Aloysius Stepinac
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Blessed Aloysius/Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac (born May 8, 1898 in Krašić, Croatia - died on February 10, 1960 in Krašić) was a notable Croatian Prelate.
As a soldier with the Allied volunteers in Salonica during WWI, he was awarded the highest award for heroism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1924, he traveled 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 and the Nazi-puppet 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 also met with the leader of the Ustaše Ante Pavelić on several occasions. On the other hand, Stepinac was involved directly and indirectly in numerous efforts to save hundreds of Jews, before and during the war. He also used the pulpit to publicly condemn ethnic genocide against Jews, Serbs, Romanies and other persecuted minorities. The main fault 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.
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, where Stepinac was diagnosed with polycythemia in 1953 and died of thrombosis at the age of 62.
This trial was part of a wider affair of involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustasa regime. Stepinac became a symbol in the fight for religious freedom against a repressive government during the Communist Yugoslavia. He was created 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.
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 weren't 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 posthumously 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.
External links
- Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac (http://www.hr/darko/etf/stepinac.html)
- Patron Saints Index - Blessed Alojzije Stepinac (http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/sainta66.htm)
- Documents about Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac from the Pavelic Papers (http://www.pavelicpapers.com/documents/stepinac/)hr:Alojzije Stepinac