YUGOSLAVIA HAD BEEN held together by Marshal Tito from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980. Less than ten years later it was heading in the opposite direction to Germany. Now unified for the first time since the end of that same war, Germany was about to play a key role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, aided and abetted by Pope John Paul II and his Secretariat of State. Tito, a Croatian Communist, had presided over a federation of republics with disparate religions and cultures with consummate skill. He rotated the presidency so that a Croatian followed a Serb or a Slovenian or a member of one of the other federal units in what was a one-party state. No discussion of the solely artificial boundaries that had been created was permitted and Tito observed that the frontiers between the various republics were only ‘administrative’.
After Tito’s death the collective presidency, despite the emergence of nationalistic aspirations, held together until the federal elections in 1990. In May of that year Dr Franjo Tudjman was elected President of Croatia and in neighbouring Slovenia a new government also emerged headed by President Kucan. Even before the elections in their respective countries there was an open telephone between the two republics enabling them to coordinate plans to bring about the break-up of the Yugoslavian Federation. They were greatly assisted in this by the Croatian, Stjepan Mesic, who took over the revolving national presidency in May 1990.
‘When prevailed upon by European and other international mediators, I accepted the presidency to use this top position as a way to get in touch with the most influential leaders, utilising Yugoslav diplomatic channels to convince them of the pointlessness of Yugoslavia’s survival.’
At the time the overwhelming majority of the EU member states believed that Yugoslavia had a future as a single entity. The sole exception was West Germany, just months away from its own historic unification with East Germany. Chancellor Kohl’s government was very receptive to the persuasive Mesic. No matter that as President of the Federation it was his duty to preserve it, to Mesic this was a lost cause:
‘At that time not one single institution of the Federation functioned because everything was blocked, so the Presidency was blocked and the federal assembly was blocked and could not function and the same was true of the supreme and constitutional court. So practically Yugoslavia ceased to exist and simply melted away.’
In conversation with me, Stjepan Mesic called Yugoslavia a ‘dead corpse’. If so, it was a body not unlike Caesar’s with many an assassin’s handiwork upon it. There are the usual suspects: Milosevic of Serbia, Tudjman of Croatia, Izetbe-govic of Bosnia-Herzegovina to name but three. Others are rarely if ever mentioned: former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Pope John Paul II are three of a considerable number who should be added to the list for their respective roles in consigning Yugoslavia to a premature grave. The French General Pierre Gallois observed:
‘Since 1991 and probably before, Germany was providing arms for Croatia through Italy, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; so, more than a thousand vehicles carried light weapons but also anti-aircraft and antitank weaponry, ammunitions and replacement equipment.’
The Former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman wrote:
‘We discovered later that Genscher, the German foreign minister, was in daily contact with the Croatian foreign minister. He was encouraging Croatia to leave the Federation and to declare independence.’
Other intelligence sources in the West have asserted that the arms from Germany were flowing into Croatia as early as 1989. Slovenia and Croatia simultaneously declared their independence on 25 June 1991. They were assured of the support of both Germany and the Vatican. Speaking in the Hungarian city of Pecs in August 1991, the Pope urged the world to ‘help to legitimise the aspirations of Croatia’. The Pope chose to ignore the fact that the Vatican had been one of the principal supporters of the unilateral acts of secession, acts that were illegal under Yugoslav and international law. Archbishop Jean Louis Tauran, a senior member of the Secretariat of State, was particularly active on behalf of Croatia and Slovenia during the latter half of 1991 when, using Vatican diplomatic channels, he worked hard to drum up support for the two countries.
On 26 June, less than twenty-four hours after the joint declaration, the Yugoslav army moved to secure airports and frontier posts between Slovenia and Serbia and met fierce resistance. Fighting also occurred between Yugoslavian troops and Croatian forces. Dubrovnik was under siege from early June. Vukovar was reduced to rubble between August and November. Tudjman had already activated a policy of ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating many hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Muslims and Jews from Croatia and Bosnia as early as June 1991. The European Community rapidly dispatched a peace mission in an attempt to mediate an end to the fighting. On 7 July under the auspices of the EC, the Brioni Declaration maintaining Yugoslavia as a single entity was adopted. Under the agreement both Croatia and Slovenia agreed to suspend their decisions to declare sovereignty and independence for three months. Two months later on 7 September 1991 the EC Peace Conference on Yugoslavia opened at The Hague. While some genuinely strained to find a peaceful solution others were busy stoking the flames.
With one exception, the European Community of twelve still believed that the way forward for Yugoslavia was as a unified country. Their view was shared by many beyond Europe, including the United States. The major obstacles at this stage were not Slovenia and Croatia but the German Government and the Vatican, who were determined that their joint position would prevail. One factor for Chancellor Kohl and his government were the half million Croats resident in Germany that ensured that anti-Serbian sentiment was a constant. After the joint declaration of independence the demand that their adopted country recognise their motherland was expressed with increasing urgency.
These were heady times. The Berlin Wall was down, Germany was unified and apparently united and Kohl had long entertained fantasies of being acclaimed as a latter-day Bismarck.
For Kohl, assisting Croatia and Slovenia to a full and lasting independence would be another jewel in his crown and an extra half a million voters at the next election would pile triumph on triumph. Helping Kohl and Genscher every step of the way was the Catholic Church.
