Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

2. The First Strife
1. Muzˇić, Katolička crkva u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji, pp. 218–221.
2. Nikolaj Velimirović, “Konkordatska borba 1937 godine” (The Concordat
struggle in 1937), in Vladika Nikolaj: izabrana dela. Knjiga XII, ed. Ljubomir Ranković,
Radovan Bigović, and Mitar Milovanović (Valjevo: Glas Crkve, 1997),
p. 310.
3. Ibid., p. 342.
4. On 8 November 1929, the Yugoslav state assembly passed the “Law on
the Serbian Orthodox Church.” According to this law, the state provided salaries
for the clergy and financial assistance to the church but also interfered in church
affairs by influencing the election of the patriarch.
5. The Serbian Church perceived the new state as “the restoration of the
state of the Serbian people. ...Serb warriors defeated the enemy, liberated the
country, united all our ethnic brothers, and created a state more spacious than
Dusˇan’s empire. The magnificent dreams of generations have come true. ...By
the political liberation and unification of the Serbian people, conditions for liberation
and unification of all Serbian Churches and Church provinces have been
thereby created.” Glasnik Srpske pravoslavne crkve, no. 10, October 1970, p. 299.
6. According to a secular Catholic historian, “the foundation of the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the Catholic episcopate welcomed not only as a
political necessity, but also as an opportunity for Roman Catholic penetration to
the East.” Muzˇić, Katolička crkva u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji, p. 202.
7. Also in the capital city, the grandiose church of Saint Mark was built in
the 1930s. It was designed as an enlarged replica of the famous historic Gračanica
church at the historic Kosovo battlefield. In the Kosovo province, the
Serbian Orthodox Church was building new churches, renovating ancient ones
and sponsoring archaeological excavations at historic sites. A new cathedral was
built at Djakovica, six miles from the Albanian border. It had a mausoleum
dedicated to four hundred heroes who died for Serbia in the Balkan wars of
1912–13 and in World War I. New Orthodox churches also appeared in the
homogeneous Catholic Slovenia and predominantly Catholic Croatian coastline.
The Slovene cities of Ljublijana, Maribor, and Celje acquired Orthodox byzantine
temples. In Croatia, new Serbian churches were built at Susˇak near Rijeka (Fiume),
in Split, at Ston near Dubrovnik, and on the naval base of Vis.
8. A Catholic priest complained in a pamphlet on church affairs in the interwar
kingdom that interfaith marriages “at the expense of the Catholic Church
were deftly arranged and encouraged. Orthodox army officers were bound by a
confidential circular to celebrate matrimony with a Catholic girl solely according
to the Orthodox rite. Up to 1940 there were more than 30,000 of these mixed
marriages.” Guberina, “The Catholic Formation of Croatia,” in Carlo Falconi, The
Silence of Pius XII, trans. Bernard Wall (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 267.
9. In 1921 the census registered in the total population of Yugoslavia as 46.6
percent Orthodox and 39.4 percent Roman Catholics. In 1931, the census registered
48.7 percent Orthodox and 37.4 percent Catholics. Vrcan, “Religion, Nation
and Class in Contemporary Yugoslavia,” p. 92.
10. A church commission requested 3,997,472,632.50 dinars. In January
1940, the government agreed to pay 1,142,262,283.11 dinars. Risto Grbić, “O
crkvenim finansijama” (On the Church’s finances), in Srpska Crkva na istorijskoj
prekretnici (Belgrade: Pravoslavlje, 1969), p. 7; see also Muzˇić, Katoličk qcrkva,
p. 31.
252 notes to pages 17–19