Pope seems happy to pander to tribalism

At the start of this week, before the convenient cancellation of tomorrow's soccer international between Ireland and Yugoslavia, we were all in the rather absurd position of expecting moral leadership from people who organise football matches. Asking the FAI to decide how civilised people should respond to the appalling atrocities at the heart of Europe is like seeking medical advice from a barman.

But where are we to look for a clear application of basic morality to the human disaster that has been unfolding in slow motion on our television screens since the collapse of Yugoslavia? To the political and military leaders of the West who seem to swing helplessly from cynical calculation to ritual violence and back again? Hardly.

To the churches, then? Not, alas, if the breathtaking crassness of the Pope's actions in Croatia last weekend are anything to go by.

Last March, the Vatican issued an official statement of repentance for the failure of some Catholics to do enough to oppose Nazism and to help its victims. The Serbs are so deservedly reviled these days that it is easily forgotten that they were numbered among those victims.

A critical aspect of the pathology of Yugoslavia is the memory of what happened to Serbs ruled by their ethnic enemies during the second World War, particularly those unfortunate enough to find themselves under the thumb of the Nazi puppet regime in "independent" Croatia. President Slobodan Milosevic's brutal exploitation of those memories makes it all the more crucial that the rest of the world shows that it feels the same way about atrocities against Serbs as it does about atrocities by Serbs.

It almost defies belief, therefore, that last Saturday, just as Mr Milosevic was trying to convince his people that the international community's concerns about human rights were merely a pretext for anti-Serbian aggression, the Pope should have beatified the former Archbishop of Zagreb, Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who died while under house arrest in 1960, making him a formal candidate for sainthood. He served five years of a 16-year prison sentence for collaboration with the fascist Ustache regime in Croatia, headed by the monstrous Anton Pavelic.

Between 1941 and 1945, Pavelic's government massacred at least 500,000 Serbs, Jews, and Romany Gypsies. A key part of the attack on the Serbs was a systematic programme of forcing them to convert from the Serb Orthodox religion to Catholicism.

This programme was enthusiastically endorsed and, indeed, put into effect by the local Catholic Church. After the war, several senior churchmen were indicted for war crimes. They included Bishop Ivan Saric of Sarajevo, Bishop Gregory Rozman of Slovenia, and the Franciscan priest, Father Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, a commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp where the Ustachas tortured and beat to death hundreds of thousands of people. Also among them was Stepinac.

Last Saturday, the Pope, wearing the red and white colours of the Croatian flag, chose this moment of crisis to tell the world that Cardinal Stepinac was "now in heaven, surrounded by all those who, like him, fought the good fight, purifying their faith in the crucible of suffering. Today, we look with trust and invoke his intercession."

Cardinal Stepinac was not as bad as some of his fellow bishops and priests. He seems to have been deeply upset by the more lurid atrocities, especially when the Ustache continued to kill Serbs who had converted to Catholicism in an attempt to save themselves. He also seems to have carried out individual acts of kindness to some Jews and Serbs.

He was, in all probability, the sort of man who, in normal times, would have behaved well, but in appalling times could not find the inner moral strength to stand up for his beliefs.

To elevate him as a potential saint and a moral exemplar for Catholics is, however, simply grotesque. He went along with the forcible conversion of Serbs, never once suggesting that it was wrong. He asked the regime to "separate Catholic non-Aryans from non-Christian non-Aryans . . . in the manner of treating them", in other words to ensure that any smidgin of available mercy would be extended to Catholics who had fallen foul of the regime and not to Jews or Orthodox Serbs.

He blessed Pavelic at the opening of the Croatian parliament. He ordered his clergy to have a Te Deum sung after all masses in honour of the birthday of "our Glorious Leader". He got the Pope to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Croatian puppet regime and helped to secure two private audiences with the Pope for Pavelic.

All of this is, in former Yugoslavia, not history but current affairs. Croatia today is not only emerging from a vicious war with the Serbs but also has a substantial and justifiably fearful Serbian Orthodox minority within its borders. Imagine what it means to Serbs to hear one of the world's major spiritual leaders praise a supporter of Pavelic for having "fought the good fight".

Imagine how useful such words and such a gesture must be to Mr Milosevic in his attempt to persuade Serbs that protests about human rights are just propaganda.

The Pope was asked by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre to postpone the beatification "until after the completion of an exhaustive study of Stepinac's wartime record". The Vatican made no public reply to this request. This is all the more distressing in the light of the Vatican's own continuing refusal to open its archives and to help determine the full extent of the church's collaboration with the Pavelic regime during the war.

There are strong suggestions in documents released by other archives that money stolen from Croatian Jews and Serbs made its way to Rome with the help of Croatian priests. Some of it was used to help virtually the entire Croatian leadership to escape to South America after the war along a "ratline" whose headquarters was the Istituto San Giralmo, a Catholic monastery in Rome.

Intelligence reports recently declassified in the US and Britain show that Pavelic, one of the most wanted of all war criminals, was living "within the Vatican City" in 1946. Interviewed in his South American refuge by an Italian newspaper in 1952, he said he had been hidden both in the Vatican and in the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

In this context, and with the unfinished business of the second World War re-emerging so horribly in the former Yugoslavia today, the Catholic Church should be taking the lead in attempting to separate religion from ethnic politics and to face with courage the consequences of its own past behaviour.

Instead, the Pope seems content to pander to the worst forms of tribalism so long as they are expressed in the language of orthodox Catholicism. Suddenly, the idea of asking footballers to give moral leadership seems less absurd.