MURDER FROM THE PULPIT?

 

 

     The BALKAN ESSAYS of Hubert Butler

             The Irish Pages Press, 2016

I bought Hubert Butler’s Balkan Essays specifically to read The Artuković File. Naturally, I finished it first but after I had read everything else, Butler’s effect of understated horror was just as strong. In the restrained style of the scholar, he allows the reader to create his own vision of Croatia during World War 2. The writing is beautiful but unimpassioned, its strength lying in the absence of concessions to any collective subconscious, Croat, Serb, Communist or Catholic, that might lure the reader down a prejudiced path.

Andrija Artuković was the Minister for the Interior under Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist terrorist organization that, with the blessing of Hitler and Mussolini, governed the Independent State of Croatia, as it was called, that also included Bosnia. Artuković was a ‘desk-murderer’ wrote Butler, who preferred the Nazis’ disciplined approach to genocide to the savagery of the Ustasha. Butler’s attempts to pick up his trail as he fled through Europe after the war, through Ireland to the USA, include anecdotes from good Catholics who had assisted his flight and, knowing nothing of his past, assured Butler what a nice man he had been.

‘So evidently we in Ireland had sheltered this notable man for a whole year. He was…a maker of history, dedicated to the extermination not of Jews alone, but also of his fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox. He was a member of the government which in the spring of 1941 introduced laws which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. Some twenty concentration camps were established in which they were exterminated. Did we cherish him because he presented himself to us as a Christian refugee from godless Communism? That seems to me rather likely.’

‘I spent a part of last summer in Yugoslavia, which I knew well before the war, because I was a teacher in Zagreb and held a travelling scholarship from the school of Slavonic Studies.’

Butler was fluent in the language and returned in 1947 and 1950 when he investigated the wartime genocide committed by the Ustasha. After time spent in the public library in Zagreb 'looking up the old files of the newspapers that were issued in the occupation period, particularly the church papers', Butler concluded that Pavelić was supported by the Croatian people with as much adulation as Hitler in Germany.

The relationship between church and state is the crux of the essays. The church is no longer the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus brought to earth, but the vehicle of such protagonists as Pavelić and Artuković who ‘believed that the interest of their churches could be forwarded by wars, coups d’etat and physical force. They were champions of that militant and political ecclesiasticism which it is our duty to condemn.’ Indeed, in the current dispute around the proposed canonization of Aloysius Stepinac, Butler, as a Christian, asks a very relevant question: What is the church?

Here in Australia the church has never needed to be the nationalistic body that it had become in Croatia. We have not been suppressed by empires. We have not had to struggle against a hostile government. Stepinac, as Archbishop of Zagreb, was the head of a church whose history had molded it to represent the Croat. Yet, this ‘wide-scale convergence of patriotism and piety’ was a dangerous development, and to what extent it encouraged ‘the extraordinary alliance of religion and crime’ under that devout Catholic, Ante Pavelić, the reader must judge. Butler’s research led him to conclude that the Church was indeed involved with the murders and forced conversions of Serbs far above the exceptional case 'of a mad priest' or 'isolated instances of priests blinded by national and party passions' as was later claimed by the bishops.

Butler visited Archbishop Stepinac in Lepoglava Prison after he was convicted of collaboration with the Ustasha by the Yugoslav Government. Butler liked him, describing him as brave, kind and simple (which I understand to mean socially unsophisticated). Yet the archbishop was compromised by his errors of judgement. When Butler asked him why he had collaborated with a fellow priest who had shown such enthusiasm for the Serb conversion campaign, ‘the archbishop gave the stock reply he had so often given at his trial (which incidentally has become the stock answer among the flippant of Zagreb to any awkward question): “Our conscience is clear”.’

