Cardinal’s Links to Fascists Questioned

A declaration by the Vatican last week that Croatia’s World War II Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac was a martyr for the faith--a step on a possible road toward sainthood--comes at a time when Croatia’s murky wartime history, and that of the cardinal, is under close examination.

Stepinac is regarded as a hero by Roman Catholic Croatians for having stood up to a hard-line Communist regime after the war. Declaring him a martyr paves the way for Pope John Paul II to beatify him when he visits Croatia in October.

But although Stepinac is a hero to Croatians for resisting the Communists, questions remain about his relationship with the fascists who ruled Croatia during the war.

Stepinac was jailed by the Communists for allegedly collaborating with the Croatian fascist Ustasha regime--a Nazi puppet government--responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. After a show trial, he was sentenced in 1946 to 16 years of hard labor and died under house arrest in 1960.

In 1941, as archbishop of Zagreb, Stepinac had supported the regime of Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic. But by 1942 he had withdrawn his backing because of Pavelic’s policy of forced conversions and mass executions, and had denounced the genocidal policy.

In today’s tense climate of ethnic distrust between Serbs and Croats, however, many Serbs, who are Orthodox Christians, still view Stepinac as a war criminal, seeing him as a symbol of other Croatian Catholics who were cozy with the Ustasha.

“There is no doubt that too many Catholic clergy . . . had shown far too much sympathy with the Ustasha regime during the war and had condoned or turned a blind eye to their atrocities,” English historian Sir Duncan Wilson has written.

Jewish groups too are expressing concern about the Vatican steps toward beatification of Stepinac.

“Archbishop Stepinac’s record of support for the Croatian Ustasha regime, along with his unwillingness to confront the regime’s acts of murder against Jews and Serbs, should clearly disqualify him from the exalted rank of sainthood,” said Mark Weitzman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s national task force against hate.

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Weitzman said the efforts of the Vatican would be put to better use “in searching out and holding up as role models those who achieved true greatness, rather than forcing this honor on a political cleric where it does not belong.”

Present-day Croatia, which seceded from Yugoslavia to become independent in 1991, has both a fascist and a fiercely anti-fascist political legacy.

Many Croatians--including President Franjo Tudjman--fought as anti-fascist partisans in the Communist resistance movement led by Josip Broz Tito, who ruled postwar Yugoslavia until his death in 1980.

But in his drive to win Croatian independence and to assert a Croatian national identity, Tudjman played down the memory of Ustasha atrocities and persecutions. Instead, he invoked a positive image of the wartime Ustasha state as a brave Croatian entity struggling for nationhood.

The Yugoslav wars and ethnic conflicts between Serbs and Croats in the 1990s exacerbated the issue.