Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

spent 17 years in jail and in monastery confinement. In 1946 in Zagreb, a
16-year sentence was given to the Catholic archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije
Stepinac. Stepinac angered the regime when he rejected the idea of clerical
associations, declined Tito’s demands that Catholicism in Yugoslavia loosen
its ties with the Vatican, and, in September 1945, convened a bishops’ conference
and released a pastoral letter against the regime’s brutal policies,
which included executions and imprisonment of clergy, and confiscation of
property. Stepinac also secretly kept NDH archival documents in his palace
(entrusted to him by NDH leaders), until the Croat communist leader Bakarić
convinced him to turn them over in exchange for a promise to ease the
persecution of clergy, and secretly met with high-ranking Ustasˇa officers
who returned to the country to organize sabotage and terrorism. The communists,
at the time urged by Stalin to rig the elections and consolidate
power in all of Eastern Europe, took this chance to discredit Archbishop
Stepinac and the noncooperative clergy and put Stepinac on trial along with
these Ustasˇa officers war criminals and terrorists. These officers and some
other internationally wanted war criminals sought by the Allies and by some
Jewish organizations, were captured, put on trial, and executed. The prosecutor,
Jakov Blazˇević, expanded the indictement against Stepinac, trying and
not quite succeeding to prove by arguing that he indeed had contacts with
the accused terrorists and knew about escapes of other Ustasˇa leaders to
the West, thanks to the Church’s help—his collaboration with the NDH and
the Germans and the Church’s contribution to the persecution of Serbs and
Jews. The prosecutor ignored documents in the possession of Western intelligence
sources that reported that Stepinac a few times protested against
the worst NDH massacres and even sympathized with the Allies after 1943,
trying to bring the NDH over to the winners’ side. 41 Eventually, Stepinac
spent five years in jail and was released, because of poor health, to his native
village, where he died in 1960. In any case, though several religious leaders
were jailed at the time in Eastern European countries after Stalinist show
trials, there was no such a thing as “the Stepinac Trial” in Yugoslavia; there
was a trial of a group of Ustasˇa conspirators, and Stepinac was deftly included
among them by the prosecutor. However, Stepinac took the opportunity
to protest at the trial against the regime’s execution of more than
two hundred Catholic priests (some of whom were innocent people killed by
a mob and the communist police but most of whom were active Ustasˇa) as
well as against the closing of religious schools and nationalization of Church
property. In this way the myth of Stepinac’s martyrdom was created in the
West during the anticommunist momentum of the 1950s. Pope Pius XII
contributed to this myth by making Stepinac a cardinal in 1953, after which
Belgrade broke off diplomatic ties with the Vatican.
In the new Yugoslavia, the communists sought legitimacy as guardians
of ethnic harmony and guarantors that the genocidal massacres of World
War II would not be repeated. In 1945, the Yugoslav People’s Assembly, upon
Tito’s initiative, passed the “law prohibiting the incitement and advocacy of
the first strife 27