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The WWII Vatican's maxima culpa
Sava Bosnitch
(professor of political science, ret.)

No one, Mr.Andy Lamey included, can exculpate the Holy See for both its silence and complicity during the genocidal persecutions perpetrated during the Second World War in the Independent State of Croatia ( Hyping the Church and the Holocaust, June 4).

In 1941, the Axis-sponsored Ustasha Croat Government sentenced to death the relatively small Jewish and Gypsy (Roma) minorities trapped in Croat territory and executed as many of both as it could apprehend. However, the primary genocidal target of the Ustasha was the two million strong Serb population. Too numerous to be executed in its entirety, the Orthodox Serbs were to be eliminated by a triple policy: one third (including the educated and the well to do) were earmarked for execution, another third was to be expelled to German-occupied Serbia and the remainder was to be assimilated through forcible conversions to Roman Catholicism.

Of necessity, the ecclesiastical part of the Ustasha genocide could not be perpetrated without the full-fledged complicity and collaboration of the Croat Catholic Episcopate headed by the Archbishop of Zagreb, Dr. Aloysius Stepinac. The conversions were authorized by Cardinal Tisserant, Head of the Roman Catholic Sacred Congregation for the Oriental Church. His oblique instructions to Stepinac referred to Orthodox Serbs as apostates, purportedly former Catholics, and authorized their return to the Oriental rite. By officiating, the Archbishop was told he would earn " a well deserved recognition for a precious contribution to the orderly growth of Catholicism in the regions where there exist so many hopes for the return of the dissidents".

In 1952, in recognition of both his role in the conversions and his militant opposition to the Yugoslav Government, Pius XII made Stepinac a Cardinal. Neither Pius XII nor any subsequent incumbent of the Holy See, let alone the Catholic Episcopate of Croatia, ever apologized to the Serbs for this crime. Instead, in 1998, in a rumored prelude to canonization, Aloysius Stepinac was beatified by His Holiness John Paul II.