ALOYSIUS STEPINAC

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'Blessed Alojzije (Aloysius) Viktor Cardinal Stepinac' (May 8, 1898 – February 10, 1960) was a Croatian Catholic Prelate. He was Archbishop of Zagreb from 1937 to 1960. In 1946, in a verdict that polarised opinion both in Yugoslavia and beyond, a Belgrade court found him guilty of collaborating with the Ustaše and complicity in allowing the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs to catholicism. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison, but after five years was released and confined to his home parish of Krašić. He was appointed a Cardinal in 1952. In 1998 Pope John Paul II declared him a martyr and beatified him, which again polarised public oppinion.

Contents

Early life

World War II

Post-war period

Death and legacy

External links

References

Early life

Stepinac was born in the village of Brezarić in the parish of Krašić. He was the fifth of eight children in his peasant family. In 1909 he moved to Zagreb to study in the classical gymnasium, and graduated in 1916. Just before his eighteenth birthday he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army, trained and sent to serve on the Italian Front during World War I. In 1918 he suffered a leg wound and was captured by the Italians who held him for five months. After the formation of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, he was no longer treated as an enemy soldier, and he instead volunteered for Yugoslav legion that went to Salonica. A few months later, he was demobilised and returned home in the spring of 1919.
For service in the Allied army during WWI, he was awarded the "Star of Karađorđe", an award for heroism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. After the war he enrolled at the faculty of agronomy of the University of Zagreb, but left it after only one semester and returned home to help his father. In 1924, he travelled to Rome to begin studying to become a priest, and was ordained on October 26, 1930. In 1931 he became a parish curate in Zagreb.
He was appointed coadjutor to the see of Zagreb in 1934, after some other candidates had been rejected by Pope Pius XI for political reasons. In 1937, though still below the prescribed canonical age of 40, Stepinac succeeded Anton Bauer as the archbishop of Zagreb, becoming one of the youngest archbishops in the Church's history.
In 1936, he climbed the Slovenian mountain Triglav, then the tallest peak of Yugoslavia. To date, he is the only prelate to have accomplished such a feat, and in 2006 this climb was commemorated by a memorial chapel being built on the mass on Kredarica, near the summit.

World War II

Stepinac was the archbishop of Zagreb during World War II in the Independent State of Croatia, a satellite state formed by the Axis Powers in part of the territory of Yugoslavia after their occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941. A movement of fanatical Croatian nationalists, the Ustaša, governed the new puppet state under German protection. In the early days of this regime Stepinac, like other influential Croatian leaders (notably Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party), supported the new state and its regime and welcomed the demise of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although most states around the world, including the Vatican, never recognised the Independent State of Croatia as a sovereign nation, Stepinac publicly exorted his hierarchy to pray for the new entity. And he asked God to fill the Ustaša leader Ante Pavelić with a spirit of wisdom for the benefit of the nation.
From the outset the Ustaša leadership was committed to a policy of extreme intolerance towards its Serb (orthodox Christian), Jewish and Roma minorities, but in his reports to the Vatican Stepinac spoke only favourably about the regime. On March 28 1941 he had made his own position clear:

''All in all, Croats and Serbs are of two worlds, northpole and southpole, never will they be able to get together unless by a miracle of God. The schism (Eastern Orthodoxy) is the greatest curse in Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. Here there is no moral, no principles, no truth, no justice, no honesty.''

Later, Stepinac called on government officials to stop the persecution of Jews and others and urged them to distinguish between people allegedly implicated in wrongdoings and others who were racially profiled or just held as "hostages". He also sought tolerance for people in mixed marriages and people who converted to Catholicism. By the time of these representations, knowledge of the Ustaša concentration camps at Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška was widespsread but Stepinac made no mention of them.
He did use the pulpit to condemn ethnic genocide against minorities and said:

''All men and all races are children of God; all without distinction. Those who are Gypsies, Black, European, or Aryan all have the same rights.... for this reason, the Catholic Church had always condemned, and continues to condemn, all injustice and all violence committed in the name of theories of class, race, or nationality. It is not permissible to persecute Gypsies or Jews because they are thought to be an inferior race.''

He was also involved directly and indirectly in numerous efforts to save hundreds of Jews, before and during the war. Dr. Amiel Shomrony alias Emil Schwartz was the personal secretary of Miroslav Šalom Freiberger, the chief rabbi in Zagreb, until 1942. In the actions for saving Jews, Shomrony acted as the mediator between the chief rabbi and Stepinac. He later stated that he considered Stepinac blessed since he did the most and the best he could for the Jews during the war.^[1] Reportedly the Ustaša government at this point agitated at the Holy See for him to be removed from the position of archbishop of Zagreb.
One of the main issues the Catholic Church in Croatia at the time seems to have had was their lenience towards the fact that the religious conversions carried out by the clergy aligned with the Ustaša were merely a part of the persecution scheme aimed at the ''undesirable'' minorities — primarily the Serb Orthodox faithful. Stepinac did not seem to make any public attempts to criticize the government for persecuting the Serbs per se, but he was later quoted as giving out a secret message to the priests that "when this time of madness and savagery passes, those who converted out of their beliefs will remain in our Church, and the rest will, when the danger is gone, return to their own".

