c. 1998 Religion News Service

MARIJA BISTRICA, Croatia _ In a joyous ceremony conducted amid cornfields and pumpkin patches, Pope John Paul II, brushing aside objections from abroad, Saturday (Oct. 3) beatified Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, the controversial World War II-era prelate the church contends is a martyr to communism but whom critics accuse of collaborating with facism.

Stepinac, John Paul told some 400,000 people gathered on the gently rolling but rain-slickened hillsides of this rural Marian pilgrimage site,”sums up, so to speak, the whole tragedy which befell the Croatian people and Europe in the course of this century marked by the three great evils of fascism, national socialism and communism.”He faced suffering rather than betray his conscience,”the pope said.

Hundreds hiked all night from Zagreb, slogging through forests for hours before reaching the site. There, nuns and priests mingled with young people in jeans and Nike jackets and elderly women in traditional shawls and headscarves. Some climbed trees to get a better view.

In the crowd, Stepinac, the former archbishop of Zagreb who died in 1960 after 15 years of confinement by communist authorities in the former Yugoslavia, was praised as a hero and preserver of religion in an era of atheism.

Davorin Jurkovic and his friends hiked 18 miles all night from Zagreb, slogging through the woods for several hours, to witness the beatification _ the penultimate step to sainthood.

Stepinac was”a great man,”said Jurkovic, 19, an economics student.”When religion was falling, he raised it up. If he’s somewhere up there looking down on us. He’s very happy.” Jurkovic’s comments mirrored those of John Paul as he read the religious formula that gave Stepinac the title”blessed.””He is now in the joy of heaven, surrounded by all those who, like him, fought the good fight, purifying their faith in the crucible of suffering,”John Paul read.”Today we look with trust and invoke his intercession.” As John Paul read the words, a 20-foot-high portrait of Stepinac was unveiled and the crowd cheered and applauded, dispelling any lingering doubts raised by groups abroad about Stepinac’s role during World War II.

John Paul also took note of the somewhat unusual circumstance that Stepinac did not”in the strict sense of the word”shed his blood for the Catholic faith is the general norm for martyrs.”His death was caused by the long suffering he endured,”the pope said.”The last 15 years of his life were a continual succession of trials, amid which he courageously endangered his own life in order to bear witness to the gospel.” But in a region of the world where religion and politics make a volatile, combustible combination, controversy remains about Stepinac’s role during World War II, when Croatia was ruled by the murderous pro-Nazi Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelic. And, with ethnic and religious tensions again running high in the Balkans, about the pope’s timing in carrying out the beatification.

Born in 1898, Stepinac played a key role during many of the turbulent and violent decades that have marked the Balkans in the 20th century. He fought for the Austrian empire, which ruled Croatia, during World War I. After the war, he went to seminary in Rome, where he was ordained a priest in 1930. During World War II, Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia as the Balkans were engulfed in some of that war’s fiercest fighting.

At first, Stepinac supported independence and the regime that ruled Croatia from 1942-45.”I would have been remiss had I not recognized and acknowledged this desire of the Croatian people enslaved by the former Yugoslavia,”he said at his trial.

But increasingly he became critical of the Pavelic regime and the church argues Stepinac saved numerous Jews, Serbs and Gypsies from extermination and he is on record numerous times _ in sermons and in letters to Pavelic _ denouncing the genocidal brutality which the Ustasha government was perpetrating.”The Catholic Church does not recognize the races that rule and the races that are enslaved,”he said in an oft-quoted 1943 sermon.”The Catholic Church only recognizes races and nations as creations of God.” But 10 days ago, the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center appealed to the pope to postpone the beatification until a study of Stepinac’s could be conducted. The Vatican did not reply to the request and on Saturday, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls pointed to a statement by a Croatian Jewish group in support of the beatification.

Navarro-Valls called the statement”significant because it represents the the local mood.” In that statement, a group called the Coordination of Jewish Municipalities in Croatia, said”The Jews in Croatia are grateful to Cardinal Stepinac for advocating the salvation of many Jews.” Stepinac had directed his priests to agree to convert any Jews or Orthodox Serbs who sought to obtain a Catholic identity for protection. Stepinac said the church’s role is”primarily to save lives. When these times of madness and savagery are over, they who converted out of conviction will remain in our church while the rest will return to their own faith.” DEA END SMITH