 n countries where the old beliefs are dying it is the
custom for educated people to handle them with nostalgic reverence. It is
thought crude and undignified for a sophisticated man to take sides in a
religious squabble, and it often happens that, the less he believes in
himself, the more indulgent he is to the time-honoured beliefs of others.
I have been reproached several times by sincere and civilized unbelievers
for my efforts to find out the details of the vast campaign in Croatia in 1941
to convert two and a half million Orthodox to Catholicism. ‘Why not let
bygones be bygones?’ they say. ‘If we rake these things up we’ll
merely start trouble at home and play into the hands of the Communists.
And anyway, they are always killing each other in the Balkans.’ I once
heard an ambassador in Belgrade argue like that, and indeed I have never
heard a British or American official abroad argue in any other way. When
in 1946 I went to Zagreb and looked up the files of
the war-time newspapers of Croatia in which the whole story was to be
read, it was obvious that no foreign inquirer had handled them before, and
the library clerks regarded me with wonder and suspicion.
Yet it seemed to me that for a man as for a community
too high a price can be paid for tranquillity. If you suppress a fact
because it is awkward, you will next be asked to contradict it. And so it
happened to me when I got back to Ireland, and gave a talk about
Yugoslavia, the country and its people, on Radio …irann. I did not
mention the Communist war on the Church, or Archbishop Stepinac, who had
just been sentenced to imprisonment for collaboration with Pavelitch, the
Quisling ruler of Croatia, and for conniving at the forced conversion
campaign. I could not refer to the Communist persecution of religion
without mentioning the more terrible
Catholic persecution which had
preceded it, so I thought silence was best. But silence did not help me.
In the following week our leading Roman Catholic weekly, The Standard,
published a long editorial diatribe against myself and against Radio …irann.
I had not, it declared, said a word about the sufferings of the Church and
its ministers under Tito and, by sponsoring me, Radio …irann had
connived at a vile piece of subversive propaganda. The officials of Radio
…irann, knowing I was no Communist, supported me, and finally The
Standard, under pressure from my solicitor, agreed to print a long
reply from me. I received the proof-sheets, corrected and returned them,
but the reply never appeared. Months later, a muddled, amiable explanation
reached me, and my friends said ‘let bygones be bygones’. I did. That
is the way things happen in Ireland.
But it became increasingly difficult to be silent. The
foreign editor of The Standard, Count O’Brien of Thomond,
published a little book called ARCHBISHOP STEPINAC, THE MAN
AND HIS CASE. It had an introduction by the Archbishop of Dublin,
and commendation on the dust-cover from a couple of cardinals, Canadian
and English, and half a dozen bishops and archbishops. Cardinal Spellman
laid a copy of the book on the foundation stone of the new Stepinac
Institute in New York, USA, and told 1700 schoolgirls, drawn up on a
polo-ground in the form of a rosary, what they were to think about
Croatian ecclesiastical history. Yet it seemed to me that there was a
major error of fact or of interpretation, or a significant omission, on
almost every page of this book. Meanwhile all the county councils and
corporations in Ireland met and passed resolutions. Extracts from Count O’Brien’s
book were hurled about, and fiery telegrams despatched to parliaments and
ambassadors.* But the climax of my
discomfort was reached when our Minister for Agriculture, Mr Dillon,
addressing some law students, advised them to model themselves on
Mindzenty, Stepinac and Pavelitch, who had ‘so gallantly defended
freedom of thought and freedom of conscience’. Those who knew Yugoslavia
were aghast, for Pavelitch, one of the major war criminals, was the
Yugoslav counterpart of Himmler, and it was under his rule that the gas
chamber and the concentration camp were introduced into Yugoslavia and the
forced conversion campaign initiated. Clearly Mr Dillon was speaking in
ignorance, not in bigotry, but ignorance rampaging with such assurance and
harnessed to religious enthusiasm is like a runaway horse and cart. It
must be stopped before serious mischief results.
I felt that the honour of the small Protestant community
in Southern Ireland would be compromised if those of us who had
investigated the facts remained silent about what we had discovered. In
many Roman Catholic pulpits the sufferings of the Catholics under Tito
were being compared to the long martyrdom of Catholic Ireland under
Protestant rule. ‘Yesterday and today Herod abides.’ If we agreed that
history should be falsified in Croatia in the interests of Catholic piety,
how could we protest when our own history was similarly distorted?
In letters to the newspapers I replied to Mr Dillon and
many others who had expressed similar opinions. A well known Irish Jesuit,
Father Devane, assuming a Slav name, Mihajlo Dvornik, to lend force to his
accuracy, solemnly declared that there had been no forced conversions in
Croatia, but I could find no one ready to argue the details .Mostly they
quoted at me passages from Count O’Brien, or, on a priori
grounds, accused me of vile slander. ‘The Catholic Church had always
insisted that conversion must be from the heart. Ad amplexandam fidem
Catholicam nemo invitus cogatur. I was alleging the impossible.
