Monday 18 April 2011

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.

12 comments:

  1. Note that there are still Catholics, Muslims, Albanians, Jews and Roma in Serbia. Serbia is a diverse paradise compared with Croatia.

    Those Serbo-Croat Catholics have not moved to Croatia, those Serbo-Croat Muslims have not moved to Bosnia, those Albanians have not moved to Kosovo.

    The first want to stay orthodox Catholics instead of what you describe, the second and third want to retain traditional Balkan Islam instead of Wahhabism, all three see their only hope in what remains of Yugoslavia.

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  2. I am fascinated with your fixation about the Balkan problems etc.

    You are a keen one to boast about the links between Britain and other countries but you do not seem to think it the same for other countries to feel their ties - like Austria towards its former possessions/partners in the Habsburg state.

    The ties between Austria and Croatia are immense. The present Austrian national anthem was Paula von Preradovic, a Croat and a mother of a future Austrian cabinet minister. Chancellor Sinowatz was the son of Croats. George von Trapp (who corrupted that nun) was born and raised in Croatia and spoke Croat as well as Italian and German. To name but three examples.

    And of course the Father of Yugoslavianism was Bishop Strossmeyer whose roots were in what is southern Austria. And of course when Hungary tried to break up the Habsburg state in 1848, it was loyal Croats under Ban Josip Jelacic who fought the scourge of Hungarian seperatism.

    For the Slovenes, Slovenia was the birthland of the great Austrian naval hero von Teggethoff. And of course Slovene folk music and culture is Alpine and Teutonic.

    You wail about ties that bind Britain but spit on the ties between the Croats and Vienna established from the time of Mohacs (1526).

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  3. Well, there have been certain developments since then, and some of them were within living memory at the time of the Slovenian and Croatian UDIs...

    It is a bit much to call Strossmayer "the Father of Yugoslavianism", and his conduct at the First Vatican Council reminds us that schismatic tendencies are nothing new among Croat nationalists. His speech to that Council will doubtless be cited if and when the Tudjman-Medjugorje faction goes into formal schism, and the early signs of that may already be evident among those Medjites already effectively separated from Rome.

    The case of the celebration of the Roman Rite in Slavonic is an important example of the tension between Papal authority and the conservation of legitimate variations in liturgical tradition, but that is another story.

    To return to your main point, to what did those ties between the former Austria-Hungary's southernmost provinces on the one hand, and a newly resurgent Germany on the other, lead first in the 1940s and then in the 1990s? We all know the answer to that.

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  4. My goodness, you are a learned man! You probably already know this, but the authorities at Vienna were most hostile to celebrating the Roman Rite in Slavonic in the coastal areas.

    Although the Breviary was in Latin, the Ritual was in vernacular Croatian Serbo-Croat even before Vatican II and that applied throughout Croatia, not only on the coast where the Mass was in Slavonic. So three different liturgical languages were used, one of them the ordinary local vernacular.

    The large and powerful Franciscan Third Order used Slavonic for everything, even the Breviary. But as you obviously know, Francisanism now has close links to Medjugorje, so be careful. There is also an edition of the Ordinary Form in Slavonic, published in the early days of the reform. But it is today very difficult to obtain.

    There are rumours of traditionalist priests occasionally celebrating the Extraordinary Form in Slavonic again. Maybe the spread of that practice as part of "the reform of the reform" will lead the Faithful back to Roman orthodoxy and away from Medjugorje and the glorification of the Ustashe both in the 1940s and in the 1990s?

    Your strong interest in Yugoslavia makes complete sense to me. That was where the forces of globalization first marched in to cut up an inconvenient country and hand over parts of it to extreme Islam. They have been doing both ever since. How right someone is to say that Croats who want to stay mainstream Catholics and Muslims who want to stay traditional Balkan Muslims choose to live in Serbia and oppose further breaking away from what remains of Yugoslavia.