Post-war period

After the war, on May 17, 1945, Stepinac was arrested and held until June 3, when he was released. On June 4 he met with Josip Broz Tito but no agreement was reached between them. On June 22, the bishops of the People's Republic of Croatia released a public letter describing injustices and crimes done to them by the new authorities, and in September 1945, a synod of bishops discussed these issues. On October 20, Stepinac published a letter in which he stated that 273 clergymen had been killed since the Partisan take-over, 169 had been imprisoned, and another 89 were "missing" and presumed dead. It is argued that most of these executions had not been ordered by the Yugoslav high command and were, for the most part, spontaneous retributions against pro-nazi clerics by the people and isolated partisan groups and, thus, had nothing to do with the Yugoslav government. In response to this letter Tito spoke out publicly against Stepinac for the first time by writing an editorial in a daily newspaper accusing Stepinac of declaring war on the fledgling new Yugoslavia.
In forging a new republic out of the war-ravaged remnants and deep-seated bitternesses of the former kingdom, Tito had established brotherhood and unity as the state's over-arching central objective and nothing was allowed to challenge it. In such a climate Stepinac's persistence had been both brave and reckless. On November 4 he had stones thrown at him by a crowd in Zaprešić and in January 1946 Yugoslavia asked the Holy See to post him elsewhere. The request was refused.
By September of the same year the Yugoslav authorities indicted Stepinac on several counts - collaboration with the Nazis, relations with the genocidal Ustaša regime, having chaplains in the Ustasha army as religious agitators, forceful conversions of Serb Orthodox to Catholicism at gunpoint and high treason against the Yugoslav government. Stepinac was arrested on September 18, 1946 and his trial started on September 30, 1946.
Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav official close to Tito, said that Stepinac "would probably not have been brought to trial for his dubious conduct in the war...had he not continued to publicly oppose the new Yugoslav state."
Stepinac was tried alongside former officials of the Ustaša government including Erih Lisak (sentenced to death) and Ivan Šalić in a case that reflected determination by the Yugoslav government to tackle the collaboration that had gone on between the puppet state and elements of the Catholic Church (see Involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustaša regime). Altogether there were 16 defendants.
The way trial was conducted was criticized by the Catholic church and nationalists. Stepinac claimed that it was a show trial. He gave a long, 38-minute speech on October 3rd as part of the fourth day of the proceedings when he stated that his conscience was clear with regard to all of the accusations, and that he did not intend to defend himself or appeal against a conviction. Instead, he stated he would take not only ridicule, disdain and humiliation, but also death, for his beliefs. He further stated that he was being attacked in order for the state to attack the Church and that no religious conversions were done in bad faith. He claimed that the military vicariate was created in the Independent State of Croatia just as it was in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to address the needs of the faithful among the soldiers and not for the army itself, nor as a sign of approval of all action by the army. Furthermore, he asserted that he was never an Ustaša and that his Croatian nationalism stemmed from the nation's grievances in the Yugoslav Kingdom, and that he never took part in any anti-government or terrorist activities against the state or against Serbs.
He also once again claimed that 260-270 priests were executed by the Partisans and deemed these summary death sentences uncivilized. He also decried the nationalization of Church property - schools, seminaries, orphanages, printing presses, and the prevention of Church involvement in education, press, charitable work (mercy was considered degrading by socialists), teaching of religion in school, as well as intimidation and molestation of clergy. He also complained against issues such as atheism, evolution, materialism, and communism in general.
The state brought forth evidence and witnesses concerning the executions and forced conversions members of his military vicariate performed, pointing out that even if he did not order them, he also did nothing to stop them. They also pointed out the disproportionate number of chaplains in the NDH armed forces and attempted to present in detail his relationship with the Ustaša authorities. Foreign affairs politics of the time also demanded that the Vatican be implicated as much as possible in these accusations. Whether the accusations were true or not, no opportunity was missed that could further imply its complicity in the matter.
The trial was, thus, soon condemned by the Holy See. Many Catholics and others considered the Judicial process to be fatally compromised by extorted witness statements, false testimonies and falsified documents. Some such critics have cited as an example a letter entered in evidence which was addressed to the Pope and was alleged to have been written by Stepinac in 1943. The letter was incriminating in that it expressed support for the Ustaša's mass conversion programme and for the state itself, but Stepinac denied writing it. The prosecutor claimed that a copy signed by Stepinac existed, but he did not produce it.
On October 11, 1946, the court found Stepinac guilty of high treason and war crimes. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison (considered a mild punishment for treason charges). All Catholics who had taken part in the court proceedings, including most of the jury members, were promptly excommunicated by the Pope.
After serving five years of his sentence in Lepoglava prison, where he had had better-than-usual accommodation in recognition of his clerical status (two cells plus an additional cell as his private chapel), Alojzije Stepinac was released in a conciliatory gesture by Tito, on condition that he either retired to Rome or was confined to his home parish of Krašić. He refused to leave his country and opted to live out his last years in Krašić, where he was transferred on December 5 1951. He said: "They will never make me leave unless they put me on a plane by force and take me over the frontier. It is my duty in these difficult times to stay with the people.". He deemed himself too old to move to another country.
On November 29, 1952, his name appeared in a list of cardinals newly created by Pope Pius XII. In response Tito's government severed diplomatic relations with Vatican on December 17 1952.