Soon afterwards it was announced that Tito was to visit
London, and in Ireland, as in England, various anti-Yugoslav
demonstrations were arranged. My friend, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, a
lecturer in Trinity College and now a member of the Irish Senate, invited
me to a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Association, at which the editor of
The Standard was to read a paper on ‘Yugoslavia — the Pattern
of Persecution’. The Association had been modelled on Chatham House as
an international fact-finding society and Arnold Toynbee himself had come
over to give his blessing to the first meeting. In the Survey of
International Affairs of 1955 he was later to
express himself as strongly as I had about the persecution of the
Orthodox. This is an undenominational society with a tradition of free
speech. The lecturer had never been to Yugoslavia, and I believe that all
the others on the platform were in the same position, though one of them
said that on a cruise down the Dalmatian coast he had met members of a
Yugoslav football team. I decided that at the end of his paper I would try
to make those points which he had failed, despite his promise, to publish
for me. I would try to show how variegated was the pattern of persecution
in Yugoslavia, and how misleading our crude simplifications would be. What
followed has been told by Paul Blanshard, whom I met for the first time
that evening, in his book THE IRISH AND CATHOLIC POWER.
It is enough to say here that the Chairman’s attempt to close the
meeting at the end of the paper was ruled out, on a vote, as
unconstitutional. I got up, holding in my hands THE
MARTYRDOM OF THE SERBS, a book published by the exiled Serbian
Orthodox Church in Chicago, in case anything I said required authoritative
corroboration. It had been given me by archpriest Nicolitch, the head of
the Serbian Orthodox Church in England. But I had spoken only a few
sentences when a stately figure rose from among the audience and walked
out. It was the Papal Nuncio, of whose presence I had been unaware. The
Chairman instantly closed the meeting, and there was an appalled silence,
followed by a rush of reporters in my direction. They had understood
nothing in the confusion. There was, consequently, some lively reporting,
and two leading dailies quoted me as saying that the Orthodox Church, not
the Communists, had initiated the persecution of the Catholics in
Yugoslavia. In gigantic letters in the Sunday Express (Irish
edition) I read: ‘Pope’s Envoy Walks Out. Government to Discuss Insult
to Nuncio.’
Blanshard has described the measures taken against
Skeffington in Dublin and myself in Kilkenny. The persecution was of a
familiar pattern, and I try to see in it not a personal hard-luck story,
but material for a study in the modern indifference to evidence, but I
think both of us knew that had we been less fortunate in our backgrounds
we would have been ruined. Skeffington, the son of a father executed by
the British in 1916 — or, to be more accurate, murdered at the orders of
a hysterical British officer — is at his happiest when he is fighting,
and shortly afterwards he had fought his way into the Irish Senate. For
myself, I am grateful for the few inherited acres which have helped me to
survive the disapproval of my neighbours. All the local government bodies
of the city and county held special meetings to condemn ‘the Insult’.
There were speeches from mayors, ex-mayors, aldermen, creamery managers.
The County Council expelled me from one of its sub-committees, and I was
obliged to resign from another committee. Although my friends put up a
fight, I was forced to give up the honorary secretaryship of an
archaeological society which I had myself founded and guided through seven
difficult years (see Appendix). My opponents hoped that my liquidation
would be decorous and quickly forgotten, but my friends and myself were
little inclined to oblige them, and for a time our small society enjoyed
in the metropolitan press a blaze of publicity which its archaeological
activities had never won for it.
I decided that before I resigned I would tell our two or
three hundred members something about the forced conversion campaign in
Yugoslavia. Much of the evidence, including the utterances of the Orthodox
Church and its bishops, and Archbishop Sharitch’s ‘Ode to Pavelitch’,
with its sonorous denunciations of Serbs and Jews, I put aside, because I
was certain that it would not be believed. Finally, I decided to publish
the long letter written by Stepinac to Pavelitch on the subject of the
forced conversions. I had translated it from a typescript in Zagreb in 1946,
and it seems to me a document of vast importance which deserves a
prominent place in the annals of religious history. Its reception was
disappointing. Many were confused by the outlandish names and inextricably
complicated series of events, and I was taken aback when one friendly
disposed reader congratulated me on ‘my interesting article on
Czechoslovakia’.
There is in Ireland a historic loathing of proselytism.
The well-meaning Protestants who plied the starving peasants of the west
with soup and Bibles after the famine of 1846 have
never been forgiven. Religious apprehensions as strong as these survive in
Yugoslavia, and I had hoped that some of my neighbours would be capable of
the necessary mental adjustment and would see the parallel. Surely it
would be obvious to them from the Stepinac letter that the Croatian
bishops, while denouncing the use of force, were delighted with the
opportunity for mass conversion which the chaos and defeat of Yugoslavia
afforded them. There was, for example, Dr Mishitch, the Bishop of Mostar
and the kindliest of mortals, whom even the Communists have praised for
his clemency. He too had made quite plain the hopes which he had
entertained at the beginning of Pavelitch’s regime:
By the mercy of God [he wrote] there was never such a good occasion
as now for us to help Croatia to save the countless souls, people of
good will, well-disposed peasants, who live side by side with Catholics….
