Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

first “concrete” ecumenical Catholic-Orthodox public prayer service was a
spontaneous informal move at local level. The prayer involved a Croatian
Catholic bishop and Serb Orthodox archpriest and took place in the Croatian
coastal city of Split on 25 January 1966. The bishop of Split-Makarska,
Frane Franić, invited the local Serb Orthodox archpriest, Marko Plavsˇa, to
pray together and hold a joint worship service in a Catholic cathedral. Nothing
similar had occurred in history in thousand years. Plavsˇa accepted the
invitation in spite of the opposition of the local Serbian bishop Stefan Boca
and many Orthodox clerics. Bishop Franić also faced opposition among Catholic
clergy. Franić’s aides argued that only another bishop or the head of a
monastic order would be an appropriate partner for such an occasion. 65
At any rate, thanks to the Council and Bishop Franić, Catholic Croats
and Orthodox Serbs came together to worship in the same Church as united
Christians and two Yugoslav nationalities who spoke similar languages and
were pillars of the country’s unity. Franić recalled the historic 25 January
prayer in an interview with the author as follows:
Before the Council, it was unthinkable that we Catholics could invite the
Orthodox to our church except to convert them. Likewise, we Catholics
never set foot into a “schismatic” church. Yet after the Council, it was no
longer a schismatic, but a sister-church. My old friend Marko representing
the Serbian Orthodox Church, read the Gospel in Serbian, pronouncing
the Scripture in the ekavian dialect otherwise regularly in use in Serbia
(even though he, as a native of the nearby city of Sinj, here in our Dalmatia,
did not speak that way). Yet on this occasion the Serb priest wanted
to assert his Serbian identity. At any rate, two churches worshiped together
and the congregation applauded several times, which was, back
then, an unusual practice in churches. After the prayer the fraternal hug,
and I saw the faithful were deeply moved and many were tearful. 66
According to the Croatian Catholic historian Juraj Kolarić, the Catholic
Church welcomed the Split prayer, but the Serbian Orthodox Church authorities
did not. 67 Consequently, contrary to Bishop Franić’s desire, the ecumenical
prayer at Split was discontinued. In January 1967, it was canceled
because Archpriest Plavsˇa was ill. As Archbishop Franić recalled in our
conversation in 1989, Plavsˇa, seriously ill, confessed that Bishop Stefan had
criticized him for naivete and foolishness. Plavsˇa also received phone threats
and angry letters from exiled Serbian nationalist organizations. Some monk
zealots called Plavsˇa a traitor of Serbia. Not very long after the historic
prayer, the ecumenical pioneer Marko Plavsˇa died of cancer.
Yet the ice was broken, and something that could be labeled an ecumenical
movement spread across the country. It brought together Catholics, Protestants,
Jews, Orthodox, and Muslims and featured many religious events,
mutual visitations of clergy, tolerant debates among theologians, friendly
ecumenical articles in religious literature and press, and so forth. 68 Accord-
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