Pavelić's actions upset Stepinac, but did not cause him to break his rule of supporting the government of the day. Under very different regimes, he fought against the Serbs in World War 1, then fought with them, upheld the government of King Alexander and, after that, the government of Pavelić who had arranged the King's assassination. He tried to save the life of Father Franjo Rihar whom Pavelić arrested and shot for refusing, as Stepinac had not, to celebrate High Mass and sing the Te Deum Laudamus at the anniversary of the founding of the Independent State of Croatia. '[Stepinac] stands surely for the principle of the State-controlled church,' wrote Butler. 'Unquestionably his conciliatory attitude influenced others who were not capable of his restraint.'

Because I have a perverse sense of humour, I would love to know what Hubert Butler might make of today's opposing posts about the archbishop on the internet. Butler is a writer of great insight – as well as actually meeting the man – and I have to say that contemporary views For and Against Stepinac are so vastly different to anything in the Balkan Essays that the bloggers themselves must have taken lessons in either Hagiography or Indictment.

I will let Mr Butler have the last word.

In 1988 he wrote, 'As for Mgr Stepinac, I believe he underwent martyrdom in order that the truth should be misrepresented.'

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A LIFE OF ALOYSIUS STEPINAC - book review

THE TRIPLE MYTH by Stella Alexander.

You cannot find two things on the internet about Aloysius Stepinac that do not contradict one another and I almost feel sorry for the poor man that Pope John Paul II ever agreed to raise him to the altars, because there has been no peace about him in heaven or earth since.

The preface to this fascinating book, published in 1987, did not fill me with confidence. ‘There is only one main primary source available to the ordinary researcher,’ Alexander commences rather dismally, ‘…two other sources exist but are not available.’ Another source ‘is not always a reliable witness’, a further source requested by the author was ‘refused’ and several others suffer from ‘tendentious’ tendencies or came from representatives of the foreign press who may have had ‘little knowledge of Yugoslavia.’

I know that this is not the reason Pope Francis put Stepinac’s canonization on hold and upset everybody, but it’s tempting to suggest that Pope JP2 could have done his research better (had he been able to). As an example, although the Pope allowed the archbishop to bypass the two miracles required for sainthood by proclaiming him a martyr, the communist government in fact looked after him comparatively well, precisely because they did not wish martyrdom to occur. ‘He was never ill-treated…He was imprisoned in decent conditions, in a double cell with a third neighouring cell arranged as a chapel where he celebrated mass every day. He had books and writing materials and was allowed visitors from time to time.’ He was well fed, and his sister visited him once a month, bringing with her whatever he needed.

Regarding the claim that the imprisonment resulted in the medical condition that killed him, Alexander quotes Hrvatska revija June 1985 Vol 35 No.2: 'Some Croatian myth makers have gone to extravagant lengths to prove that Stepinac...is a martyr. on the basis of a story that his polycythemia (which they describe as leukaemia) was induced by bombarding him over the course of four months with X rays from an adjoining cell.'     

To have been archbishop under the Ustasha government seems to have been as confronting an experience for Stepinac as it would conceivably have been for us. Whilst condemning the atrocities against Jews and Serbs, he nevertheless kept up a running tirade against a theoretical communism, so that I had to reread several of his passages in order to understand what he meant. (Stepinac had a tendency to overwrite.) His unfortunate references to returning the ‘schismatics’ (the Serbs) to the ‘true faith’ (Catholicism) are typical of his time, as is the European anti-Semitism he gradually sloughs off as the war progresses. The elegant and conciliatory language of his letters towards Ante Pavelić, leader of the Ustasha, renders his refusal to break from them (on the pretext of not being able to help people if he had) more poignant.

‘Two things stand out,’ writes Alexander. ‘He feared communism above all; and he found it hard to grasp that anything beyond the boundaries of Croatia, always excepting the Holy See, was quite real.’

In 1945, as Pavelić fled Zagreb and Stepinac, grim-faced, awaited the arrival of the Partisans, there were so many accusations and counteraccusations between the two sides that it is possible to believe whatever one wants.

