Aloysius Stepinac
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Blessed Alojzije (Aloysius) Viktor Cardinal Stepinac (May 8, 1898 – February 10, 1960) was a notable Croatian Catholic Prelate.
Stepinac was born in the village of Brezarić, in the parish of Krašić, which lies on the border of the Zumberak and Pokuplija regions south west of the capital of Zagreb. He was the fifth of eight children in his peasant family. In 1909 he moved to Zagreb to study in the classical gymnasium, and graduated in 1916. Just before his eighteenth birthday he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army, trained and sent to serve on the Italian Front during World War I. In 1918 he was wounded in his leg, and captured by the Italians who held him for five months. After the formation of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, he was no longer treated as an enemy soldier, and he instead volunteered into the Yugoslav legion that went to Salonica. A few months later, he was demobilised and returned home in the spring of 1919.
For service in the Allied army during WWI, he was awarded the "Star of Karađorđe", an award for heroism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. After the war he enrolled at the faculty of agronomy of the University of Zagreb, but left it after just one semester and returned home to help his father. In 1924, he travelled to Rome to begin studying to become a priest, and was consecrated as a priest on October 26, 1930. In 1931 he became a parish curate in Zagreb.
He was appointed coadjutor to the see of Zagreb in 1934, after several other candidates by Pope Pius XI were rejected for political reasons. In 1937 Stepinac succeeded Anton Bauer as the archbishop of Zagreb, becoming one of the youngest archbishops in the Church's history, even though he was younger than the prescribed canonical age of 40.
Stepinac was the archbishop of Zagreb during WWII in the Axis-controlled Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945). During the earliest days of the installation of the Ustasha regime, Stepinac, like other influential Croatian leaders (notably Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party), supported the demise of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in favor of a new Croatian state. Stepinac publicly called on the Church to pray for the well being of the new state and for the Lord to fill the leader, Ante Pavelić, with a spirit of wisdom for the benefit of the nation and so forth. He would soon meet with Pavelić and other Ustaša officials, with some of them on several occasions. His reports to the Vatican about the Independent State of Croatia were also favourable.
On the other hand, Stepinac soon started calling on the government officials to ease the persecution of Jews and others. He continued communicating cordially with the Ustaša leadership even after it was known that they were responsible for the concentration camps in Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška. His letters did, however, include calls to discern people who were allegedly individually responsible for wrongdoings from those who were racially profiled or just held as "hostages"; and requests to make various exceptions for people in mixed marriages and people who converted to Catholicism.
He also used the pulpit to publicly condemn ethnic genocide against persecuted minorities. In one speech, he actually went so far to state that people of all Abrahamic religions, mentioning Romanies and "the despised Jews" by name, had the right to a decent life and the right to pray to God, and that this was a God-given right that no human government could interfere with. He was also involved directly and indirectly in numerous efforts to save hundreds of Jews, before and during the war. Reportedly the Ustaša government at this point agitated at the Holy See for him to be removed from the position of archbishop of Zagreb.
One of the main faults of the Catholic Church in Croatia at the time seems to have been their lenience towards the fact that the mass religious conversions carried out by the clergy aligned with the Ustaše were merely a part of the persecution scheme aimed at the undesirable minorities — primarily the Serb Orthodox faithful. Stepinac did not seem to make any public attempts to criticize the government for persecuting the Serbs per se, but he was later quoted as giving out a secret message to the priests that "when this time of madness and savagery passes, those who converted out of their beliefs will remain in our Church, and the rest will, when the danger is gone, return to their own".
After the war, the new Communist authorities indicted him for collaboration with the Ustaša regime. One of the documents introduced as incriminatory evidence at the trial was a letter that Stepinac was alleged to have written to the Pope in 1943, in which he expressed support for the mass conversion efforts of the Independent State of Croatia and for the state itself. Stepinac denied ever having written or signed it, while the prosecutor claimed that a copy with Stepinac's signature on it existed. The letter was accepted as evidence.
After the mock trial, he was found guilty of treason on October 11, 1946 and given an extended prison sentence. However, because his trial was politically motivated and set up, he only served five (of the initial sixteen) years in prison before the sentence was commuted to home arrest in Krašić.
This trial was part of a wider affair of involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustaša regime. Stepinac became a symbol in the fight for religious freedom against a repressive government during the Communist Yugoslavia.
He was made cardinal on January 12, 1953 by Pope Pius XII during his imprisonment (with a note that he was "impeded"), a move which infuriated Tito's government in Yugoslavia. Stepinac was also prevented from travelling to the conclave of 1958.
In 1953, Stepinac was diagnosed with polycythemia. Seven years later, he died of thrombosis at the age of 62.
On February 14, 1992, the Croatian Parliament symbolically overturned the 1946 court decision and condemned the process that led to it.
Cardinal Stepinac was recommended on two occasions by two individual Jews from Croatia to be added to the list of Righteous Among the Nations, but the requests were denied. The proposers were not Holocaust survivors themselves, which is a requirement for inclusion in the list, and also simultaneous collaboration or a close link with the fascist regime would preclude listing, according to a statement made by the Yad Vashem spokesperson.
Stepinac was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 3, 1998. The Simon Wiesenthal Center asked for the beatification to be postponed pending further investigation into his affairs related to the Second World War.