In October the Bishop of Limburg, Monsignor Kamphaus, was dispatched to Croatia by the President of the German Episcopal Conference. Upon his return he criticised the EC commitment to a unified Yugoslavia and demanded the ‘rapid’ recognition of Croatia. He declared that if the twelve countries of the EC maintained their position then Germany should make a unilateral declaration of recognition. Another German bishop, Monsignor Stimphle, organised street demonstrations demanding ‘military aid for Croatia, bastion of the liberal democratic order’. Presumably no one had told the Monsignor that shipments of arms from Austria and Germany were already being sent to both Croatia and Bosnia. Later evidence would emerge of Vatican bearer bonds worth $40 million being provided by the Holy See to the Croatian government for the purchase of weapons.
In November 1991 foreign minister Genscher speaking in the Bundestag declared that Germany demanded from its EU partners the immediate recognition of Slovenia and Croatia and sanctions against the Serbs, ‘otherwise, the Community will face a serious crisis’. To people of a certain age with long memories and to students of Second World War history, his words and his overwhelming desire to be Croatia’s ‘protector’ stirred deep unease. Hans-Dietrich Genscher like any good foreign minister was a man who was singularly adept playing both ends against the middle. In Cabinet he appeared to be the one voice of sanity who for a long time had resisted the clamour to assist in the breakup of Yugoslavia. In his secret meetings with Tudjman of Croatia and Kucan of Slovenia well before the joint declarations of independence he assured them that Germany would give full recognition before the end of 1991.
During another series of secret meetings with Stjepan Mesic, who had been smuggled into Bonn, Genscher told his Croatian guest that he was fully committed not only to full independence for the two countries but the subsequent inevitable break-up of the other parts of Yugoslavia. Dr Bozo Dimnik who had arranged the meeting recalled, ‘Genscher said, “I will help you but as Foreign Minister of Germany and because of the things that happened during the Second World War, I cannot openly support your cause.” ’ He was referring to the historic relationship between Croatia and Nazi Germany. He suggested that Mesic should talk to both Italian Prime Minister Andreotti and the Pope: ‘Genscher wanted to hide behind the Pope’s robes.’
Within a month the doors both to Prime Minister Andreotti and the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano had been opened. In the late summer of 2004 Stjepan Mesic, now President of Croatia, talking of that Vatican meeting on 6 December 1991 told me: ‘Sodano told me that the Pope had been fully informed of the various Croatian demands and that he fully supported them. He also told me that the Holy Father agreed to maintain Croatian independence.’
In late 1991 EC heads of state, foreign ministers and senior politicians were gathered at Maastricht. Their collective struggle to agree a treaty that would signpost the way forward for the future development of the community was hampered at the eleventh hour by a deadlock occurring during an increasingly acrimonious debate about European security. The German delegation had introduced the Yugoslavia issue. Specifically they demanded that Croatia and Slovenia be given diplomatic recognition of their independence by the European Twelve. In the run-up to the conference, there had been a clear eleven to one majority opposed to the proposition. The general view was that the way forward was for Yugoslavia to stay unified as a federation. Vatican shuttle diplomacy between July and late autumn had reduced the majority to eight to four. At 10.00 p.m. German Foreign Minister Genscher announced that he would not leave the table until all twelve EC members voted unanimously in favour of the resolution. Genscher was apparently prepared to torpedo the entire Maastricht Treaty unless the other eleven submitted to the German point of view. By four in the morning Genscher, Kohl and the Pope and his Secretariat of State had prevailed.
That extraordinary turnaround came despite the profound misgivings of the French President François Mitterand, the British Prime Minister John Major and his Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and a host of other senior players both at the table and further afield, including the United Nations Secretary General, the US President George Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker who had predicted in June that
‘If there are unilateral declarations of independence followed by use of force that forecloses possibilities for peaceful break and peaceful negotiations, as required by the Helsinki Accord, it will kick off the damndest civil war that this region has ever seen.’
The joint declarations and the use of force to seize the border posts by Slovenia and Croatia had been the trigger that Baker had feared. The violence that ensued between June and December 1991 should have been cause enough for urgent peace negotiations. The failure of negotiations during that period to secure peace should have ensured that nothing further was done to inflame the situation – such as acknowledging and recognising two illegal acts of independence. Germany and the Vatican had a different agenda. Chancellor Helmut Kohl described the vote as ‘a great victory for German foreign policy’.
To salve the consciences of those countries at the table who had handed the Germans their ‘great victory’ a fig leaf had been created. The European Community would recognise the two republics as of 15 January but only if Slovenia and Croatia pledged to respect human and minority rights, demonstrated a willingness to settle border questions and other disputes peacefully and guaranteed a democratic government. The Germans promptly undermined that caveat by declaring that they intended to recognise the two countries immediately. They were not prepared to wait while the rest of the membership determined whether or not the conditions had been met.
The fact that the most fervent advocates of the recognition were Germany, Italy, Austria and the Vatican did nothing to allay widespread apprehension. Yet again it seemed the Croatia card was in play in the European theatre of war. In demanding a pledge of respect for human and minority rights, the majority of the European Community demonstrated its well-founded fears concerning the fate of any non-Catholics in Croatia. By the end of 1991 the evidence of the previous six months furnished ample proof that Croatian history was repeating itself.
Fifty years earlier, on 10 April 1941 the German 14th Panzer division had entered the Croatian capital of Zagreb to a flower-strewn enthusiastic welcome from the Croatians. Within hours, a German envoy announced the formation of the Independent State of Croatia, the ISC, under the ‘Poglavnik’ (Führer) Ante Pavelic, Croatian leader of the fascist Ustashi terrorist movement. Within a week, the Axis forces of Germany and Italy controlled all Yugoslavia. The highly regarded Pavelic was given not only Croatia but also Bosnia, Herzegovina, the Serb areas of Slovenia and Srem and part of Dalmatia.