‘Objective history will show that the representatives of the Catholic Church in Croatia never betrayed their callings and that the mistakes of a few priests are trifling beside what is happening…[under] organized atheism’ – Stepinac.

‘Some of his ideas about the role of the Catholic Church in recent happenings were basically incorrect’ – Partisan response to the Catholic Bishop of Šibenik.

‘Only individuals personally and directly responsible for crimes would be brought to justice’ – communist policy towards relations between the state and the Catholic church.

‘I dare to say that the Croatian people will refuse to accept any regime either of the far left or the far right which does not completely respect its more than thousand year old Catholic tradition’ – Stepinac.

‘We want to create a great community of South Slavs in which there would be both Orthodox and Catholic, who must be closely linked with all the other Slavs. The Orthodox are nearer to this than the Catholics’ - Tito.

The mix of these strong and flawed personalities created a huge mess. Certainly, in not breaking with the Ustasha government when he was advised to, and in launching himself into a head-on collision with the communists after the war, Stepinac gave Tito enough rope to hang him with. Yet, as Tito correctly pointed out, Stepinac did not react to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Serbs by the Ustasha with anything like the same energy as he uncompromisingly defended the Catholic Church against communism. 

My own feeling is that the Partisans, whose attacks on the church so upset the archbishop after the war, were traumatized and angry. They had been witnesses of the Ustasha genocide against the Serbs, Jews and Roma. Many were Serbs and Jews themselves and, as other writers have observed, revenge was in the air. That the liaison between the Catholic Church and the Ustasha had compromised the church, Stepinac does not seem to have appreciated. Like many left-brained men, he was absorbed in his present crisis: the communists were persecuting his church because they were atheists, and it was up to him to ensure its survival.  

Here lies the moral hurdle. Why is the survival of an institution more important than people? Shouldn't Stepinac, as a Christian leader, rather have proclaimed national shame and mourning for those whom the Ustasha had killed? To read about their crimes is to be physically sick, yet their monstrous leaders were not brought to justice after the war, and through a series of Western and Catholic interventions, were able to begin new lives in the Americas. How will canonizing Aloysius Stepinac help Croatia face up to its unsavoury past? 

In any case, a saint must first be a man. What does The Triple Myth reveal about Stepinac? Within its pages, he appeared to me highly intelligent but rule-conscious to the point of autism. (You will forgive me. I am a Special Education teacher.) For example, I was intrigued by the story of his fiancée. As a young man engaged to be married, Stepinac informed her that, rather than risk lewd remarks in the event of being seen with her in public, he would correspond. He added that he only intended to write infrequently, and the ensuing letters contained his rules for her to be a good Catholic wife. The girl broke off the engagement. Stepinac did what he believed to be right but did not anticipate her emotional reaction. Likewise, he is pious and devoutly practical but unable to open the eyes of his heart to rise to the higher things that might have made a great man of him instead of merely a good one. The same might be said for his anxiety about the survival of his church in a country of mass graves. 

The archbishop’s trial I found particularly fascinating. Though it was no doubt set up to find him guilty, its political implications are not well known and are worth considering here. Alexander writes, ‘the actions of the government in bringing Stepinac to trial were understandable,’ and she goes on to list reasons, such as the unstable nature of Yugoslavia in 1946 (which his attacks on the government weren’t helping), disillusion with the Allies regarding land claims and ‘its conviction that the Vatican supported the expansionist aims of Italy in its territorial dispute with Yugoslavia.’

Various communist excesses against the church continued to take place, from time-to-time observers from the west made encouraging (or otherwise) observations about religion in Yugoslavia, and the battle between the two sides seems to have gradually resolved in the years between 1950 and 1953. I can’t help feeling that the Vatican was a major player that allowed neither side to move freely, Stepinac, because he referred all important matters to them, and the Yugoslav government, because the Vatican was a political body.

The Triple Myth ends by lengthy examples of how political opponents in Yugoslavia have exploited the archbishop’s memory for their own ends.

Not a lot of peace in this story. 

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