‘Christian Confrontations with the Holocaust’: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CROATIA, THE VATICAN AND THE MURDER OF THE CROATIAN JEWS

Oxford Academic

MENACHEM SHELAH

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 4, Issue 3, 1989, Pages 323–339, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/4.3.323Published: 01 March 1989

Abstract

The ambivalent position of the Croatian Catholic Church towards the barbaric regime of murderers known as ‘The Independent Croatian State’ (1941–1945) determined that Church’s attitude to the murder of Croatia’s Jews.

As in other German satellite countries, the Church tried, unsuccessfully, to defend converted Jews. On the other hand, it remained unperturbed in the face of the persecution of the Jews, the seizure of their property, elimination of their rights, and ultimately, their banishment to camps where they were murdered.

Only towards the end of the war did the heads of the Croatian Church raise their voices in protest against the murder of the Jews, but that was after the almost total destruction of Croatian Jewry.

Not only that — the Church did not so much as censure, nor did it eliminate from its ranks, priests and men of religion who took part in the incitement against the Jews and in their murder.

https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article-abstract/4/3/323/572037?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s