Collaborator with the pro-Nazi Croatian regime or shadow opponent who helped save the lives of thousands of persecuted Jews and Orthodox Serbs? The performance of the Archbishop of Zagreb Aloysius Stepinac during World War II continues to be a matter of discussion. The recent stoppage of his canonization process ordered by Pope Francis and the creation of a mixed Catholic-Orthodox commission to review his biography have once again revealed how controversial his figure is.
Aloysius Viktor Stepinac was born on May 8, 1898 in Brezaric, a village near Zagreb. He was the son of a large family of a prosperous vintner (Aloysius had eight brothers and three half-siblings) and his second wife, a devout Catholic woman who insisted that his fifth offspring become a priest.
Aloysius was sent to the Croatian capital to study at an archdiocese boarding school. In 1916, when he was 18 years old, he was recruited by the Austro-Hungarian army to fight on the Italian front, where he would be captured. Stepinac spent the last months of World War I in a prison camp.
After the war, he was released and returned to Croatia, to the newborn Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later known as Yugoslavia. It was a state with great ethnic and religious diversity, threatened since its creation by tensions between the two most powerful factions: the Serbs, supporters of a centralist Yugoslavia under their rule, and the Croats, former Austro-Hungarian subjects, defenders of a federal government. Some tensions that also had a religious component, since most of the Serbs were Orthodox and the Croats were Catholic.
Following his father’s wishes, Stepinac enrolled in Agriculture at the University of Zagreb. However, he ended up fulfilling those of his mother. In 1924 he entered the Collegium Germanicum, a German-speaking seminary in Rome. His rise was meteoric. In 1930 he was ordained a priest. Four years later he was appointed Coadjutor Bishop of Zagreb. And in 1937, at the age of 39, he was the archbishop of the capital, the youngest in the history of the Catholic Church.
During the first years of his mandate, Stepinac earned the appreciation of his parishioners for his involvement with the most underprivileged classes, being the founder of Caritas in Croatia, and for the impetus he gave to the Marian sanctuary of Marija Bistrica as a center of pilgrimage ( It is currently the main religious tourist destination in the country). But he also distinguished himself by his opinions denouncing the discrimination that, in his opinion, Yugoslav Catholics suffered since the proclamation in 1929 of a new pro-Serbian dictatorial monarchical state led by King Alexander I.
Stepinac’s arrival at the Archbishopric of Zagreb coincided with an escalation in the rivalry between Serbs and Croats. In 1928 the Croatian nationalist leader Stjepan Radic had been assassinated at the hands of a Montenegrin deputy. In 1933 another prominent Croatian politician, Josip Predavec, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist. And in 1934 it was King Alexander I himself who died in an attack in Marseille perpetrated by a Bulgarian agent of the Ustasha, the extreme right-wing Croatian terrorist organization that years later would govern Croatia with the support of Hitler.
In April 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav government’s rapprochement with the Allies was responded to by Hitler bombing Belgrade and occupying the country in just over a week. The invasion was used by the leader of the Ustashas, ​​Ante Pavelic, to establish the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist dictatorship backed by the Nazis characterized by exacerbated nationalism, racial supremacism (they considered themselves of Gothic origin, not Slavic) and a radical Catholicism, more political and propagandistic than devout.
Pavelic launched a ruthless persecution against the country’s minorities: Gypsies, Jews and Orthodox Serbs. The latter, whose presence in the border regions, the Krajina, was the majority (in total, they accounted for 15% of the population of Croatia), were the main objective of the Ustashas. Serbs were forced to convert to Catholicism or go into exile, their property being confiscated. Those who resisted were killed.
For this purpose, the Jasenovac extermination camp was created, where between 80,000 and 100,000 people were executed. The methods used were terrible. With the intention of saving ammunition, the prisoners were killed with a hammer to the head or burned alive at the stake, or their throats were cut with saws or the so-called “serbic cutter”, a leather glove equipped with a sharp blade that allowed the executioners slit their victims more easily.
How did Stepinac receive the Ustacha regime? At first, judging by the homilies he delivered, it seems that he gave her his full support. As an anti-communist and nationalist, the Archbishop saw in Pavelic a strong defender of Catholicism and Croatian identity in the face of the Bolshevik threat and the pan-Serbian and anti-Catholic policies of the central government.
On the other hand, the official Catholic daily Nedelja left no doubts about the position of the Croatian Church: “God […] has given us Ante Pavelic and has moved the leader of a friendly people, Adolf Hitler, to use his troops and disperse our oppressors and allow us to create an Independent State. Glory to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler and infinite loyalty to our leader, Ante Pavelic.”
However, Stepinac’s later endorsement is more difficult to elucidate. Although the collaborationism of a part of the Croatian clergy is not in doubt, including its involvement in genocidal policies, that of the archbishop is not so clear. On the one hand, there is numerous evidence of the prelate’s meetings with Pavelic and other Ustasha leaders, to whom he was always loyal, at least publicly; but also of his protests against the violent persecution of the country’s minorities.
Stepinac’s defenders justify these contacts as inevitable, given his status as primate. Detractors wonder why these protests against the harassment of Serbs were never made public (it did in the case of Gypsies and Jews).
Less in doubt is Stepinac’s position on the persecution of the Jews. His most energetic complaints against the Government were for this cause. The prelate was actively involved in protecting him and helped them flee. The Chief Rabbi of Zagreb Miroslav Freiberger spoke of “the deep gratitude for the sympathetic attitude of the representatives of the Holy See and the leaders of the Church towards my unfortunate brothers.”
However, other voices within Judaism question the extent of that activism, considering that his collaboration with a genocidal anti-Semitic regime dwarfs his work as a “savior” of Jews. That is why recommendations to include Stepinac on the Righteous Among the Nations list have always been rejected.
After the fall of the Independent State of Croatia in 1945, Stepinac was arrested. The partisan leader Tito met with the archbishop and offered to create a Catholic Church independent of Rome under the aegis of the new Yugoslav socialist state. Faced with the refusal of the prelate, he was brought to trial accused of having supported the Ustasha, of being an accomplice in forcing Orthodox Serbs to convert by “putting a knife to their necks” and of conspiring to overthrow the Yugoslav government.
On October 1, 1946, Stepinac was found guilty and sentenced to 16 years of hard labor. As a result of the tensions of the Cold War, the trial acquired great international relevance. From the West and the Holy See, the Tito regime was accused of having organized a show trial in the Stalinist manner and of persecuting religious freedom. Pius XII excommunicated the officials who participated in the process and made Stepinac a cardinal. The Yugoslav government, in response, broke relations with the Vatican.
Stepinac died on May 10, 1960 in his native parish of Krasic, while he was under house arrest after his prison sentence was commuted (in 2016 the Zagreb provincial court would annul his sentence). Considered a martyr by the Church, in 1981 John Paul II began his beatification process, a process that culminated in 1998 with the pope’s pilgrimage to the Marija Bistrica sanctuary.
This decision contributed to fuel the rivalry between Croats and Serbs, already festering after the Balkan wars. The first saw it as an act of justice. In fact, the figure of Stepinac had been used by Croatian nationalism to legitimize the country’s independence process and underline the importance of Catholicism in its configuration. The latter considered it a senseless provocation and raised public protests.
Those protests were heard almost twenty years later. In 2016, Pope Francis decided to stop the cardinal’s canonization process as a goodwill gesture in his policy of rapprochement with the Orthodox Church. The investigation that was opened to elucidate Stepinac’s actions during the war did not offer satisfactory results, so his canonization remains on hold pending the collection of new data.
