Content for Croatia

A demonstration against concordats was held in Croatia in 2016, demanding abolition of Croatia’s concordats with the Vatican, claiming they cost Croatians more than a billion kuna a year (over 140 million US dollars) and violate separation of church and state.

In 1999 the elderly survivors of the Croatian Holocaust launched their claim for compensation against the Franciscans and the Vatican Bank, but ten years later their claims were rejected because the American court said it lacked jurisdiction over the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank was further shielded by the internal Vatican monitoring body set up to prevent money laundering.

Had Franjo Tudjman, the first president of Croatia, lived longer he might have been convicted of war crimes committed in the civil war of the 1990s. For politicians shunned by the world, a concordat with the Vatican means welcome acceptance and, in fact, Tudjman concluded four of them. In 1998, just before the financial concordat was signed, the Vatican sweetened the deal by beatifying an archbishop convicted as a war criminal for complicity in the WWII Croatian Holocaust. 

This concordat assures that the Church gets advance warning of any impending investigation of its clerics. In light of the atrocities perpetrated during the Croatian Holocaust (1941-45) and the Croatian War of Independence (1991-95), this may be a prudent move.