What Goes Around

Before anyone starts with "How can a Catholic possibly take this view?" as if it were a rhetorical question, they should look up John Laughland, or Pat Buchanan and the American paleoconservatives, or, indeed, both the Pope at the time and the Pope now. That my interlocutors appear not to know any of this, or of the following, only indicates how schismatic much, probably most, of Croatian Catholicism has now become. Much like those American and wannabe American Catholics who support neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy.

Where the Roman writ still runs, resistance to the apparently never-ending dismemberment of Yugoslavia is still a living cause, with the Catholic Archdiocese as opposed to the secession of Kosovo as were and are the Islamic religious authorities in Serbia, the Albanian community leaders there, the Jewish ones, the Roma ones, the lot.

The disastrous UDI of Franjo Tudjman's neo-Ustasha state in Croatia led to that state's war of Ustasha re-enactment (then, as in the Forties, on the same side as the jihadi) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as its removal of the constitutional recognition of the Serbs as one of Croatia's two founding peoples, leading to the largest ethnic cleansing in the entire break-up of Yugoslavia. We used to ignore all of this and whole lot more, instead simply branding the Serbs as the villains, the Croats as sort of all right, and the Muslims as whiter than white, perhaps because we imagined that they were not actually white.

Increasingly, however, "Serbia and Croatia" are treated as the bad guys from the Yugoslav War. Both of them. Together.

Well, they belong together. They are brothers. Each other's. And ours. It is not even clear exactly when the Serbs went into schism from Rome: their second King, Stephen II, brother of Saint Sava himself, received in 1195 both his royal crown and the title prvovenčani, or primus coronatus, from Pope Honorius III. What is clear, however, is that the Serbs and the Croats both share in the historic mission of all the Slavs, naturally led by Russia and in the exercise of which the Serbs are particularly distinguished, as the gatekeepers of the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ and His Church. That synthesis is the True West, whereas the closely interconnected forces of European federalism, globalisation, and American military-industrial hegemony constitute the pseudo-West, in unsurprisingly close alliance with Islam, not least in the former Yugoslavia.

I do have to wonder how differently people might react, not least in post-9/11 America, if someone tried to set up a Wahhabi state in Europe these days, as was done by Izetbegovic in the 1990s. Except, of course, that someone has recently done exactly that, with full American and British backing. Do we never learn? Or rather, why do we never learn?

It gives me no pleasure to have to point out that the Croats backed the wrong side, and were thus derelict in their historic duty as a people, both in the Forties and in the Nineties. I believe passionately, as any orthodox Catholic must, in the historic mission of the Croats as Antemurale Christianitatis, the Ramparts of Christendom, a vitally important manifestation of the historic mission of the Slavs, just as much as is the lived-out identity of Russia or Serbia. But the Croats have been derelict in that duty twice in the last seventy years, and Christian charity includes the obligation to reproach the brethren when and where necessary.

They should have remained Antemurale Christianitatis within a multiethnic, post-Communist Yugoslavia, witnessing to Catholic Social Teaching both against nostalgia for the Communist past and against neoliberalism. Only ever having had a state as Hitler's plaything, and with no history of it, that is the Croats' true historic mission, as lived out within several preceding multiethnic entities. That a people exists does not necessarily mean that it needs a state. On the contrary, that might very well be the last thing that it needs and, which is just as important, that others need of it. Inhabitants of this island, of Belgium, of the north of Spain, and elsewhere, take note.

But the Croats failed to bear witness. They must repent of the Ustasha from whom they took their inspiration, of their pro-jihadi war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of the denial and attempted destruction of their Serbian compatriots (or, as Jesus would have put it, neighbours), because every Western forum is crying out for the witness of Antemurale Christianitatis, a witness best borne to the EU precisely as the reason for staying out of it; EU accession would bring about once and for all the German domination the hope of which led Germany to recognise the UDIs in the former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Slovenia and Croatia, thus setting off the Yugoslav Wars.

Christendom needs Her Ramparts now, as ever. She will not find them in the Croat separatism and supremacism of the Tudjman and subsequent years, nor in its closely related cult of Medjugorje, each and both of which are the stuff of which schism, leading to or consolidating descents into heresy, have always been made. On either of them, just ask the Pope. Or just ask in prayer his predecessor, soon to be beatified, ora pro nobis. The only Catholics to take a different view on the dismemberment of Yugoslavia were and are those who, away with Megaforgery as well as with the related, hardly original definition of the Faith as nothing other than their own ethnic separatism and supremacism, have been less and less Catholic, and more and more schismatic and heretical, ever since. Again, just ask the Pope.