Isn't it a first rate scandal that despite the strongest opposition party which calls itself Social Democratic, despite the second strongest opposition party which emphasizes that it is not only liberal but also social, despite all those trade unions, precisely the Church opens the neglected political issue of social problems in Croatia.
Zagreb archbishop is everything but a revolutionary. He heads an institution which
represents the foundation of the system. The Croatian Catholic church is today the main
ideological apparatus of the Croatian state. Tudman rules not only through his
political and military-police apparatus, but in the widest possible sense through
ideology, using culture, education and above all the Croatian church.
To attend church services today in Croatia and be a practicing Catholic, doesn't
mean to express one's faith in God, but one's ideological and political orthodoxy.
Therefore, that doesn't mean "I believe in God," but "I am a real Croat!" By accepting the role of ideological hegemony the Croatian church has completed the process of its atheisation. Although the Communist materialist criticism of the religion and church
failed to demonstrate that its only truth is in its earthly, secular role, Franjo
Kuharic managed to discredit the Croatian Church by fully collaborating with Croatian
political and ideological nationalism [drzavotvorstvo].
Today, religion and church in Croatia feed on politics. All that is new
and revolutionary in Bozanic's approach is that he realized that one can also
perish from the politics and that the only chance the church has to preserve its
unprecedented privilege, its ideological hegemony, is to jettison Tudman's
ship before it sinks and takes the church with itself to the bottom.
What Croatia needs today, in order to build democracy and human dignity for its
citizens, are strikes and a legal rebellion of socially disenfranchised, rather than priestly sermons; sentimental affection for the priests is only a bad compensation for
deep disappointment in the politics of the Croatian opposition.
It would be good for Croatia if in it there remained someone who truly believed in God and respected some of Ten Commandments, for example "Don't kill!", so that the situation in which the Church is the first in the line when it is time to distribute crucifixes and rosaries, and the last in line when it's time to accept responsibility for crimes committed also under those symbols doesn't repeat in the future.
Thus, Bozanic only postpones the time when the church will have to face its true drama, the drama of those churches which find their reason for existence in authentic human religiosity, instead of its political surrogates: the fact that in the developed Western countries the faith in God has never been as low as today.