07.12.2025. 11:32h
After a long time, an intervention by the Roman Catholic Church in Croatian politics had somewhat more direct ties to church issues: the Croatian Bishops’ Conference in Zagreb joined in criticizing the city authorities for their intention to change the names of streets named after Ustasha collaborators in World War II.
Thus, the then Archbishop Ivan Šarić also came under attack. This is why Cardinal Vinko Puljić first declared “Možemo”, the ruling party in Zagreb, to be “rigidly left-wing and pro-Yugoslav”.
But this is just one in a series of critical statements by the Church in Croatia towards various public policies, which have been intensifying for months. It is not a lie that such campaigns come in waves.
The clergy reacts to a wide variety of topics: health policy when it comes to abortion, school programs regarding sex and sexuality education, historiography – when it comes to Ustasha symbols. Now it’s the turn of street and square names, which in the case of a prelate from World War II could be understandable in principle.
However, Archbishop Šarić was not only a collaborator of the Ustasha, but also much worse: he wrote and published verse panegyrics to the poglavnik Ante Pavelić, declared himself fiercely anti-Semitic, and supported the forced conversion of Serbs from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.
From the position of the most powerful Catholic authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this was more than cooperation. He undoubtedly influenced the mobilization of numerous Croats into the ranks of the Ustashi, and often their departure for crime or death – or both. Šarić died in 1960 in Spain, where he had fled and lived under the protection of the fascist Franco regime.
Ambitions without limits
Today’s church leadership in Croatia practically does not distance itself from such a legacy at all, even when compared to the current Vatican.
“There is no big secret here,” theologian Branko Sekulić told us about such a stance, “because it is about what I call ethno-religiousism, and it has deeply affected the Catholic Church in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the Serbian Orthodox Church.”
Two years ago, he published a book about this phenomenon in the former Yugoslavia, “The Mask of Christian Vulgarism.” He says that ethno-religionism arises “at the intersection of ethno-totalitarian ideology and ethno-clerical aspirations.”
He believes that the furthest this process has gone “in Republika Srpska as a de jure state and Herceg-Bosnia as a de facto entity.” But, as he notes, these ambitions do not stop at their borders – they are constantly expanding, territorially in the direction of Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia.
“And ideologically,” he added, “towards the complete elimination of others – those ethnically and religiously different who are declared mortal enemies, or those ideologically different who are declared apostates and traitors. For ethno-religiousism, it is not enough to be a Croat to be Catholic or a Serb to be Orthodox.”
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“No, because loyalty to the Ustasha, or Draža’s Chetnik concept, is required for orthodoxy. That is why a significant part of the church structures could bless the policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide without moral discomfort, turning them into sacred undertakings,” believes this theologian from Šibenik. He concludes that in this context the gospel does not serve them “as a path to freedom, but as a rug to wipe away the mud of their own politicking, just as Christ serves them as a drum to beat the ethno-religious drill.”
Branko Sekulić is convinced that the fight against such a narrative is not a fight against God, as the Church tries to present.
“Quite the opposite – it is a struggle for liberation, the consequence of which is the liberation of God himself from his oppressors,” Sekulić told DW.
The Church – like a kidney in fat
In this light, the Church’s engagement in various social and political issues is clearer, but political philosopher Jaroslav Pecnik warns that all of this is inextricably linked to the interests of the church institution itself, which further concerns primarily its material position.
Pecnik points out to DW that in Croatia “it lives like a kidney in fat today,” as a wealthy institution. He listed its privileges – social, political, property and others, as well as known state and unknown local subsidies.
This analyst agrees with the assessment that the Church’s actions have been ebbing and flowing “ever since the so-called democratic changes,” depending on its tactics in relation to broader social circumstances and events, while interfering in almost everything. “However,” he continues, “there is always a desire to be the moral authority and arbiter above all, which serves to maintain existing power.”
In this region, this goes hand in hand with nationalist and conservative policies, in his opinion, which explains the closeness and mutual complementarity between the Church and the HDZ, believing that the spiritual motive is only formally in the foreground.
“The church can afford not to see the reality of this world, because it manages to enslave the people with imposed symbolic values,” Pecnik told us.
photo: Shutterstock
The role of the left and the unrecognized secular state
He then pointed out the “responsibility of the so-called left” which distanced itself from the people led astray from the altar, while during its mandates in power it gave the Church more than the HDZ, “in order to soften it up”.
He claims that this is a very naive and harmful attitude. The church with its ethno-religious concept has only been given additional impetus, so it has recently been behaving “more extreme than during the time of Franjo Tuđman, while now it can even be ahead of Plenković.”
“The truth is that the Church is not only the largest part of the highest clergy, but also the lower clergy and the entire community of believers, among whom there are many who are of a different mind. But these are politically extremely dominant. Those who perceive the church’s mission as more social and recognize this state as secular are not really heard,” believes Jaroslav Pecnik.
The current Pope Leo XIV allegedly does not look favorably on such a reactionary orientation of the top Croatian clergy, and his predecessor, Pope Francis, especially did not like it.
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