On taking office Ante Pavelic stated:
‘It is the duty of the Ustashi movement to ensure that the Independent State of Croatia is ruled always and everywhere only by Croatians, so that they are the sole master of all the real and spiritual good in their own land. Within Croatia there can be no compromise between the Croatian people and others who are not pure Croats; Ustashi must extinguish all trace of such people.’
The campaign of ethnic cleansing was already operating when Pope Pius XII received in audience Pavelic and the state delegation of the ISC on 18 May 1941. Secretary of State Montini, later Pope Paul VI, and a number of other Vatican luminaries maintained throughout the war the closest of relationships with Pavelic’s regime. As for the Jews, as in every act of genocide, the numbers game has been played extensively. The exact number slaughtered by the Ustashi between 1941 and April 1945 will never be known but it is possible to arrive at minimum figures. Jasenovac, before the Second World War, was a large and prosperous town with a predominantly Serb population. On 26 December 1945 a Government Committee of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia stated in a report that was accompanied by documentary evidence that ‘By the end of 1943 at least 600,000 people were killed in this camp . . . The victims were mostly Serbs, then Jews, Gypsies and even Croats.’ To that total must be added at least 350,000 non-Catholics butchered in their homes, churches, valleys, woods and various other locations across the entire area ruled and controlled by Ante Pavelic. Another 250,000 were forcibly converted to Catholicism although many of them were then murdered, and a further 300,000 or so were driven out of Croatia into the remote mountain regions of Serbia.
In carrying out these acts, the Ustashi were from the very beginning assisted by the Roman Catholic Church both in Rome and within Croatia. Within days of Pavelic’s installation, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb strongly recommended to the papal nuncio in Belgrade that the Holy See should immediately recognise the Ustashi regime, as the legal government of the annexed country. Stepinac was already very aware of the Ustashi doctrine defined by its Minister of Education and Culture, Mile Budak.
‘The basis for the Ustashi movement is religion. For minorities such as the Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. We will kill a part of the Serbs. Others we will deport and the rest we will force to accept the Roman Catholic Religion. Thus the new Croatia will be rid of all Serbs in its midst in order to be 100 per cent Catholic within ten years.’
The Franciscan clergy were particularly rabid. Friar Dionizije was appointed head of the regime’s Religious Department.
‘In those regions yonder, I arranged for everything to be cleared away, everything from a chicken to an old man, and should that be necessary, I shall do so here too, since it is not sinful nowadays to kill even a seven-year-old child, if it is standing in the way of our Ustashi order . . . Pay no heed to my religious vestments, for you should know that when the necessity arises, I take into my hands a machinegun and exterminate everybody down to the cradle, everybody who is opposed to the Ustashi State and Government.’
Friar Dr Srecko Peric from Livno observed in one of his sermons in July 1941: ‘My Croat brethren! Go and slay all Serbs! First of all my sister who is married to a Serb. After that, come to me, and I shall take on my soul all of your sins.’
Pope Pius XII appointed Archbishop Stepinac as senior military chaplain. A Catholic priest was subsequently appointed to serve with every Ustashi military unit. There is no record that Stepinac ever attempted to restrain the priests and friars who were answerable to him. Even when a member of the Franciscan order, Friar Miroslav Filipovic, was appointed commander of the Jasenovac camp for four months, the Archbishop did nothing to stop the mass killings that ensued. Filipovic is believed to have overseen the killing of between 20,000 and 30,000 inmates. Having previously organised massacres in a number of villages, the friar was particularly adept at killing, as he noted of his time at the concentration camp: ‘I personally killed about 100 from Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska.’ A large number of the killings by the Ustashi were carried out with hammers and knives. Gouging out the eyes of victims became a regular occurrence. The evil would undoubtedly have continued until the Ustashi had run out of victims but for the defeat of the Axis powers. In late April 1945 during the closing days of the war in Europe the leaders of the Ustashi, having ensured that a substantial amount but by no means all of the evidence of their sub-human reign of terror had been destroyed, fled the country. Ante Pavelic went to Austria. With him and some of his inner circle went the entire contents of the Croatian State Bank and Treasury. During the war Pavelic had not only orchestrated genocide. He had also had all the private property of his victims seized, including their homes and businesses, bank deposits, share certificates – everything and anything of value. A great deal of loot also accompanied Croatia’s Führer as he slipped under cover of darkness into the British-controlled sector of Austria. Pavelic had also sent twelve cases of gold and jewels to Austria prior to his own escape, which were hidden near Salzburg. Other assets, including 1,338 kilos of gold and twenty-five tons of silver coins, were shipped out of Croatia in 1944 to the Swiss National Bank. Both British and US intelligence were fully aware of these movements of looted assets. For good measure Pavelic had also seized the entire assets of the Croatian State Mint and all tangible assets of the Croatian Army. Pavelic lived in Austria until the spring of 1946. This man who was wanted as a war criminal on a whole range of charges, who had been sentenced to death in absentia for his involvement in the 1934 assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, enjoyed the protection of the British Eighth Army in Austria. US Army Intelligence reports of the period refer to an ongoing investigation. When Pavelic moved to Italy in the spring of 1946 the plunder accompanied him in a military truck convoy supervised by ‘British officers, or by Croatians wearing British Army uniforms’.
Pavelic was returning to the country where Mussolini had been his patron and protector both before and during the war. His other great champion had been the Holy See, who in 1946 yet again accorded the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ every hospitality. Along with the most senior members of his Ustashi regime Pavelic enjoyed the protection of the Vatican until July 1947. That protection reached up at the very least to the higher reaches of the Secretariat of State and to Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, who sixteen years later would be elected Pope and become Paul VI.