Conversion would be appropriate and easy. Unfortunately the authorities
in their narrow views are involuntarily hindering the Croatian and
Catholic cause. In many parishes of (my) diocese … very honest
peasants of the Orthodox faith have registered in the Catholic Church…
But then outsiders take things in hand. While the newly-converted are at
Mass they seize them, old and young, men and women, and hunt them like
slaves. From Mostar and Chapljina the railway carried six waggons full
of mothers, girls, and children under eight to the station of Surmanci,
where they were taken out of the waggons, brought into the hills and
thrown alive, mothers and children, into deep ravines. In the parish of
Klepca seven hundred schismatics from the neighbouring villages were
slaughtered. The Sub-Prefect of Mostar, Mr Bajitch, a Moslem, publicly
declared (as a state employé he should have held his tongue) that in
Ljublina alone 700 schismatics have been thrown
into one pit.
Elsewhere in his letter the Bishop wrote:
At one time there was a likelihood that a great number of schismatics
would be united to the Catholic Church. If God had given to those in
authority the understanding and the good sense to deal effectively with
conversion, so that it could have been carried through more ably, more
smoothly and by degrees, the number of Catholics might have been
increased by at least five or six hundred thousand. Such a number is
required in Bosnia and Herzegovina, if there is to be an increase from 700,000
to 1,300,000.
The other three bishops, whose letters Stepinac quoted,
all took the normal human view that it is inadvisable in the name of
religion to throw waggon-loads of schismatics over cliffs; they were
critical of the conversion campaign, but they did not find the occasion
for it unseasonable. Had there been no cruelty, and if possible a little
soup, they would have welcomed it. But compared with Mgr Mishitch’s
letters theirs are cold, calculating and self-righteous. Archbishop
Sharitch opined that the town council of Sarajevo was imposing too high a
tax on the Bosnian Orthodox for their change of religion. The Bishop of
Kotor, Dr Butorac, declared that the missionaries to the Serbs must be
wisely selected. ‘We must not entrust the problem,’ he wrote, ‘to
monks or priests who have no tact at all and who would be much better
suited to carry a revolver in their hands than a cross’. And he
expressed the fear that if the Serbs were driven too hard they might, out
of defiance, pass over in a body to Islam.
I must confess that I find Mgr Stepinac’s comments on
these letters and the situation that provoked them curiously narrow and
thin-lipped. He scolds the miserable, hunted Orthodox for their terrible
errors, deriving, he declares, from ‘hatred and schism’, and he blames
them for the Russian Revolution, just as he blames the crimes of Pavelitch
and his gang on the Chetniks — that is, the followers of Mijailovitch
— the Communists, and the Royal Yugoslav Government. He considers that
the best way to convert the Orthodox might often be found through the
medium of the Greek Catholic Church, which recognizes the authority of the
Pope while preserving its Orthodox ritual. He ends his letter, as he began
it, by exonerating Pavelitch from all blame in the crimes that had been
committed.
Yet Count O’Brien tells us in his little book that at
this time, in defence of the Orthodox, the Archbishop had swept into
Pavelitch’s office. ‘“It is God’s command!” he said, “Thou
shalt not kill!” and without another word left the Quisling’s palace.’
Stepinac’s long and respectful letter to Pavelitch at
this date proves the anecdote to be a hagiographical fabrication. Yet it
was quoted at me several times in the press at Kilkenny and Dublin. The
letter was obviously the most important that Stepinac had ever written,
and it struck me as odd that though I had published it twice in Ireland
— for my critics in Kilkenny and also in The Church of Ireland
Gazette — nobody in the British Isles, at a time when so much was
written and said about the imprisoned Archbishop, ever commented on it,
quoted from it, or wrote to me to enquire how I had secured it. Three
years later, however, Richard Pattee published in America a lengthy book
in defence of Stepinac, and among his documents the long letter belatedly
appeared. Yet I believe that my translation is the more accurate of the
two. Mr Pattee has thought it best to omit a sentence or two here and
there. He leaves out, for instance, Mgr Mishitch’s calculations of the
number of conversions required in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Again, wherever
the word ‘conversion’ appears in the text Mr Pattee reads it as ‘legitimate
conversion’, thus adding an epithet which I could not trace in the
original. Stepinac’s admiring description of the Bishop of Banja Luka as
‘that old Croatian warrior’ likewise disappears, presumably because Mr
Pattee does not wish his readers to infer that the bishops were Croatian
separatists trying to ingratiate themselves with Pavelitch.
