Catholic Church and the Independent State of Croatia

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.

## 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
- guarantor of Croatia as the "Bulwark of Catholicism" against Islam and Orthodox Christianity
- hope for a Catholic state to reconvert the 200,000 Serbian Orthodox Christians who changed from their Catholic faith after WWI

## 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, despite Pope Pius XII's clear knowledge of the ongoing genocides of Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs.  Aligned with the Pope's will, Stepinac only disagreed with brutalizing Catholic Jews, but not the vast majority of non-Catholic Jews.

## Pogroms

Pogroms against Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs were often incited by Catholic priests who hated the presence of non-Catholics in their parishes. 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.

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. Instead, they asked Pavelić to delegate them the conversion authority to make the persecutions look more "humane".

## 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, while denying that Ustaše's genocides were planned. The Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the NDH until its defeat in 1945.

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. 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.

## 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".

Within the lower clergy, many Jesuits and Franciscans were Ustaše members, who persecuted or massacred Jews, Roma and Serbs for the Ustaše regime. Some prominent Catholic perpetrators included Ivan Guberina, Mate Mugoš and Franciscan Father Bojanović, 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.

Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, the operator of the Jasenovac concentration camp in which 77,000–99,000 were killed, 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. 81% of Croatian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

## Critique

In his 1999 book _Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII_, British author and journalist John Cornwell pointed out that
1. Pope Pius XII's allegedly anti-Nazi sermons never mentioned Jews
1. Pope Pius XII was silent after the Nazi roundup of 1,200 Jews below the Vatican hill on 16 October 1943
1. the reason for (1.) and (2.) was Pope Pius XII's lifelong antisemitism preventing him from developing sympathy for Jews
1. 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

## Related pages

- Antiziganism
- Antisemitism
- Supersessionism
- Slovak Republic (1939–1945)
- _The Protocols of the Elders of Zion_