During the immediate postwar years the Vatican provided safe houses for thousands of Ustashi war criminals. The centre for the organising and financing of this activity was the Pontifical Croatian College of St Jerome (S. Girolamo) on Via Tomacelli in the centre of Rome, and the key figure was Monsignor Krunislav Draganovic, a Vatican official who functioned as the Apostolic Visitator for Pontifical Assistance for Croatians. In this role Draganovic answered directly to the Secretary of State, Montini. Draganovic was a man of many parts. US Intelligence reports describe him as
‘The ideological leader of the Ustashi movement in Italy, priest and professor of theology, who should represent at the Vatican the interest of Croatian emigration . . . but has put himself to represent only the Ustashi and their interests.’
In mid-1947 the versatile Draganovic, ably assisted by Bishop Alois Hudal, produced his greatest contribution to ensure the fascist Ustashi would live to help create a bloody sequel to their four-year reign of terror in the Balkans. He negotiated a secret contract with the US Army for the delivery of war criminals by the Counter-intelligence Corps to Draganovic for their export to South America. Captain Paul Lyon of the 430th CIC based at headquarters in Salzburg negotiated the deal, which called for a set fee, plus expenses to be paid for each war criminal. The notorious ‘ratline’ had been born. Down it would go some of Europe’s greatest mass murderers and a great deal of Nazi gold, including a substantial part of the looted assets of Croatia – all courtesy of a Vatican official. Among those smuggled out of Europe with the full knowledge not only of Pope Pius XII and his Secretary of State Cardinal Montini, but also British and US high command, were Klaus Barbie, Ante Pavelic, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Müller and Franz Stangl. The total number of war criminals who escaped to new lives through the Vatican’s ratline was in excess of 30,000.
In September 1946 Archbishop Stepinac was arrested by Tito’s Communist regime that now controlled Yugoslavia and was accused of ‘collaboration with the enemy and of conspiracy against the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia’. He was put on trial along with fifteen others similarly charged and on 11 October having been found guilty he was sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment with forced labour. From 1946 to 1951 he was confined in a former Pauline monastery in Lepoglava. His ill health in 1951 resulted in his transfer to a parish residence in Krasic where he was held under house arrest. Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal in January 1953. He remained at Krasic until his death in February 1960.
At the time of his trial his attempts to defend his actions were at best half-hearted. In part it echoed Eichmann’s ‘I was only obeying orders.’ He said,
‘You accuse me as an enemy of the State and the people’s authority. I acknowledge your authority. What was my authority? I repeat again you have been my authority since May 8th, 1945 but not before that. Where is it possible in the world to obey two authorities: you in the woods; they (the Ustashi) in Zagreb?’
One might expect an archbishop to have regarded as his ultimate authority neither the partisans in the woods or the fascists in Zagreb but the pope. The evidence that Stepinac actively and freely collaborated with the Ustashi was overwhelming.
When the trial of Stepinac finished in October 1946 the Vatican announced that the court officials who were Croatians and Roman Catholics were all excommunicated as were ‘all persons who had taken part in or were responsible for the prosecution of the Archbishop, on the grounds that no member of Catholic clergy could be prosecuted without the consent of the Holy See’.
At the time of that mass excommunication Ante Pavelic and a large number of the men who along with him bore direct responsibility for the deaths of between 600,000 and 1 million people were living under the protection of Pope Pius XII in the Vatican and surrounding church property in Rome. The slaughter in wartime Croatia and indeed throughout Yugoslavia should have made both Germany and the Vatican during 1989 and later move with the greatest caution when confronted with Croatian and Slovenian politicians seeking support for the declarations of independence.
In 1991, echoing Pavelic, the new President Tudjman of Croatia introduced a ‘new’ constitution that defined Croatia as a national state of Croatian people ‘and others’, immediately relegating the Serbs, Muslims, Slovenes, Czechs, Italians, Jews and Hungarians and other Croatian-born nationals to a second-class status. On the orders of President Tudjman all the remaining buildings and structures of the Jasenovac concentration camp with many of the artefacts and records inside were destroyed ‘to make way’, Tudjman explained, ‘for a rare bird sanctuary’. On 20 January 1991, a mere week after Croatia and Slovenia had been recognised by Germany, the Vatican and then the other members of the EC as independent states, Tudjman addressing a huge rally declared,
‘We are in a war against the JNA (the Yugoslav Army). Should anything happen, kill them all in the streets, in their homes, throw hand grenades, fire pistols in their bellies, women, children . . . We will deal with Knin (a Croatian Serbian area) by butchering.’
In the event, butchering was perpetrated on all sides and by all sections of the country that had been Yugoslavia. Between 1992 and 1995 more than 200,000 were killed and more than two million made homeless.
In death the late Cardinal Stepinac has remained as controversial as he was in life. Claims and counterclaims have been made about the man, some hailing him as a modern saint and others insisting that he was evil personified. In October 1998 Pope John Paul II entered the fray. Declaring that Stepinac was ‘one of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church’, he proclaimed the beatification of Alojzije Stepinac. During the previous month, deeply alarmed at this prospect, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre wrote to Vatican spokesman Navarro-Valls asking that the Pope ‘postpone this beatification until after the completion of an exhaustive study of Stepinac’s wartime record based on full access to Vatican archives’.
The Centre, internationally recognised for many decades as the pre-eminent hunter of war criminals, specifically those who were complicit in the Holocaust, pointed out to the Vatican that the beatification was proceeding ‘despite public expressions of indignation’ and asked that the ceremony be postponed ‘in view of the bitter memories and current religious sensitivities in the structure of the ex-Yugoslavia, and also his Holiness’ oft-repeated hope for reconciliation with the Jews’.