About the same time Mr Michael Derrick published in The
Tablet a paragraph or two from Mishitch’s letter, but he attributed
it to Stepinac, and he omitted the extraordinary parenthesis about the
Sub-Prefect who told of the barbarities inflicted upon the Orthodox, and
the bishop’s comment that ‘as a state employé he should have held his
tongue’. In the succeeding issue of The Sword, Mr Derrick
published my translation of Stepinac’s THE REGULATIONS
FOR CONVERSION without acknowledgement! Anybody who read these
regulations with an open mind, and particularly an Irish Catholic with his
inherited horror of ‘souperism’, would have to admit that they bore
every trace, except soup, of illegitimate conversion. For instance,
Clause XI, an appeal that the Orthodox be granted
full civic rights, has been much applauded, but it begins, ‘A
psychological basis for conversion must be created among the Greek
Orthodox inhabitants.’ If still in doubt as to the bearing of these
regulations one would have only to read the manifesto of Dr Shimrak,
editor of the leading Catholic daily, and chosen by Stepinac as one of his
two colleagues in the supervision of conversion:
Every priest must have before his eyes that historic days have come
for our mission. Now we must put into practice that which we have spoken
of in theory throughout the centuries. In the matter of conversion we
have done very little up to this, simply because we were irresolute and
dreaded the small reproaches and censure of men. Every great task has
its opponents, but we must not be downcast on that account, because it
is a question of a holy union, the salvation of souls and the eternal
glory of the Lord Christ. Our work is legal in the light of the ruling
of the Holy See … also in the light of the ruling of the Holy
Congregation of Cardinals for the Eastern Church. . .and finally in the
light of the circular sent by the Government of Independent Croatia,
July 30, 1941, whose intention it is that the
Orthodox should be converted to the Catholic faith (Diocesan Magazine
of Krizhevtski, No. 2 [1942], pp. 10-11).
Count O’Brien, an Austrian of Irish descent, had been
until he came to Ireland after the war editor of an important Viennese
paper, and he claims in his book to have known Shimrak intimately for
twenty years. He also writes that all the Croat bishops had opposed
Pavelitch’s ‘evil plan’ for the forced conversion of the Orthodox.
This seemed in such strong conflict with Shimrak’s declaration that long
before the ‘Insult’ I had visited Count O’Brien to ask for an
explanation. An explanation was forthcoming. The Count replied at once
that Shimrak had not been a bishop at the time, but only an administrator.
It appeared from his reply that it was actually after he had proved
himself in sympathy with Pavelitch’s plan that Shimrak was appointed to
the bishopric and to Stepinac’s committee for regulating conversion. I
then asked how it came about that, if all the bishops were hostile to
Pavelitch and his plans, Archbishop Sharitch of Bosnia, one of the
greatest of them, had been able to print his Ode to Pavelitch in
the ecclesiastical papers of his own archdiocese and that of Zagreb. I had
made a translation of his ode in twenty-six verses, describing his meeting
with Pavelitch at St Peter’s in Rome, and I now ventured to remind Count
O’Brien of a few lines:
Embracing thee was precious to the poet
as embracing our beloved Homeland.
For God himself was at thy side, thou good and
strong one,
so that thou mightest perform thy deeds for the
Homeland. . .
And against the Jews, who had all the money,
who wanted to sell our souls,
who built a prison round our name,
the miserable traitors. . .
Dr Ante Paveli„! the
dear name!
Croatia has therein a treasure from Heaven.
May the King of Heaven accompany thee, our Golden
Leader!
Count O’Brien had an explanation for that, too. He
said: ‘The Archbishop was an abnormal man, very emotional. He was always
embracing people. Whenever we met, he used to kiss me on both cheeks. He
can’t be taken seriously.’
These replies made me feel very helpless, since they
could not have been made if venal indifference had not reigned around us.
When I went home I was feeling as emotional as the Archbishop, and I
remember that I wrote a poem myself of the Massacre of the Orthodox,
though I must admit that it was the massacre of the truth that really
outraged me.
Milton, if you were living at this hour,
they’d make you trim your sonnet to appease
the triple tyrant and the Piedmontese.
‘Why for some peasants vex a friendly power?
We’d like to print it, but Sir Tottenham Bauer
and half the Board would blame us. Colleen Cheese
would stop its full-page ad. They’re strong RCs.
It’s old stuff now, and truth, deferred, goes
sour.
So cut those lines about “the stocks and stones”
and “slaughtered saints”, or keep for private
ears
that fell crusade, for even in undertones
it breeds disunion and the Kremlin hears.
Say nothing rash or rude, for it is right
that all the godly (west of Kiel), unite!’
I thought my poem almost as good as the Archbishop’s,
but I had some difficulty in getting it published. In the end it appeared
in a pacifist weekly, but very inconspicuously and in very small print.
The Archbishop had been luckier. His had appeared in Katolicki Tjednik
(The Catholic Weekly) on Christmas Day, with a signed portrait of
Pavelitch and a decorative border of Christmas tree candles and little
silver bells.
