Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

and exerted mutual influence on religious organizations’ mythmaking concerning
the same period. This phenomenon is a reminder and an enlarged
picture of the ethnic nationalistic and revisionist-anticommunist “new histories”
that were accompanied by church mythmaking and saint-making
during the decades of the disintegration and transformation of Yugoslavia.
Accordingly, speaking again about Catholicism, one of the chief objectives
of the Myth of the Three Evils of the Twentieth Century is to bring the
Church on the side of the post–Cold War winners, that is, the Western
democracies, in the conclusion of the twentieth-century ideological conflict
between Nazism, fascism, communism, and democracy. That is to say, if the
Church were, for example, not only acknowledged as a champion of anticommunism
but also perceived as a supporter of right-wing authoritarianism,
including Nazism and fascism, it could not become one of the post-
1989 winners and architects of the new world order. The myth presumably
aims to achieve even more than merely consolidating post-1989 gains of
the Catholic church and established faiths in general by reasserting moral
and intellectual supremacy of religious over secular thought.
Furthermore, the Myth of the Three Evils of the Twentieth Century is,
like many myths that originated in religious organizations during that terrible
century, an anticommunist myth. It aims at hurting communism even
posthumously. The myth portrays the anticommunist struggle as a holy war
of sorts and rebuffs the criticism of excesses in anticommunism, its ambiguous
character and aims. 45 More specifically, the Myth of the Three Evils of
the Twentieth Century aims to preclude the “vampire” of communism from
rising again in the form of a “revisionist” history of the twentieth century—
a history that may attempt to rethink communism without the pressure of
the Cold War and acknowledge it as, not an inherent evil but a good idea
with sporadic “aberrations” and “misuses,” and the major contributor in the
struggle against Nazism and fascism. However, religious organizations have
shown no such remarkable effort in order to prevent revivals of Nazism,
racism, fascism, and right-wing tyrannies now routinely fused with religious
monopolies. Not to mention that religious organizations that do not merely
tolerate capitalism but explicitly declare this system as “good” must be held
responsible for this moral blunder. It is fair to say that the Roman Catholic
Church is not among those.
In close connection with this myth’s functions as just presented, it also
aims at softening and watering down the strong impact of Holocaust historiography
and genocide studies. This scholarship studies many dimensions
of modern genocidal crimes and convincingly argues for making religious
organizations responsible, either as having been “tolerant” of evil or, in some
cases, operating as instigators of genocide and accomplices in crimes. 46 By
the same token, another major implication of the Stepinac beatification concerns
the controversy about the role of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during
World War II. I believe that the Vatican conceives of Stepinac’s case as a
stepping-stone toward the beatification of Pope Pius XII and that both future
conclusions 231