The Vatican ignored the plea and the beatification of Stepinac took place in Croatia on 3 October 1998. Almost exactly one year later, the Croatian President Franjo Tudjman visited the Vatican. He had previously ‘requested’ that the then Secretary of State should personally administer Holy Communion to the Presidential party in the crypt beneath St Peter’s. That Tudjman should ‘order’ a Mass, specify who should say it and also select the location carried his self-importance to new heights. The Vatican acceded to the request from the man who in a fit of rage had grabbed Prime Minister Mesic by the throat and screamed, ‘All I want is Bosnia. Give me that and I will demand no more.’
Croatia and Slovenia, like any aspiring nation-state, had the right to seek independence, but that does not excuse either Helmut Kohl or Pope John Paul II for pursuing their conspiracy with such reckless disregard for the consequences. They and their defenders have argued, with Slovenia in the EU and Croatia on the way, that time has proved them to be visionaries. The 250,000 who died and the two million made homeless in the Balkans after January 1992 might have a different view.
In 1999 the Vatican had cause to reflect on its historic relationship with the Ustashi. A lawsuit was filed in the San Francisco Federal Court by Serb, Jewish and Ukrainian survivors of the Holocaust. They sought $18 million damages from the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order and the Croatian Liberation Movement and ‘the return of Nazi loot stolen from wartime Yugoslavia by Croatian Nazis, called the Ustashi’. The three defendants were accused of concealing up to an estimated $200 million looted from Yugoslavia during the Second World War and using it in the early postwar period ‘to fund the infamous Vatican ratline’. The Vatican has claimed immunity on the grounds that it is an independent state. As of mid-2006 the case was still pending.
The influence that Pope John Paul II and his Secretariat of State exercised in the Balkans will be felt in the region for decades. Other foreign policy initiatives were without a single medium or long-term effect. The Papal trip to Castro’s Cuba in January 1998 eloquently demonstrates Wojtyla’s impotency in the face of Communism.
One year earlier than his trip to Mexico the Pope had been visiting Castro’s Cuba. Yet again he had been accompanied by some eighty journalists whose news outlets had as usual paid many thousands of dollars for the privilege of travelling with the man described by his spin doctors as the most powerful pope in history.
This journey was no exception, as Cardinal Ricardo Carles from Barcelona proved more amenable to answering questions from international reporters than from the Naples magistrates. ‘The Papacy has never before had such moral force.’ The all-powerful Pope was about to meet the man who had defied a world superpower for nearly forty years, in its own backyard.
This meeting between John Paul II and Fidel Castro had raised great expectations within the Catholic world. It was thought that profound democratic change would follow, that human rights would flourish.
The Pope was equally optimistic when addressing 100,000 Cubans in a baseball stadium, declaring, ‘No ideology can replace Christ’s infinite wisdom and power.’ He urged the audience to reclaim their role as ‘primary educators’ of their young. Catholic schools had been shut after the 1959 revolution, leaving no alternative to an education steeped in Communist doctrine.
Nearly two years after the visit, in late 1999, a detailed and extensive assessment paper was compiled by Douglas Payne, an expert and independent consultant on human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. The report was one of a series compiled to assist United States Asylum and Immigration Officers.
The report acknowledged that the visit had indeed opened a window, albeit a small one, but observed that Castro ‘did not heed the Pope’s call for democratic change’ and that since the visit Castro had disregarded similar pleas from Canada, the European Union and the Organisation of American States. He was still running a one-party Communist state under ‘totalitarian control’. Critics within the country had continued to be subjected to
‘harassment, surveillance and intimidation. Cuba used short-term, arbitrary detentions together with official warnings of future prosecution to urge activists to leave Cuba . . . As 1998 drew to a close, Cuba stepped up prosecutions and harassments . . . refused to grant amnesty to hundreds of political prisoners or reform its criminal code, it marked a disheartening return to heavy-handed repression.’
The Pope had appealed for the release of some 270 prisoners on a list submitted by the Vatican. Some weeks after the papal visit, Castro released several dozen prisoners, a large number by Castro’s standards, but as the Payne report observes, it was part of ‘a historical pattern as a way to gain favour with visiting foreign dignitaries’.
Pope John Paul II had had much higher expectations. Just three days after returning from Cuba, during his regular Wednesday audience in the Vatican he drew a parallel between Cuba and Poland ‘where he visited in 1979 and helped stimulate that country’s eventual democratic transition’. The US report then quoted the Pope as saying, ‘I expressed my hope to my brothers and sisters on that beautiful island that the fruits of this pilgrimage will be similar to the fruits of that pilgrimage.’
As has already been recorded, the Pope was rewriting reality in Poland: he had been little more than a benevolent onlooker of the efforts of Wyszynski, Walesa, and the men and women of Solidarity and KOR. The fruits of the Pope’s Cuban pilgrimage were some temporary relaxations and the eventual release of some 200 prisoners, of whom some eighty had been on the Vatican list.
Before the end of the year a comparable number had been rearrested and imprisoned to join the estimated 100,000 prisoners held in a series of gulags that stretched right over the country. Five years after the Pope’s visit, Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino of Havana declared that prospects for religious freedom ‘are foundering in Cuba . . . in place of hope, despair is settling in’. The hopes of the faithful that had been raised by Wojtyla’s visit had been shattered. The cardinal confirmed that shortly after the visit ‘the government inaugurated a powerful ideological campaign, completed with the sort of propaganda that marked the 1960s.’ The papal visit had resulted not in an improvement but deterioration.