I suppose that the small community in which I live has
about the same significance for the world as the community of Mr Bjitch,
who as a state employé ‘should have held his tongue’ about the
massacres, so I need not apologize for returning to it. My friends and
neighbours were memorably kind and supporting; for they knew that I had
not intended to insult anybody. But others were puzzled. I was not, like
Mr Bjitch, a state employé, and some found it difficult to make their
disapproval materially felt. This problem would not have baffled them for
long had it not been for the courtesy and good sense of the local Catholic
clergy. I was most vulnerable through the Kilkenny Archaeological Society.
This had been a famous Victorian institution, with the Prince Consort as
patron and the Marquess of Ormond as President, but it had shifted to
Dublin as an All-Ireland Society, and when I revived it in Kilkenny in 1944
it had been dead there for half a century. In a couple of years the new
Society became a real bridge between Protestant and Catholic,
Anglo-Irishman and Celt. The friendliness which it created was perhaps our
main achievement, but we did other things, too. Mr O. G. S.
Crawford made for us a photographic survey of old Kilkenny such as no
other Irish provincial town possesses; Dr Bersu, the Director of the
Institute of Frankfurt, made his principal Irish excavation on a hill fort
outside Kilkenny and reported it in our journal; we had a centenary
celebration of the old society in Kilkenny Castle; and the National Museum
co-operated in a very successful Kilkenny Exhibition. But I think I was
proudest of having organized a week’s visit from the principal
archaeological society in Northern Ireland; for cultural fraternization
between North and South are as rare as they are valuable. I feared that
all this work would be wasted, so I decided to appeal to a certain Stephen
Brown, a Jesuit, who had attended meetings of our Society. He had escorted
the Nuncio to the fateful meeting, and afterwards in the Irish
Independent had defended the Croatian hierarchy against the charges of
illegitimate proselytism, with copious quotations from Count O’Brien
but, as it seemed to me, with a total ignorance of Yugoslav conditions.
Father Brown received me warmly. He said he was satisfied that I had not
intended to insult the Nuncio, that he strongly disapproved of the
introduction of the incident into the affairs of an archaeological
society, and that in any case the Nuncio had visited the meeting by
mistake under the impression that he was bound for a meeting of a Catholic
society with a similar name. Father Brown said that he would send me a
letter making these three points, and that I might publish it in any paper
I chose. The letter never arrived. It seemed, however, that a compromise
had been reached in the matter, for a few days later a paragraph appeared
in The Standard under the heading ‘Mr Butler rebuked’. After
commending all the denunciations by public bodies, the passage ended:
It is well that such a repudiation should be known. But we doubt if
any good purpose would have been served by the proposed step by which Mr
Butler would have been deprived of office in, say, the Kilkenny
Archaeological Society, of which he is presumably an efficient
functionary, and into which he can scarcely introduce secular issues. If
he has any regard for public opinion he must know by now that his action
met with not alone local but national disapproval. That is sufficient.
It was difficult for me to return as a presumably
efficient functionary to a Society which I had myself founded, so I never
after attended a meeting, but my friends, both Catholic and Protestant,
still support the Society and I am glad today that it continues.
I hope I have not appeared to diagnose in my Catholic
countrymen a unique susceptibility to a disease with which we are all of
us more or less infected. Speed of communications has increased, and we
are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote
events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not
correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated
emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency. This shifting current
of expediency may be illustrated by a chronicle of the changing attitude
to Pavelitch in the past ten years. In Croatia, upheld by the victorious
Germans, he had for four years been regarded as a great Christian
gentleman and patriot. All the Catholic bishops and the Evangelical
bishops were among his panegyrists and had received decorations from him.
Then the Nazis collapsed, and Pavelitch was regarded by the outer world as
one of the basest of war criminals, while in Croatia all the dignitaries
hastened to disavow the compliments they had paid him. A former Italian
Fascist, Malaparte, in his book, KAPUTT, has
described how, as correspondent of Corriere Della Sera, he visited
Pavelitch in his office in 1942 and saw behind him
what appeared to be a basket of shelled oysters. ‘Are these Dalmatian
oysters?’ Malaparte asked. ‘No,’ Pavelitch replied, ‘that’s
forty pounds of human eyes, a present from my loyal Ustashe in Bosnia’
— eyes, that is to say, of Serbian Orthodox. I am ready to believe that
this story is an invention, like Stepinac’s visit to the ‘Quisling’s
Palace’, and that stories like this were repeated by the ex-Fascists,
who thought that if they made the whole world black their own shade of
dirty grey would be less conspicuous. But in 1948 no one told Malaparte
that he was a liar. Indeed, writing about KAPUTT in The
Irish Times, Mr Kees van Hoek, the biographer of the Pope, said that
Malaparte was ‘the most accurate observer and reliable witness’.
That was the universal western view of Pavelitch seven
or eight years ago — a monster of iniquity, an ogre out of a fairy-tale.
