Alojzije Stepinac was clattered throughout his life by three violent forces: the hostility between western Catholic Croatia (and Slovenia) and Orthodox Serbia, traceable back to the Great Schism; Nazism; and Communism, under which he died, possibly poisoned after fourteen years of internment following a notorious show-trial. Harris acquits his subject of complicity in the crimes of the Croatian Ustaša, founded in 1929 by Ante Pavelić, later quisling leader of the New Independent State of Croatia (NDH) established when the Axis took control.
Harris warns that few have been more lied about than his subject, but his book is not hagiography. He sets the heroic virtues that saw Stepinac beatified in 1998 against his shortcomings and miscalculations, and the follies and treacheries of some of those around him. But he presents rebuttals of books by the American professor Michael Phayer (The Catholic Church and the holocaust, 1930–1965, Bloomington, In 2000) and by John Cornwell (Hitler's pope: the secret history of Pius XII, London 2008). Even Phayer concedes that Stepinac showed courage and insight against the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis in Croatia. But Harris seems respectful of the historian and Stepinac biographer Stella Alexander even though she found him a more problematic figure and had some sympathy for Tito and the Serb standpoint.
The background to Stepinac's priestly vocation is powerfully traced, including front-line military service for the Austro-Hungarian army in which he saw men blown to pieces in front of him, a passionless courtship when he had formally abandoned his vocation, his re-entry to priestly study and his time as a seminarian at Rome's Germanicum. He spoke good German. He was fit and an excellent climber. Ordained in 1930, he gained his theology doctorate the following year.
Hopes of simple parish life were overset when he was appointed MC to Zagreb's Archbishop Bauer. Then, to his genuine dismay, he was named coadjutor, aged only thirty-six, in 1934, with the approval, after some hesitation, of King Alexander, since 1929 personal dictator of the kingdom of Yugoslavia.
At his only meeting with the king Stepinac told him that he was determined to keep the Church out of politics, complained of the treatment of the Croats and warned that only the Church could take on Communism, ‘the great enemy’. But the king was assassinated three months later, with Pavelić involved. Croatian Catholics had at first supported the new state, naively, since most privileges were enjoyed by Serbs. Yugoslavia was 45 per cent Orthodox, 24 per cent Croat, 9 per cent Catholic Slovenes and 6 per cent Bosnian Muslims. But between 1919 and 1937 83 per cent of leading ministers were Serbs.
The pinnacles of Stepinac's resistance to Nazi and Ustaša crimes were his sermons, two notably, on the successive Feasts of Christ the King in 1942 and 1943. He denied that the Church was sympathetic to Communism. He never expressed a preference between the Ustaša and the Communists. He ordered that any Jews or Orthodox who wished to convert to Catholicism to save their lives were to be received without question, salvific interventions later travestied as forced conversions. After a defeat of the partisans, mainly Serbs, in the Bosnian Kazara mountains in 1942 he organised the rescue of over 6,000 Serb children, sheltering them around his archdiocese.
By March 1945 Tito and his partisans, backed by Britain, were in full control of Yugoslavia, the London-exiled king Peter ii sidelined. A regrettable pastoral letter that Stepinac and four other Croatian bishops issued at that time did not condemn what had been done under the NDH, only what was then being done by the Communists. With Tito's partisans about to arrive in Zagreb Stepinac had put himself in their sights. As Pavelić prepared to flee he urged Stepinac to take interim power. After reflection the archbishop refused, judging that he would have been executed at once, leaving Church and people leaderless.
In the summer of 1946 Tito told his state prosecutor to ‘get’ Stepinac. The Communist terror was chronicled by one Captain Evelyn Waugh, but his superior in Belgrade, Fitzroy Maclean, was complacently confident that Tito would behave well. The papal nuncio to Britain, Archbishop Godfrey, also reported the crimes against the Church but the Foreign Office denied them.
Stepinac complained to the government of the killing and imprisoning of priests and many other oppressions. The Communist party was waging war on the Church. He could give way or fight. He fought, with an uncompromising pastoral letter in September 1945 which led, through a dark labyrinth including a physical attack, to his arrest on 18 September 1946.
Harris wryly summarises that ‘The folly of Stepinac's associates combined with the malice of his enemies to effect his destruction.’ Two priests had been arrested for blessing a flag of the Križari, a group fighting the Communists. In January 1946 Tito accused Stepinac of full complicity with the Pavelić regime, i.e. of being a war criminal. Tito claimed to believe that the Vatican took a poor view of the archbishop and might remove him. But Bishop Hurley, the nuncio in Belgrade, who had met Stepinac, told the British that the Vatican would never yield to pressure to displace him, nor did it. Stepinac himself was resolved to stay, accepting any consequence including martyrdom.
It was unfortunate for Stepinac that at the time of his trial US sentiment was becoming more favourable to Tito because of his growing independence from the Soviets. Truman rejected demands from Congress that relations with Yugoslavia be severed. There were also protests from Catholics around the British Empire, from Westminster's Cardinal Griffin and from the Irish government but the British Foreign Office thought Griffin a nuisance and said that ‘this trial and sentence of a Yugoslav subject is entirely a domestic matter’.
Better treated than other persecuted Cardinals (Slipyj, Mindszenty, Beran), Stepinac was not drugged, tortured, humiliated, beaten or starved. His food and conditions in Lepoglava Prison and later in the priest's house in Krašić were always decent despite close surveillance. Tito, post-Stepinac and post-Pius xii, hoped for better relations with the Church, and so allowed Stepinac to be buried in Zagreb Cathedral despite Serb and Orthodox sentiment that this was a posthumous amnesty.
This reviewer endorses Harris's portrait of an honourable man.