In early 2003 Cardinal Ortega observed, ‘Relations with the Cuban government remain essentially the same. There is no substantial change . . . the social-political space is always very limited and it appears often that the Church is ignored.’ Commenting on the fact that the Church was still banned from operating schools and also denied access to the media, the cardinal continued: ‘The government does not recognise the Church as a public entity that should have access to the communications media. There is a silence in terms of information about the Church.’
Within the Vatican at much the same time the Secretariat of State’s office gave its blessing to a series of articles that subsequently appeared in the Pope’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. The occasion was the inauguration of a convent given by Fidel Castro to the Brigittine order. The seven-page spread appeared over four days. It sang the praises of Castro and told of his warm friendship with the Brigittines’ Abbess Sister Tekla and the man from the Secretariat, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe.
Notably absent from the festivities was the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino. He appears to have been the only senior member of the Vatican who was aware that Castro was about to have eighty-three opponents of his regime arrested, the overwhelming majority being Roman Catholics.
Four days after the photo calls had finished, the arrests duly took place and in April 2003, after what passes for a trial in Cuba had taken place, eighty of the dissidents were sentenced in total to more than 1,500 years in prison. The other three were executed. This particular piece of repression caused Cardinal Ortega to make his public comment on the absence of religious freedom and the growth of despair. The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano (considered by many Vatican insiders to be by far the most inept holder in history of the position that is second only to the Pope) moved quickly – not to condemn Castro but to placate him. On 31 April 2003 he stated that neither he nor the Pope ‘have at all repented from placing trust in Castro’ and that they continued to hope that ‘he leads his people towards new democratic goals’.
The Cuban reality in the aftermath of the Pope’s visit is not unique. The killings, the repressions, the intimidations, the suppression of basic human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of 1948 continued or even erupted in many places after the papal flight had returned to Rome. Whether in Marcos’s Philippines or the Middle East or Pinochet’s Chile, the Pope’s recurring pleas for peace and respect for humanity were constantly ignored, in country after country.
In September 1990 the Pope flew to the Ivory Coast and, in an act that provoked deep unease within Roman Catholic communities in many countries, consecrated the basilica church Our Lady of Peace in the capital city of Yamoussoukro. No expense had been spared in this impoverished African country. At 525 feet it is the world’s tallest church. The cost of the building was between $150 million and $180 million. The Pope described the building as a ‘visible sign’ of God’s presence on earth. On the tenth anniversary of the consecration, the President of the Ivory Coast was in Rome and about to have an audience with the Pope when he was forced to cancel and hurry home to a civil war that a multi-million-dollar church and papal injunctions had failed to prevent.
The Pope’s condemnations of the blood bath in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and his fifteen public appeals for peace were all ignored. The previous year, Rwanda, a country 90 per cent Christian and two thirds Roman Catholic, ignored the Pope’s entreaties as it collapsed into genocide and over 800,000 people were murdered. Bishops, priests and even nuns were among the perpetrators of atrocities, and the Rwandan Catholic Church was deeply compromised by its links to the ruling Hutu government. Within a year of the slaughter the Pope, speaking on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, denied any responsibility.
Three days after the Rwanda killings commenced, the Pope publicly pleaded for the slaughter to stop. Many, if not the majority, of those responsible were Roman Catholic. They along with the Rwandan clergy and religious ignored the Pope. The murders continued for one hundred days. Four hundred thousand of the victims were children; a further 95,000 children were left orphaned. Two years later in a response to the allegations that many members of the Catholic clergy were among the killers, the Pope declared, ‘All members of the Church who sinned during the genocide must have the courage to face the consequences of the acts which they have committed against God and their neighbour.’ The response was not overwhelming. The Church made no effort to ensure otherwise. Instead, in February 1997 through the papal nuncio in Rwanda, it was made clear that the accused would continue to enjoy the support of the Church.
Among the number enjoying the protection of his superiors was Father Athanase Seromba. He was discovered in 1999 working under a false name in a parish in Florence. He is accused of paying to have over 2,000 people crushed to death with caterpillar tractors and of having personally supervised the massacre. In 2002, faced with extradition hearings and international publicity, Father Seromba ‘volunteered’ to return to Rwanda. As well as using a false name Seromba had also travelled to Italy on a false passport. His trial began in September 2004. He was subsequently found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
In the savage conflicts of the late twentieth century, it would be absurd to expect the entreaties of one man, even the spiritual leader of a ‘billion’ people, to quell man’s inhumanity to man. Stalin had a point in his cynical question: how many divisions has the Pope? It is equally absurd for Vatican propagandists to insist that the Pope’s words have prevailed against tyranny and war.
The myth of the Pope as peacemaker reached new heights during 2003 when a Vatican-orchestrated pressure group lobbied strenuously for him to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Vatican officials let it be known that the Pope would accept the award and would travel to Oslo for the award ceremony. The Nobel committee thought otherwise. Having carefully investigated his claims, they passed him over and awarded the prize to a woman, which merely served to add to the chagrin inside the Vatican.
The woman, the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, has been imprisoned by the theocratic authorities and threatened by the hardline ideologues. Iran’s first woman judge, she was told by the conservative clerics after the 1979 revolution that women could not sit as judges. Displaying that same level of extraordinary courage as Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma she has stood as a rallying point for all who seek to improve human rights in the Muslim world. The Pope’s supporters considered he should have been given the award among other reasons ‘because he spoke out against the 2003 war in Iraq’. Others talked of his ‘ceaseless journey spreading the word of God’.
