Pope Pius XII and the Challenge of Totalitarianism in Yugoslavia, 1941-1958 (POLITY)

Partners (SROs):

Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

Institute for Recent History of Serbia

 

Principal Investigator (PI): Vojislav G. Pavlovic, PhD, principal research fellow

 

Team Members:

Boris Milosavljević, PhD, principal research fellow

Dragan Bakić, PhD, senior research associate

Dušan Fundić, PhD, research associate

Igor Vukadinović, PhD, research assоciate

Milosav Đoković, PhD, research associate

Bogdan Živković, PhD, research associate

Rastko Lompar, PhD, research associate

Anja Nikolić, PhD, research associate

Konstantin Dragaš, PhD, research assistant

Miloš Ković, PhD, Full Professor, Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

Aleksandar Stojanović, PhD, senior research associate, Institute for Recent History of Serbia

 

 

Project description and aim

The aim of this project is to provide an in-depth analysis of the policy of Pius XII and the Catholic Church towards the fascist (Ustasha) Independent State of Croatia (ISC) during the Second World War and towards Tito's communist Yugoslavia post-1945. Pius XII's biographers assert that he did not publicly condemn Shoah in order not to provoke the wrath of the Nazis against the Catholic Church in Hitler's Europe. However, this project suggests, focusing on Yugoslavia, that there was much more to the Pope's considerations, at least in this case. In Yugoslavia, or rather in wartime Croatia, Pius XII chose to pass in silence over the genocide committed against the Serbs, Jews and Roma in pursuance of a more longue durée agenda of the Catholic Church. It concerned the support for the Catholics — Croats, albeit by tacitly de facto condoning their use of the most gruesome means under the cover of war. Hence the Pope implicitly supported the Croat puppet state because it extolled Roman Catholicism as an ideological pillar of the Croatdom in the racist Croat national state as envisioned by the Ustasha regime. The coherence and the longevity of Pius' support for Croats was demonstrated when it even took precedence over his anti-communism, which was the main feature of his pontificate, as his biographers conclude. His disapproval of Tito's regime was so profound that he disregarded completely the importance of the Tito-Stalin split and continued to consider Tito as a "cruel, ambitious dictator of the worst type". The proposed research project is designed in order to profit from the opening of the Vatican archives for the period of the Pius XII pontificate. The project will result in the publication of an edited volume. The software capable of automatic creating of metadata will enable the processing of hundreds of thousands of archival documents for the use of the project and create the web accessible and searchable database to help present the case to the academic community.

 

 

Funding and duration

 

Funding for the project is provided through the Budget of the Republic of Serbia, and the World Bank project – the Serbia Accelerating Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project (SAIGE). The project will last 36 months, from January 2022 until December 2024.