communism. 59 The delegation complained that international
observers avoided visiting ancient shrines such as the patriarchate
of Peć, Dečani, or Gračanica. Those shrines, Pavle said in Washington,
“are the most valuable pieces of evidence to prove the Serbian, Christian,
European and civilizational character of the culture they represent.” 60
In August 1990 US Senator Robert Dole arrived in Kosovo on a factfinding
mission. According to a report dispatched by the archimandrite
Atanasije Jevtić from Prisˇtina to the Holy Synod and written as an article
in the Belgrade daily Politika express, “all attempts of Kosovo Serbs to provide
any explanation to American senators were in vain—Bob Dole came as a
prosecutor of the Serbian people and an advocate of their Albanian enemies.”
61 Jevtić, as he himself claimed, invited the guests to visit the shrines
of Kosovo and Serb villages, but they refused. Thus, he explained in his