    You really are an amazingly learned man.

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  5. And what about Strossmayer. It was he who called for the unity of Slovene, Croat, Serb and Bosniak within an entity within the Habsburg state called "Yugoslavia". The vision was to create an entity called Austria-Hungary-Yugoslavia. His vision also included getting the Kingdoms of Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria to enventually unite with Yugoslavia and in turn for the Habsburgs maybe to kick the Turks out of the Balkans.

    It was Strossmayer's influence that brought about the Declaration of Zadar whereby Serbs and Croats in the Habsburg state allied themselves.

    You are getting confused with the Croatian Party of Rights under Starcevic which was anti-Serb. Strossmyers's National Party also had to compete with the the Automnasa whose Latinised Croats rejected the notion of a united Croatia (preferring links with Italians) and the Serb Peasants Party who rejected the existence of Croatia as a country and merely Serbs in denial.

    We all know you hate Croats and are a fan of the murderous Karageorvic clan whose bungling of the creation of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes left the power trail for later events.

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  6. I am not confused at all. I don't do confused, dear.

    Strossmayer (I note that you still cannot spell his name correctly, although you are now onto your second variation) is a very poor object of emulation on all sorts of levels, and he represents a tradition of schismatic tendencies in the Croatian Church, the latest manifestation of which is the coming together of Medjugorje with Tudjman's invocation of the spirit of Henry VIII, Coquille, Pithou, Bossuet, van Espen, Hontheim, Joseph II, and all the rest of them. There are no new heresies.

    I love the idea of the revived Glagolithic form of the Roman Rite as the means of calling Croats away from these errors and back to their historic mission as Antemurale Christianitatis, even if it would have to be printed in a script that anyone could read. What do we make of the idea that the Glagolithic script was devised by Saint Jerome? Not much, I expect.

    Still, that use could be authorised beyond its pre-Conciliar redoubts, most obviously among the beleaguered Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina, now facing the reality of what they did in the Yugoslav Wars, and particularly susceptible to Megaforgery, to which traditionalist priests would give absolutely no quarter.

    The reform of the reform could do itself a lot of good if its great conferences featured not only the Tridentine Mass, but also, as well as the Eastern Rites, other Western Rites in regular use on the eve of the Council: Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Bragan, Glagolithic, of various Religious Orders, and so on. But we really are straying off topic now.

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  7. Mr Lindsay confused? Wash your mouth out.

    This is the one he pulls on the Irish a lot, everything you think you know from listening to bloodthirsty drinking songs is wrong, every serious scholar knows it is wrong but it would never occur to most of them to talk to you, your idea that it is the same thing as the Catholic faith is especially wrong. Great stuff.

    Glagolithic? Hontheim? Only Mr Lindsay, lads. Only Mr Lindsay.

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  8. You are absolutely amazing, the sort of figure lurking in colleges and parsonages that most people assume do not exist any more. No surprise that you are either a vicarage boy or originally a Chadsman, it all makes sense. No surprise that you are some sort of Dominican, either. The surprise is that you have never been ordainedm I suppose. I would bet that you really could read Glagolithic and were the last person left alive who still could.

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  9. If anyone on these shores still can, then I know who. But we really are off topic now.

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  10. I first read about Honorius III and Stephen II in Rome and the Eastern Churches: A Study in Schism, by Fr Aidan Nichols OP. Expect you did, too. Your thought chimes very well with that of Fr Nichols, apart from his enthusiasm for the Ordinariate. You have definitely found your niche as a Dominican.

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  11. Antoine Arnauld19 April 2011 at 14:09

    Further to above references @17:31, as I recall you know an awful lot about both Gallicanism and Jansenism. You should do a post on them sometime.

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  12. Oooh, after I have finished a bit of related reading and writing, then I might just. On how post-Vatican II traditionalism, with its French roots, has both Gallican and Jansenist charcteristics, perhaps? We'll see.

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