Papal politics was a constant, indeed incessant feature of Karol Wojtyla’s reign. As with many other issues, his attack on abortion was never confined to the pulpit or the pastoral letter but was expressed repeatedly and openly in the political arena. When French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was granted a papal audience in 1981 the Pope berated him for ‘allowing abortion’ in a largely Catholic country.
The Pope believed that the Catholic Church’s view on abortion should indeed be imposed upon every person in every country. He may have understood how democracy works, but he had very little sympathy for the concept as he observed more than once during his papacy. In September 1987 while visiting the United States he ignored a request from American bishops to affirm his belief in freedom of speech, choosing instead to observe: ‘The Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy. Dissent from the Magisterium is incompatible with being a Catholic.’
In 2004 many American bishops tried hard to make the Catholic laity obey this precept. In January of that year Bishop Raymond Burke, a rising star in the US hierarchy, excited the media’s attention when he stated in his diocese of Lacrosse, Wisconsin, that any Catholic politician that he considered to have shown ‘support’ for abortion or the legalisation of euthanasia would not be granted Holy Communion within his diocese. The pronouncement, deliberately timed to coincide with the early Democratic primaries, was seen as a direct attack on Senator John Kerry, one of the contenders for the Democratic nomination. Promoted to the archdiocese of St Louis, Burke upped the ante by declaring that John Kerry, now the Democratic presidential candidate, would be refused communion and that any individual Catholic voters who voted for him in the coming election should also be excluded from communion until such time as they had repented their ‘sin’ in voting for such ‘a pro-choice politician’. Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs got in on the act by warning that Catholics voting for Kerry would ‘jeopardise their salvation’.
The papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae, ‘On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life’, was frequently quoted by such bishops. The news media, both Catholic and non-Catholic, gave increasing coverage to a totalitarian undemocratic Catholic Church on a collision course with John Kerry, a devout Catholic churchgoer seeking the highest democratic office in the world. His ‘sin’ in the eyes of his critics was not to be pro-abortion, but to be pro-choice. In May 2004, some time before he was even the official Democratic candidate, a Zogby poll of nearly 1,500 Catholic voters gave clear indication of what lay ahead for Kerry. The right-wing Catholic World News agency trumpeted ‘Low Catholic support for Kerry on Church issues’. Only 23 per cent approved of Kerry’s position on stem cell research, which he supports. He was given the same approval rating on the same-sex unions issue: Kerry supported unions but opposed homosexual marriages. The attack on Kerry had now broadened to embrace a spectrum of moral issues.
The editor of Catholic World News, Phillip Lawler, onetime official of the extreme conservative Heritage Foundation, the first of the New Right think tanks, ensured that the attacks on Kerry received prominent coverage throughout the summer of 2004. Lawler had also headed the American Catholic Committee, a group of right-wing Catholics opposed to the US bishops’ position on nuclear control, had been at the heart of the campaign against the liberal Archbishop Hunthausen and was a long-time Republican who had worked on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. In 2000 he announced his intention to run against Senator Edward Kennedy. For Lawler ‘the key issue has always been abortion’ but he also wanted to see the abolition of income tax, the Department of Education and the National Endowment for Humanities and Arts. He also wished to see the power of the Supreme Court restricted and was opposed to any form of gun control. To run on that kind of platform in Massachusetts against Kennedy required not blind courage but profound stupidity. It also required funding and substantial support even to get on the ballot. In the event Lawler attracted neither. He and other similarly minded people saw John Kerry as the natural enemy.
Among that number were Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as then was, and the overwhelming majority of the Catholic hierarchy. In June after conferring with the Pope, Ratzinger wrote an official letter to the US Bishops declaring that ‘public figures who openly dissent from Church teachings should not receive Communion’. The bishops had by this time demonstrated that they were divided on the issue.
The Republican Party seized on the implications. Constant public references by Republicans reminded the electorate that President Bush was opposed to abortion, same-sex marriages and stem cell research. The President, while in conversation with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Sodano, complained about the division within the ranks of the bishops: ‘Some of the American bishops are not with me on the issues of abortion and stem-cell research.’ By August the Kerry campaign was being assailed on a wide variety of fronts. Lawler’s Catholic World News gleefully reported an interview by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick with the Italian daily Avvenire that stated ‘No “ideal” US presidential candidate Cardinal McCarrick says’ for the headline. The US bishops – whatever their various views – were united on at least one thing.
A ten-page ‘Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics’ was created by Catholic Answers, a lay apostolate based in San Diego, California. They identified five issues as ‘non-negotiable’. They were abortion, euthanasia, foetal stem-cell research, human cloning and homosexual unions. Any candidate supporting any of these policies was in the opinion of the guide ‘automatically disqualified as a viable option for a faithful Catholic voter’. In August alone, a million copies were distributed and a further four million went out before election day. Full-page advertisements for the booklet in USA Today served as a counterpoint to President Bush’s constant reminders to the electorate of his own born-again Christian virtues. When someone at a Republican rally shouted at Bush, ‘I am glad to see that God is in the White House’, the President did not demur. In his third and final TV debate with John Kerry, Bush said:
‘Prayer and religion sustain me. I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency. I love the fact that people pray for me and my family all around the country. Somebody asked me one time, how do you know? I said I just feel it. Religion is an important part. I never want to impose my religion on anybody else. But when I make decisions I stand on principle. And the principles are derived from who I am . . . I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That’s what I believe. And that’s one part of my foreign policy. In Afghanistan I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty. And I can’t tell you how encouraged I am to see freedom on the march. And so my principles that I make decision on are part of me. And religion is part of me.’
