Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac took over the helm of the Church in Croatia in the worst period of the 20th century, in the time of rampant Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Even before the Foreign Ministers of France and England (Daladier and Chamberlain) tried to once again reach an agreement with the monstrous Hitler in Munich in 1938 and before the powerful statesmen, F. D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill, drew maps drinking whisky with that other world criminal in Teheran in 1943, Stepinac, though almost powerless in the face of those murderous powers, was completely aware of all the evils of the century directly threatening the planet and his people.
As early as 1937 he was at the head of an association which aided people expelled by National Socialism. He would later explain that in such circumstances the Church, like all other humane people and institutions, had to find its way through the difficulties. The Church had to be on the side of human dignity and be sympathetic toward human suffering, considering that the crimes being committed against humanity were massive. Stepinac constantly grappled with the powerful to protect those under threat. He witnessed how Serbian hegemony enslaved the Croatian people and recognised that it was only in its sovereign state that the Croatian people could survive with such neighbours. These were harsh circumstances in which one had to be very careful lest the remedy might be worse than the illness and in which sometimes the only possibility was to choose the lesser of two evils.
Neither the Nazis nor Communists loved Cardinal Stepinac, and since they could not win him over, they accused him of sympathising with the other side. Thus, for both of them he was a persona non rata and treated according to the estimates of those in power as to what would be more profitable or less detrimental. The testimony of famous Croatian sculptor Ivan Metrovic about Stepinac has been published several times. Knowing the circumstances surrounding Cardinal Stepinac very well, Mestrovic discreetly warned him in 1943, in Rome, that his life was in danger. Stepinac simply responded that he was aware of the fact and was not afraid, despite having reliable information that both Nazis and Communists were plotting to kill him. Thus it is no accident that the US Congress officially stressed that Stepinac, among other things, was "an open opponent of the practices of Nazism and Communism" and that during the war years he was entrusted with "the successful organisation of the escape of many Jewish refugees to freedom" (Nikolic, 1983, p. 221).
Stepinac openly took the side of Nazi and Fascist victims, both in word and deed. Consequently the Nazis cruelly killed his brother as a bitter warning. Later he was victimised and convicted at an open, spectacle trial in the darkest times of a Stalinist regime. Still some in the world, for various reasons, accepted the Stalinist propaganda from Belgrade and thus did not always do justice to the life and work of Cardinal Stepinac. This was facilitated by the fact that Stepinac belonged to a nation that, like many others in Europe, could not be spared the tyranny of either Hitler or Stalin, nor anything that accompanied it. Yet Stepinac did not abandon the solidarity with people in need, even in the worst of times. He helped as much as he could, as suggested by newspaper reports.
"In 1941 he released the Croatian bishops' statement against a forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism, demanding that conversion to Catholicism should be totally voluntary and beyond the reach of public authorities. In 1943 he lodged a strong protest with an Italian minister against the Italian atrocities in the south of the country and enraged the Croatian government by condemning mass reprisals for acts of sabotage. At the same time, he was constantly engaged in relieving the sufferings of the Jews, Serbs and Slovenes and other victims of the persecution and saved many lives" (The Times, London, 11 February, 1960).
As the communists were well cognisant of the fundamental orientation and the integrity of Cardinal Stepinac, they left him in peace when they took power. Thus, for a full 15 months he could act "freely", naturally under the well-known conditions of a Stalinist regime. When the Yugoslav authorities realised that they would not win him over nor persuade him to separate the Church in Croatia from the Vatican, they initiated court proceedings with the intentions of eliminating him and discrediting the Church in Croatia in the eyes of the world by accusing it of collaborating with the Nazis. The authorities also hoped this would frighten the Croatian Catholics, who put up indomitable resistance to this Stalinist regime. It is a known fact that after his conviction, Milovan Djilas, at the time the second man in the state, stated several times that Stepinac was innocent, but that out of political necessity he had to be convicted - so Djilas justified to the West.
Today, decades after Stepinac's death, the conditions under which he worked and all other facts concerning his person and life are known in full detail. All of this tells us that Stepinac, with his dignified bearing and work, transcended the boundaries of his homeland, as well as the temporal limitations of his earthly life. He managed to gain the admiration of more than one religious community. Recognising in Cardinal Stepinac an innocent martyr who fell victim to the cruel delusions of communism, and a staunch advocate of rights for each man and each people during the greatest evils of the 20th century, whose faith was inspired and fed by his true faith in God and desire for the benefit of each and every one man - the Catholic Church has good cause, and indeed, is honour bound to beatify Stepinac only 38 days after his death, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth.
Cardinal Stepinac: Fascist Saint?
30 Dec '05 19:54
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