But since then Pavelitch has become more respectable, and if he was wanted
again in a campaign against Communism in the Balkans it is possible that
he and his friends would be used. He now lives in South America and two or
three papers and journals are published in his interest. Five years ago he
issued postage stamps commemorating the tenth anniversary of Independent
Croatia, and he has cashed in very effectively on the Stepinac legend,
since one of his Ustashe clubs in the Argentine is called after the famous
Cardinal. Archbishop Sharitch, the devoted admirer of both Pavelitch and
Stepinac, lives in Madrid, but still publishes his odes (rather modified),
as well as ecstatic reminiscences of Stepinac, in Hrvatsk Revija, a
Croatian separatist quarterly of Buenos Aires. I once visited Mgr Stepinac
in prison and found him a gentle and serious man, who obviously acted as
he thought was right. Surely it must be one of the hardest blows that fate
has dealt him that both Pavelitch and Sharitch speak well of him?
In one way or another the memory of a terrible crime
against humanity is being confused and effaced, so that many people
believe that it never happened at all or that it has been monstrously
exaggerated. I have seen Pavelitch compared in Irish papers with Roger
Casement and Patrick Pearse as a simple-hearted patriot who merely did his
best for his country in difficult circumstances. In October 1952
he was interviewed for an Italian picture paper, Epoca of Milan. He
was photographed basking in the South American sun with his wife and
family, stroking a pet dog. He told how he had escaped from Croatia
through the Allied lines, how he had paused for weeks at a time in Naples,
the Vatican City, and Castel Gandolfo. He was to be considered a romantic
fellow, the carefree immunity which he enjoyed no more than his due.
How has all this happened? Three centuries ago Milton
gave undying notoriety to the massacre and forced conversion of the
Waldenses, and Cromwell sent out emissaries to collect information about
the sufferings of this tiny Alpine community. We are mostly now immune
from the religious fanaticism which once intensified racial antipathies
and to which Cromwell himself was no stranger; why has it become unwise to
censure or even to take notice of an explosion of those ancient passions
fifty times more devastating than that which Milton observed? There were
scarcely ten thousand Waldenses to be persecuted in Piedmont, while the
decrees of Pavelitch were launched against more than two million Orthodox,
and 240,000 were forcibly converted.
Looking for a reason, I can only conclude that science
has enormously extended the sphere of our responsibilities, while our
consciences have remained the same size. Parochially minded people neglect
their parishes to pronounce ignorantly about the universe, while the
universalists are so conscious of the world-wide struggles of opposing
philosophies that the rights and wrongs of any regional conflict dwindle
to insignificance against a cosmic panorama. They feel that truth is in
some way relative to orientation, and falsehood no more than a wrong
adjustment, so that they can never say unequivocally ‘that is a lie!’
Like the needle of a compass at the North Pole, their moral judgment spins
round and round, overwhelming them with information, and telling them
nothing at all.
Appendix
A Statement to the Committee and Members of the Kilkenny
Archaeological Society
by the Honorary Secretary, Hubert Butler
November 10, 1952
A Committee Meeting is being summoned on Wednesday next,
at 8.30 p.m., in the Technical Schools, Kilkenny, to
discuss the effects upon the Society of the incident at the International
Affairs Association. I think it would leave you freer to discuss the
matter if I did not come to the meeting myself but sent to each of you a
statement which you could study before you reached the meeting.
I expect that some of you will think I ought to resign
without more ado and others, who bear me no ill will and realize that I
spoke without any intention to give pain to anyone, will think I ought to
give up the secretaryship in order to tide things over and prevent the
Society from dissolving.
I need not emphasize how desperately sorry I would be if
the Society did break up along sectarian or other lines, and how ready I
shall be to co-operate in any effort to keep it going. We are, I think,
unique in having survived so long without a trace of bitterness or
dissension. So I have to think hard what is the right thing to do.
In the first place, I do not believe that my resignation
now would save the Society as an interdenominational one to which people
of every shade of opinion could belong. Secondly, pressure has been
exercised to make me resign. That makes resignation impossible for me for
it would imply that I admitted that what I did or said was wrong, and that
I cannot admit.
As I have been secretary for seven years, of which the
recent year, in which we organized the exhibition in the Tholsel and the
visit of the Belfast Field Club, has been the most successful, I should
have to consider the request to resign as a mark of disapproval. I could
not take it in any other way.
Before you make a decision I would like you to look back
over the many pleasant summer afternoons we have spent together in the
past seven years, and how often we might have split upon just such issues
as this and yet we survived. Do you remember, for instance, the outing to
Carrickshock, when Father Clohosey spoke to us on the Tithe War at the
memorial to the three men who had been killed in an attack on the tithe
collector, Edmund Butler, who, with twelve policemen, lost his life? Most
of the Protestants went home from the bottom of the hill, but I went to
the top, because I knew that Father Clohosey could be relied on to give an
impartial account of this bitter controversial event. And that is just
what he did do. And, if you remember, it was I who offered him the thanks
of the Society when the evening ended at Ballybodan. Yet that was an issue
which, had I been a bigotted person, might have affected me strongly. My
great grandfather, Richard Butler, the Rector of Burnchurch, near
Bennetsbridge, had been mobbed and molested so frequently by the agitators
that in the end he had to leave his home for several years. Yet in fact,
he thought, as I think, that the tithe agitators had right on their side.