By now the separation between Church and State that is enshrined by the Founding Fathers within the American Constitution had been suspended until further notice. Official Republican fliers were sent out in Arkansas and West Virginia claiming that if elected John Kerry would ban the Bible. The Democratic candidate was not a born-again Christian: he had always been one. It is not within the nature of such men, particularly Roman Catholics, to go about endlessly and loudly proclaiming their faith. This natural reticence placed Kerry at a distinct disadvantage as polling day got closer.
The ubiquitous Archbishop Burke was never far from the headlines. In early October he sent a pastoral letter to over half a million Catholics in his diocese, with copies to all media outlets. He declared that voting for a candidate who endorsed any of the five issues that the voters’ Guide had identified ‘cannot be justified’. All were ‘intrinsically evil’, although war and capital punishment were not. It was an unusual way of endorsing George W. Bush. The news media quoted significant numbers of the electorate who shared the views of John Strange of Plymouth, Pennsylvania:
‘I support the President not because I am a Republican, but because he is a Christian. I believe that a growing number are supporting Bush because of the values he has, the pro-life message and the fact that he supports traditional marriage. These values transcend party lines.’
When Phillip Lawler ran a story entitled ‘Kerry Said To Be Excommunicated’, it did not matter that it was a piece of fluff based on the response that the under-secretary of a Vatican Congregation had conveyed to an obsessive canon lawyer in Los Angeles who had previously initiated an action in an ecclesiastical court charging John Kerry with heresy. Within twenty-four hours it was front-page news throughout the United States. The witch hunt was in vogue again. Kerry had been demonised by his political opponents, by some of the American bishops and by the Vatican. If the electorate had read John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, and understood his position that the democratic process must obey Catholic teaching, John Kerry would have been defeated by a much larger margin.
There was one overriding issue that swept Bush back into the White House. It was not Iraq, terrorism, or the economy. It was ‘moral values’. At exit polls twenty-two per cent of the electorate identified that as the most important issue. Within the Vatican during the closing weeks of 2004 a quiet satisfaction at ‘a job well done’ was clearly discernible. The reactionary wing of the Catholic Church in the United States had not only succeeded in alienating John Kerry from nearly fifty per cent of the Catholic vote, traditionally a Democratic stronghold, but they had also made it much easier for the Republican party to capture many millions of evangelical Christian votes. They had helped to spread the false belief that John Kerry was pro-abortion: he was not and never has been. He is pro-choice as are the majority of Americans. A five-point swing in the Catholic vote for Bush gave him the states of Ohio and Florida and with them the White House.
In November 2005, the Hitler Syndrome – tell a lie long enough and loud enough and it becomes the truth – was again in evidence among the Catholic hierarchy in the United States. Archbishop José Gomez of San Antonio, Texas, declared that
‘most Catholic politicians in the United States have fallen into a distorted understanding of what their faith is. Seventy per cent of politicians, who claim to be Catholic in Congress and the Senate, support abortion, and that figure reaches almost ninety per cent in traditional states such as Massachusetts or New York.’
Gomez talked of Senators who, while professing to be Catholic, ‘voted 100 out of 100 times in support of abortion, euthanasia, homosexual unions and experimentation with embryonic stem cells’. The archbishop cited as an example John Kerry: ‘Kerry claimed to be Catholic, yet openly supported abortion.’ It is difficult to believe that the archbishop did not know when he uttered those words that Kerry did not, and does not, support abortion. John Kerry is on record many times on this. What he does support, like many of his Catholic colleagues in both Congress and the Senate, is the right of women to exercise their own choice. To the archbishop, the solution was simple: deny Holy Communion to the erring politicians until they recant.
The delight of the Pope and his advisors at the result of the United States presidential elections was counterbalanced by their anger at the rejection as an EU Commissioner of the Italian politician, Rocco Buttiglione, a close friend of the Pope and one of his earliest biographers. Buttiglione was in line for the job of Justice Commissioner until he expressed the opinion that homosexual acts were sinful. On another occasion he compared the relationship of the United States with Europe to that of children of a single mother, saying, ‘Children who have no father are not children of a very good mother.’ A majority within the European Parliament found such views incompatible with being a Justice Commissioner. After a political impasse of several weeks, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi prevailed upon Buttiglione to withdraw his nomination and he was replaced by a candidate who was discreet enough to keep his views on homosexuals and single mothers to himself.
The affair came on top of the European Union’s refusal to bow to the intense and at times rabid lobbying from the Vatican on the written constitution. From the Pope down, it seemed that every member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy demanded that the constitution should acknowledge in its preamble Europe’s ‘Christian’ origins. By making such a high-profile, high-powered campaign on the issue, Pope John Paul II risked a public humiliation if the campaign failed, as it duly did. Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, the Secretary for Relations with the States, saw the absence of any reference to Christianity in the European constitution as ‘more than anti-Christian prejudice . . . It’s the cultural myopia that astonishes us.’ Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna expressed the belief that ‘powerful anti-Christian forces are in evidence on the European scene today’. Buttiglione weighed in with the opinion that his own experiences showed the existence of ‘an anti-Christian inquisition’ and alleged that he had been subjected to a ‘campaign of hate that twisted and distorted my public statements’ but it was the Princes of the Roman Catholic Church that caught the ear.
Not one of them acknowledged that any failing by the body politic of the Church was to blame for such widespread alienation. What was beyond doubt was that if Christianity, albeit evangelical Christianity, was flourishing in the United States, Christianity in all of its many persuasions was on its knees throughout Europe, and not in prayer.