Death and legacy

In 1953, Stepinac was diagnosed with polycythemia, a rare blood disorder. Seven years later, at the age of 61, he died of a thrombosis. He was buried in Zagreb during a service in which the protocols appropriate to his senior clerical status were, with Tito's permission, fully observed.
Notwithstanding that Stepinac died peacefully at home, he quickly became a martyr in the view of his supporters and many other Catholics. There is no evidence that he was killed, but they argue that the declining health of his last years was in some way a consequence of his imprisonment, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that he was treated at home rather than in a hospital (as was dictated by the law). Against this, others argue that he enjoyed favoured treatment in Lepoglava in comparison with other prisoners, being allocated double the normal entitlement of living space and an adjoining cell as his personal chapel.
For Catholics at least, Pope John Paul II resolved the debate in Zagreb on October 3, 1998 when he declared that Stepinac had indeed been martyred. John Paul had earlier determined that where a candidate for sainthood had been martyred, his/her cause could be advanced without the normal requirement for evidence of a miraculous intercession by the candidate. Accordingly he beatified the late cardinal after saying these words: ''One of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church, having endured in his own body and his own spirit the atrocities of the Communist system, is now entrusted to the memory of his fellow countrymen with the radiant badge of martyrdom.''
In 1984 a community of Croatians who had emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, built a Croatian American Home named after Stepinac and placed a larger-than-life statue of Archbishop Stepinac in its hallway. The Croatian American Lodge is located in Eastlake, Ohio.
On the other hand many non-Catholics have remained unconvinced about Stepinac's martyrdom and about his saintly qualities in general. Some saw his promotion to within one step of sainthood as a gratuitous provocation, one result of which is that to his most severe critics he has become known as the patron saint of genocide. Without question the beatification re-ignited old controversies between Catholicism and Communism and between Serbs and Croats. The Jewish community in Croatia, some members of which had been helped by Stepinac during World War II, did not oppose his beatification but the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked for it to be deferred until the wartime conduct of Stepinac had been further investigated. The Vatican ignored this representation.
On February 14, 1992, the Croatian Parliament symbolically condemned the 1946 court decision and the process that led to it, amid protests. However, the verdict has not been formally challenged nor overturned in any court (even between 1997 and 1999 when that was possible under Croatian law).
Stepinac was unsuccessfully recommended on two occasions by two individual Croatian Jews to be added to the list of the Righteous Among the Nations. One of those Croatian Jews, Dr. Amiel Shomrony, has recently the Serb lobby for preventing the inclusion of Stepinac into Vad Yashem's Righteous list. Esther Gitman, a Jew from Sarajevo living in the USA who holds a PhD on the subject of the fate of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia, said that Stepinac did much more for Jews than some want to admit. However the reason stated by Yad Vashem for denying the requests were that the proposers were not themselves Holocaust survivors, which is a requirement for inclusion in the list; and that maintaining close links with a genocidal regime at the same time as making humanitarian interventions would preclude listing''.

External links

★ Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac

★ Online Book: Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac - Basic Facts about His Person and Work by Simun Sito Coric

★ Patron Saints Index - Blessed Alojzije Stepinac

★ "The Case of Archbishop Stepinac", by Sava N. Kosanovic, Ambassador of the FNR Yugoslavia in Washington

★ Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, A Servant of God and the Croatian People

★ Archbishop Stepinac High School - A Catholic High School in White Plains, New York (USA) named for Archbishop Stepinac. Includes a shrine featuring a bust of Stepinac by the Croatian artist Ivan Meštrović.

★ Cardinal Stepinac Village (Retirement & nursing home)

References

★ Tanner, Marcus, Croatia New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1997
1. ''Serbian Lobby Prevents the Inclusion of Stepinac in Yad Vashem'' (article in Croatian), Večernji list, June 5, 2005


★ http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=512