He did not, and no more could I, make a sectarian issue of it.
I mention this because I have been attacked, but each
one of us has acted in the same way. Our little Society, under our
chairman, John O’Leary, has been doing Christian work healing the sores
of history and reconciling conflicting opinions. I am quite certain that
His Excellency, the Nuncio, could not possibly wish it to come to grief.
It would not have been surprising if we had split on
some local issue of Kilkenny history, the Confederation, Cromwell, the
Penal laws, but it is to me almost unbelievable that we should be in
danger of disintegrating because of two different interpretations of
tragedies that happened eleven years ago in the plains of Slavonia and the
wild hills of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As I would like you to understand some of the issues at
stake, I will quote you the letter I wrote to the Nuncio, but I gather at
present he does not want it to appear in the press.
Maidenhall
Bennettsbridge
Co. Kilkenny
Nov. 2, 1952
Your Excellency,
I would like to express my regret at any embarrassment
or pain I may have caused you by my remarks after Mr O’Curry’s talk.
I felt, as I have felt for six years, that vital facts were being
suppressed and that, though their discussion might at first be very
bitter, worse would follow if they were ignored.
I think the enclosed letter from Mgr Stepinac, which I
translated and published Dec. 29, 1950 in the Church of Ireland
Gazette, discloses a complex situation in Yugoslavia, which could
not possibly be ignored in any discussion on ‘Yugoslavia, the Pattern
of Persecution’. You are not, I think, likely to have seen this
letter, because it was never published in Yugoslavia or mentioned at the
Archbishop’s trial by his accusers. The Communists were at that time
holding him responsible for the barbarities of the conversion campaign
and this letter shows too clearly that he was not responsible for them.
Nonetheless, it also shows (the quotation from Mgr
Mishitch in particular) that force was being used to affect opinion, or,
to put it differently, the violence of the times was being exploited for
the purpose of proselytism. Since these were the methods used then and
later by the Communists for their proselytism too, an unfair and
unbalanced view of persecution in Yugoslavia would have been obtained if
Mr O’Curry’s paper had not been discussed in the light of these
facts.
The International Affairs Association with its
membership drawn from all creeds seemed the only forum in which these
delicate issues could be soberly discussed. I went as the guest of a
foundation member, who assured me that unfettered discussion had always
been the order of the day.
I had gone, I admit, with the intention of disputing
Mr O’Curry’s interpretations, which I already knew, but, believe me,
the last thing I wished to do was to insult you, your Church or Mr O’Curry.
My family is Irish, I was born here and have lived
here most of my life. My experience and the experience of most Irish
Protestants is that the kindliness, toleration and good will of Irish
Catholics toward their Protestant fellow countrymen is such that it is
hard for us even to conceive what bitterness and violence can exist in
other lands.
In conclusion I would like to assure your Excellency
of my sincere esteem and good will.
Yours sincerely,
HUBERT BUTLER
As for the charge that I spoke uncharitably of Mgr
Stepinac, I hope that one of the Kilkenny papers will print the account
which I published over a year ago in The Church of Ireland Gazette,
20 April 1951, of a visit I
paid to Mgr Stepinac with four Quakers. It will show that I never thought
him ‘a dupe’ (a misreporting) and that my feelings toward him have
always been respectful.
I will quote here one extract: ‘Mgr Stepinac in prison
is a figure, who commands respect. What he did, he did in the belief that
it was right. Christians, who think otherwise — and there are millions
of them — would mostly agree that while he remains in prison, the focus
of violent emotions, there is little hope of a dispassionate enquiry into
the tragic story of 1941.’
I attach also a translation of the letter from Mgr
Stepinac to Pavelitch, which I have sent to the Nuncio. It is long and
difficult, but I took great pains to translate it accurately from the
Serbo-Croatian, and I am rather surprised that here, where Mgr Stepinac is
so greatly venerated, it excited so little interest on publication nearly
two years ago. No Irish paper asked permission to republish it, yet I
believe it is the most important letter the Archbishop ever wrote. The
facts to which he refers are all corroborated in the publications of the
Serbian Orthodox Church.
Those who read the letter will admire Mgr Stepinac for
his courage and humanity, though some may share the views of the Serbian
Orthodox Church, expressed very strongly in their war-time publications,
that he could have helped them best by withholding his recognition from
the Government which decreed their compulsory conversion. But I do not
think we are likely to divide on this point along the obvious lines. It is
a question upon which each person will have his own individual opinion.
The Archbishop’s letter will show that Count O’Brien,
who is quoted against me in the Dublin and Kilkenny papers, is a wholly
unreliable historian. Of the gigantic compulsory conversion campaign he
writes on page 16 of his book on Mgr Stepinac,
published by The Standard, ‘It was through Mgr Stepanic’s firm
stand that Pavelitch’s endeavours to impose the Catholic faith by force
ended in complete failure.’ Mgr Stepinac, who is modest as well as
brave, shows in the attached letter how wildly untrue this statement is.
