Posted on: Saturday, June 21, 2003
Pope to visit Balkans again
By Tracy Wilkinson
Los Angeles Times
ROME — When Pope John Paul II travels tomorrow to the Balkans for the second time in as many weeks, he will press a message that has become fundamental to the waning years of his papacy: affirming the Christian identity of Europe.
It is a two-track mission for the pope.
In countries such as Croatia, where the pope completed a five-day tour earlier this month, John Paul urges the Roman Catholic faithful to hold true to their religious roots. As Croatia — and other formerly Communist countries — join the European Union, he says, they should carry with them their faith and avoid the West's secularist temptations.
And in countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the pope will hold Mass tomorrow, he hopes to promote the healing of a millennium-old schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, as a way to advance religious unity.
Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, along with predominantly Muslim Bosnians, fought a savage war for the first half of the last decade as the former Yugoslav federation broke apart along largely ethnic lines. The wounds of that conflict, as the pope himself has said, remain raw.
The Catholicism of Croatia that the pontiff blesses historically has been intertwined with the violent, radical nationalism that helped fuel the war and to this day riles the Serbs.
Similarly, the Serbs' Christianity was often a battle cry rallying a "Greater Serbia" in which neither Catholics nor Muslims were welcome.
Serbs are protesting the scheduled arrival of the pope tomorrow in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, the Serbian mini-state within Bosnia. During the war, Banja Luka was a place where mosques and Catholic churches were burned or destroyed by Serbs, and where tens of thousands of Serbian refugees sought haven after being driven violently from their Croatia homes.
The element of the pope's visit that most angers Serbs, however, relates to an earlier war.
The pope is going to beatify Ivan Merz, a turn-of-the-century Bosnian Croat layman who was born in Banja Luka. The Mass will be performed in a Franciscan monastery on the outskirts of the city that Serbs say was the site of a World War II atrocity in which pro-Nazi Croats massacred nearly 3,000 Serbs, many of them children.
Croatia was a puppet state of Nazi Germany in World War II, and its henchman killed masses of Serbs, Jews and opposition Croats. To this day, many Serbs accuse nationalist Catholic priests of encouraging some of the slaughter.
In the more recent war, Serbs burned the monastery; today, only five friars and two nuns work there. The parish's Catholic population shrank from 5,500 to 380.
Police in Banja Luka yesterday reported the arrest of a number of people whom they accused of "endangering" the pope's visit.
Web sites have cropped up protesting the visit. And posters of the pope in Banja Luka were defaced with a graffi representing a nationalistic Serbian slogan: Only Unity will Save the Serbs.
Into that climate, the pope will try to preach reconciliation and peace. A handful of Serbian Orthodox priests attended his events in Croatia, and much was made of their appearance.
As of a few days ago, however, it had not been decided what level of Orthodox delegation will meet with the pope in Banja Luka. Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, is not expected to be present.
John Paul, who is 83 and ailing but making his 101st foreign trip this weekend, sees uniting West and East as a way to cement the Christian character of Europe.
Another way is to promote the inclusion in the European Union of Catholic countries that were communist or belonged to the Soviet Bloc, in the hopes that their more traditional Catholicism will spread.
In every appearance in Croatia two weeks ago, he emphasized to his audiences that they marry in the church, raise children in the church and live the kind of faith-filled lives that are less in evidence in the rest of Western Europe.
