Catholic Church and the Independent State of Croatia

The flag of the Independent State of Croatia.
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) shaking hands with Alberto Vassallo-Torregrossa (1865–1959), a high-ranking Vatican clergy in Bavaria, Nazi Germany.
Pope Pius XII kept diplomatic relations with the Ustaše state throughout WWII.

Throughout the existence of the Independent State of Croatia (Serbo-Croatian: Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) ruled by the pro-Nazi Catholic fascist group Ustaše from April 16, 1941 to May 8, 1945, the Roman Catholic Church played a significant role in the genocides of Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs committed by the Ustaše regime.[1]

Background

Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac, then the Archbishop of Zagreb was crucial in the Church's decision to sponsor the Ustaše due to his perception that the Ustaše was the[1]

NDH leadership

In May 1941, Pope Pius XII met the NDH leader Ante Pavelić – a devout Catholic himself – with Stepinac. It was followed by Pope Pius XII's posting of Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone (1882–1952) as his rep to the NDH,[1] despite Pope Pius XII's clear knowledge of the ongoing genocides of Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs.[1] Aligned with the Pope's will, Stepinac only disagreed with brutalizing Catholic Jews, but not the vast majority of non-Catholic Jews.[1]

Pogroms

Pogroms against Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs were often incited by Catholic priests who hated the presence of non-Catholics in their parishes.[1] To avoid immediate death, many Serbs were forced to convert to Catholicism, while Jews who converted were still killed as the Ustaše regime followed the Nazi racial policies on seeking to wipe out Jews as a race rather than a religion.[1][2]

Under subordinate bishops' pressure, Stepinac told the Pope that they would ask Pavelić to stop the massacres and forced conversions, while sending Pavelić a different letter in which they asked for neither to stop.[1] Instead, they asked Pavelić to delegate them the conversion authority to make the persecutions look more "humane".[1]

Support for the NDH

In April 1942, Stepinac visited the Vatican for the second time, when he presented a report to Vatican's State Secretary Luigi Cardinal Maglione that praised the Ustaše regime's crackdown on abortion and pornography,[1] while denying that Ustaše's genocides were planned.[1] The Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the NDH until its defeat in 1945.[1]

To stay friendly with the Jews, Stepinac arranged for Chief Rabbi Freiburg of Zagreb to write the Pope a letter to thank him for the help, which the Church had not actually offered.[1] Chief Rabbi Freiburg of Zagreb was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 8 May 1943 upon arrival for protesting the Nazi brutalization of his fellow Jews.[3]

Participation in the Holocaust

Contrary to the common perception that the Roman Catholic Church was opposed to Nazism and the Holocaust, priests and bishops throughout the Church hierarchy were highly sympathetic to them due to classical antisemitism and their belief that Nazi Germany was the "lesser evil".[1][2]

Within the lower clergy, many Jesuits and Franciscans were Ustaše members, who persecuted or massacred Jews, Roma and Serbs for the Ustaše regime.[1] Some prominent Catholic perpetrators included Ivan Guberina, Mate Mugoš and Franciscan Father Bojanović,[1] while Franciscan Dionizije Juričev and Radoslav Glavaš served as the head of the Religious Section (VO) and head of the Religious Department of the Ministry of Justice and Religion respectively to oversee forced conversions within NDH territory.[1]

Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, the operator of the Jasenovac concentration camp in which 77,000–99,000 were killed,[4] was a Franciscan. In addition, Catholic priest Božidar Bralo served as the security police chief in Sarajevo to target Jews while Dyonisy Juričev as an Ustaše newspaper editor calling for all bishops to join the Ustaše to kill Jews.[1] 81% of Croatian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.[2][4]

Critique

In his 1999 book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII,[5] British author and journalist John Cornwell pointed out that[6]

  1. Pope Pius XII's allegedly anti-Nazi sermons never mentioned Jews
  2. Pope Pius XII was silent after the Nazi roundup of 1,200 Jews below the Vatican hill on 16 October 1943[7]
  3. the reason for (1.) and (2.) was Pope Pius XII's lifelong antisemitism preventing him from developing sympathy for Jews
  4. Defenders of Pope Pius XII promoted lies to make him look like a hero by misclassifying his neutral correspondence with the Nazis as "protests" and overstating his interventions in Nazi deportations of Jews[8][9]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17
    • Shela, Menachem (1989). "The Catholic Church in Croatia, the Vatican, and the Murder of the Croatian Jews". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 4 (3): 324. Retrieved December 27, 2024.
    • Steinberg, Jonathan (1989). "The Roman Catholic Church and Genocide in Croatia, 1941-1945". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 60: Studies in Church History. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved December 27, 2024. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
    • Phayer, Michael (2000). The Catholic Church and The Holocaust, 1930-1965. Bloomington, Indiana, United States: Indiana University Press. p. 32. Retrieved December 27, 2024.
    • Biondich, Mark (November 28, 2006). "Controversies surrounding the Catholic Church in Wartime Croatia, 1941–45". Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. 7 (4: The Independent State of Croatia (NDH), 1941–45): 429–457. doi:10.1080/14690760600963222. Retrieved December 26, 2024.
    • Retchkiman, Golda (2020). "The Ustaše and the Roman Catholic Church in the Independent State of Croatia". Occasional Papers on Religions in Eastern Europe. 40 (1: Thirtieth Anniversary Issue of the Fall of Communism). Retrieved December 27, 2024.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2
  3. ↑ Zubrinic, Darko (1997). "Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac and saving the Jews in Croatia during the WW2". Croatian History. Zagreb, Croatia. Retrieved December 27, 2024.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1
  5. ↑ Cornwell, John (2000). Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Penguin Books. Retrieved December 28, 2024.
  6. ↑ Carroll, James (October 1, 1999). "The Holocaust and the Catholic Church". The Atlantic. Retrieved December 28, 2024. Some in the Vatican want to make Pius XII a saint. If they succeed, "the Church will have sealed its second millennium with a lie."
  7. ↑ most of whom were then gassed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
  8. ↑ Morley, John F. (1980). Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust, 1939–1943. Ktav Pub & Distributors Inc. ISBN 9780870687013. Retrieved December 28, 2024.
  9. ↑ "Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion". International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). 2024. Retrieved December 28, 2024.