Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

111. In 1994 the Skopje government passed a law prohibiting Serbian clergy
from entering the territory of the Republic of Macedonia (or the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia [FYORM]) in clerical attire. The Belgrade Patriarchate
announced pilgrimages and commemorations around Serbian monasteries and
First Balkan war battlefields across the FYORM.
112. Pravoslavlje, 15 November 1990.
113. “Church—Symbol of the Serbs,” Independent, 22 June 1989.
114. The official bulletin of the clerical association criticized the Croatian
Marxist sociologist Srdjan Vrcan for his public statement that “an aggressive and
sometimes disgusting anti-Catholicism is emanating from the Serbian Orthodox
church press and Belgrade media.” Vesnik Udruzˇenja pravoslavnog svesˇtenstva,
June–July 1988.
115. From Bulović’s interview with Politika express; see Glas koncila, 20May
1990.
116. Die presse, Vienna, 23 October 1989.
117. Pravoslavlje, 15 November 1990.
118. Ibid.
119. Monsignor Juraj Kolarić served for years as the secretary of the ecumenical
committee of the bishops’ conference. He was criticized by the Serbian
Church for writing an “anti-ecumenical book.” However, Kolarić’s 1985 study,
Pravoslavni The Orthodox, was, in the words of its author, “probably the most
cordial book about the Orthodox Church ever written by a Catholic scholar. ...
[D]id they expect me to write a love letter ...? Let us just take a look at the
Serbian theologian Justin Popović’s 1974 study that denounces every form of
ecumenism.” From Monsignor Kolarić’s interview with me in Zagreb, February
1991. See also Nedjeljna Dalmacija, 3–10 March 1991.
120. Pravoslavlje, 15 December 1990.
121. Ibid.
122. Pravoslavlje, 15 February 1991.
123. Crkva 1991.
124. See more on this mobilization in Slavoljub Djukić, Izmedju slave i anateme:
politička biografija Slobodana Milosˇevića (Belgrade: Filip Visˇnjić, 1994); and
Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia—Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin
Books, 1997).
125. See Sabrina P. Ramet, “The Serbian Church and the Serbian Nation,”
in Ramet and Adamovich, Beyond Yugoslavia, pp. 101–122.
126. Večan pomen: Jasenovac: mjesto natopljeno krvlju nevinih 1941/1985/1991,
pp. 349–350.
127. Ibid., p. 351.
128. The calendar’s cover page featured a fresco-style illustration with the
biblical Cain and Abel and the quotation: “What have you done? The voice of
your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10).
129. The text reads: “In European history, the three cycles of the Catholic
Church’s persecution of its enemies took a combined 243,000 lives. Yet in the
Yugoslav inquisition, 700,000 people lost their lives! The Inquisition against
the Serbs in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, was not only the most fatal according to
the number of victims but also, according to various studies published in the
West that examined the forms of tortures of Serbs, the cruelest of all inquisitions
. . . Bloody massacres of Serbs in the Croat Nazi state and conversions of Orthodox
Serbs to Catholicism at gunpoint were carried out by ‘murderers in the name
of God.’ ” Crkva 1991, pp. 34–35.
notes to pages 154–157 291