The compulsory conversion campaign in Croatia, 1941,
was one of the most terrible in the history of Europe.
I am glad to say that these problems do not touch us
here, where for several generations we have shown tolerance and not tried
to force our faith upon each other. Yet, at the meeting in Dublin, having
expert knowledge relating to a subject which was being very seriously
investigated, I felt it my duty to speak as I did. I could not have done
otherwise.
HUBERT BUTLER
_______________________
Books by Hubert Butler:
_________, TEN THOUSAND SAINTS: A STUDY
IN IRISH AND EUROPEAN ORIGINS. Kilkenny, Ir.:
Wellbrook Press, 1972
_________, ESCAPE FROM THE ANTHILL.
Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1985
_________, THE CHILDREN OF DRANCY.
Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1988
_________, GRANDMOTHER AND WOLFE TONE.
Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1990
_________, THE SUB-PREFECT SHOULD HAVE
HELD HIS TONGUE, AND OTHER ESSAYS.
London: Viking Press, 1990
_________, L’ENVAHISSEUR EST VENU EN
PANTOUFLES. tr. Phillipe Blanchard.
Pref. Joesph Brodsky. Paris Anatolia Editions, 1994
_________, IN THE LAND OF NOD. Dublin:
The Lilliput Press, 1996
_________, INDEPENDENT SPIRIT. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard. Tr.
Hubert Butler. Intro. Tyrone Guthrie. London:
H.F.W. Dane & Sons Ltd; Boston.: Baker’s Plays
Leonid Leonov, THE THIEF. Tr.
Hubert Butler. London: Martin Warburg, 1931. New York: Vintage, 1960
Relevant books:
Paul Blanshard, THE IRISH AND CATHOLIC
POWER. An American Interpretation. Foreword,
H. Montgomery Hyde. London: Derek Verschoyle, 1954
Curzio Malaparte, KAPUTT. Tr. from the
Italian by Cesare Foligno. New York: Dutton, 1946.
Anthony Henry O’Brian, Count of Thomond,
ARCHBISHOP STEPINAC: THE MAN AND HIS CASE.
Westminster: The Newman Bookshop, 1947
Richard Pattee, THE CASE OF CARDINAL
ALOYSIUS STEPINAC. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1953
Marco Aurelio Rivelli, L’ARCIVESCOVO
DEL GENOCIDIO: Monsignor Stepinac, il Vaticano, e la
dittatura ustascia in Croazia, 1941-1945. Milan: Kaos
Edizioni, 1998.
Andrée Sheehy Skeffington, SKEFF: THE
LIFE OF OWEN SHEEHY SKEFFINGTON 1909-1970. Dublin:
The Lilliput Press, 1991
Sudjic, Milivoj J. YUGOSLAVIA IN ARMS. (“Europe
under the Nazis” series) London: Lindsay
Drummond, Ltd., 1942
Various, MARTYRDOM OF THE SERBS
(Persecutions of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Massacre of the
Serbian People) (Documents and reports of the United
Nations and of eyewitnesses) The Serbian
Eastern Orthodox Diocese for The United States of
American and Canada, 1943.
Also:
“This site is a production of the Clero-Fascist Studies Project, an
on-going research and public information project exploring the
convergence between certain strains of Christianity and fascism in the
20th century. In part, this project is a response to attempts by some of
the parties responsible to cover up, erase, or cleanse their history.
Our goal is the preservation, not the purification of history.”
Archbishop Stepinac’s Reply at the Trial
“The Case of Archbishop Stepinac”
“This document assembling facts in the case of Archbishop Aloysius
Stepinac of Yugoslavia has been prepared because the arrest and trial of
the Archbishop are still being used in the United States in a campaign
of misrepresentation against the Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia.
This campaign, accusing Yugoslavia of religious persecution -- which
does not exist in my country and which is specifically outlawed by the
Constitution -- has gone to considerable lengths. Petitions for which
thousands of names have been obtained have been submitted to the White
House and to the Department of State.
“Resolutions have been introduced in the Congress. In the face of
such organized and continuing attacks I have felt compelled, in justice
to the government and people of Yugoslavia, to make this material
available in English. It shows that Archbishop Stepinac was tried and
convicted solely because of the crimes in which he engaged against his
own nation -- the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, later the Federal Peoples
Republic of Yugoslavia -- and against his own countrymen.
“Americans who may have been misinformed on the point should know
also that millions of patriotic citizens of Yugoslavia are Catholics,
enjoying full freedom of worship today under constitutional guarantees.
Having firsthand knowledge of the role played by Archbishop Stepinac
during the war, they do not identify their religion with the secular
political course in support of Hitler and Mussolini which he chose to
follow.
“Sava N. Kosanovic, Ambassador of the Federal Peoples Republic of
Yugoslavia.
“Washington, 1947”
Kaos Editions
The Lilliput Press
The Irish Times
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