Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan S ˇ arić, and his general vicar Krunoslav Draganović
sought to fuse Roman Catholic faith and Ustasˇa ideology. The bishop
of Banja, Luka Josip Garić, was a member of the Ustasˇa organization. For
them and many other clerical and lay Catholics who in 1941 began the
church-national celebration of the thirteen centuries of the evangelization
of the Croats, the NDH had accomplished a historic breakthrough, that is,
the return of the ancient Western nation of the Croats (oppressed by Orthodox
Serbs in the Yugoslav state) into the sphere of Western civilization. 30
The Catholic Church supplied the new regime with crucial components of
statehood, such as a founding myth, patriotic ritual, and state bureaucracy.
According to the myth, the NDH was the outgrowth of the thirteen
centuries-old tradition. Concerning state-building, tens of thousands of
members of Catholic lay organizations served the NDH. The new state recruited
a large number of its officials from the Catholic lay movement and
from graduates of Catholic seminaries and gymnasia. Most of Catholic
clergy outside Italian-occupied zones were Ustasˇa supporters. A number of
Catholic clerics wore Ustasˇa uniforms, and some served as the regime’s officials.
According to the Croatian historian Fikreta Jelić-Butić, 25 Catholic
priests held offices in the Ustasˇa state and 11 clerics took part in massacres
of civilian population. 31 A Croat Catholic survivor of the Jasenovac concentration
camp recalls that camp guards, most of whom were murderers and
torturers, would regularly attend mass and receive holy sacraments, only to
return to their murderous business. 32 A Yugoslav government analysis of
clergy exiled after 1945 designated 16 priests (12 Catholic and 4 Serb Orthodox)
as war criminals. 33 A study published in 1991 in the United States,
drawing on newly opened secret Allied archives, alleged that a number of
internationally wanted Ustasˇas war crimes suspects escaped justice through
the Vatican. 34
The Church in Croatia, of course, is not the same as the Croatian people.
Serb and Croat clergy could not cooperate, but the people could. During
World War II, the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—together with
divisions of Croat Partisan fighters, including the highest ranked Partisan
leader, Josip Broz Tito, and at least several dozen Catholic clerics who were
supporters of the Partisans—defeated the Ustasˇas and destroyed the NDH. 35
It is plausible to argue that the NDH was an aberration in the long history
of the Croat people. In the interwar kingdom, the Croat people widely supported
the influential interwar Croat Peasant Party. The Communist Party
of Croatia (including its youth wing and communist-led labor unions) enjoyed
by far larger support than the Ustasˇas ever did. The peculiarity in the
Croatian political history is a struggle for autonomy by legal means under
existing political authority, through institutions such as the Sabor (diet) and
the Ban (viceroy) and via linguistic-cultural campaigning. As summarized
in the 1990 Constitution’s preamble, the long history of the Croats has been
a long political-legal and largely peaceful cultural struggle. 36 The Croatian
Constitution of 1990 says in its preamble that a Croatian authority estab-
the first strife 25