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IT IS FOR THE SAKE OF PROCLAMING THE TRUTH.

PIUS XII AND CROATIA

Slovakia and Croatia

According to Ronald J. Rychlak, the slaughters committed against Serbs and Jews are well documented, and the collaboration of some members of the Catholic clergy is rightly condemned but postwar Communist propaganda, now acknowledged by all reputable scholars to have been fabricated, is the original source of the allegations against Pope Pius XII and most of the higher–ranking Catholic clergy in Croatia. The Holy See actually filed several protests and papal interventions against those crimes.

In October 1942, a message went out from the Vatican to its representatives in Zagreb regarding the “painful situation that spills out against the Jews in Croatia” and instructing them to petition the government for “a more benevolent treatment of those unfortunates.” The Cardinal Secretary of State’s notes reflect that Vatican petitions were successful in getting a suspension of “dispatches of Jews from Croatia” by January 1943, but Germany was applying pressure for “an attitude more firm against the Jews.” Another instruction from the Holy See to its representatives in Zagreb directing them to work on behalf of the Jews went out on March 6, 1943.

Croatian Archbishop Alojzij Stepinac, after having received direction from Rome, condemned the brutal actions of the government. A speech he gave on October 24, 1942 is typical of many that he made refuting Nazi theory:
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.

The Associated Press reported that “by 1942 Stepinac had become a harsh critic” of the Nazi puppet regime, condemning its “genocidal policies, which killed tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and Croats.” He thereby earned the enmity of the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic. (When Pavelic traveled to Rome, he was greatly angered because he was denied the diplomatic audience he had wanted.)

On October 13, 1946, when the postwar Communist authorities tried to concoct a case against Archbishop Stepinac, American Jewish leader Louis Braier stated:
This great man of the Church has been accused of being a Nazi collaborator. We, the Jews, deny it. He is one of the few men who rose in Europe against the Nazi tyranny precisely at the moment when it was most dangerous. He spoke openly and fearlessly against the racial laws. After His Holiness, Pius XII, he was the greatest defender of the persecuted Jews in Europe.

Despite the defense, as well as protests from Pope Pius XII, Stepinac was convicted and sentenced to sixteen years of hard labor. Due to protests and indignation throughout the democratic world, and Jewish testimony as to the good work he had done, he was moved to house arrest in 1951. Almost immediately, Pope Pius XII raised him to the cardinalate.

One of the first acts of parliament in the newly independent state of Croatia in 1992 was to issue a declaration condemning “the political trial and sentence passed on Cardinal Alojzij Stepinac in 1946.” Stepinac was condemned, declared the parliament, “because he had acted against the violence and crimes of the Communist authorities, just as he had acted during the whirlwind of atrocities committed in World War II, to protect the persecuted, regardless of . . . national origin or religious denomination.”

Ignoring all the facts, anti-Catholic writer, Daniel Goldhagen, concocted a grossly inaccurate portrait of Croatia by making another outrageous error: “Forty thousand . . . perished under the unusually cruel reign of ‘Brother Satan,’ the Franciscan friar Miroslav Filopovic–Majstorovic. Pius XII neither reproached nor punished him . . . during or after the war.”

Actually, the so–called “Brother Satan” was tried, defrocked, and expelled from the Franciscan order before the war ended. In fact, his expulsion occurred in April 1943, before he ran the extermination camp (April–October 1943). For Pius XII to have punished him “after the war” would have been difficult indeed. Goldhagen must be unaware that this renegade priest was executed by the Communists in 1945.

Many other Croatian priest–collaborators were also punished by the Church (though Goldhagen overstates the number of such priests). All of this is well documented in the archives of the Franciscans, the Croatian archives, and depositions regarding Stepinac’s beatification.

Once again, Goldhagen has attempted to indict Pius by telling the reader the very reverse of the truth. This is explicable only as a premeditated defamation of the wartime Pope and of Catholic people in general.

Ronald J. Rychlak is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Mississippi School of Law. He is the author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope