POPE PIUS XII AND THE CHALLENGE OF TOTALITARIANISM IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1941–1958

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.