Religious minority groups have signed special agreements with the Croatian government, but will this end their marginalization?
A sense of optimism is spreading among small religious communities in Croatia as more and more of them are benefiting from a liberal legal regime.
The passage of the 2002 Law on the Legal Status of Religious Communities was followed in the summer of 2003 by a drive to register the roughly 50 minority religions in Croatia; a large majority of these groups has now acquired the full protection of the law. This protection has been reaffirmed by special agreements concluded last year between most traditional minority religions and the government.
In September, the U.S. State Department praised these developments in its annual report on religious freedom in the world.
The special agreements are modeled on the three that Croatia concluded with the Holy See in 1997 formalizing the dominant role of the Catholic Church, notably in the police and armed forces. (Negotiations on a fourth agreement are still ongoing and concern the return of, or compensation for, nationalized property, a point noted in the State Department report.) That similar, though less favorable, agreements have now been signed with other religious groups suggests that a new social reality may be emerging in a country where 87 percent of a population of 4.3 million is Roman Catholic.
Indeed, the Catholic Church says that the 1997 accords made the recognition of minority religions through similar agreements possible.
ON THE MARGINS
But the influence of the Church--together with the high share of Catholics among the population--has also created a social climate where the formal equality of religious communities amounts to very little.
Many of the small Eastern religions are still waiting, if not to be registered, then to be socially accepted.
The 1991 to 1995 war in Croatia made the Catholic faith an even more salient feature of public life, firmly establishing it as the wellspring of national and cultural identity. Population shifts also swelled the number of Catholics in the country.
Many minority religions felt compelled to sign the special agreements, as they provide additional guarantees of their rights in such areas as education, access to the media, or pastoral care. Of the larger minority groups, only the Jewish community is still negotiating; agreement has been delayed by the government’s reluctance to return nationalized property.
The fact that almost all traditional religious communities saw a need to sign these agreements points to their tenuous social recognition. The presence of religious minorities in the midst of a homogenous society still provokes ambivalent feelings. This particularly applies to new religious movements, which to a large extent have not signed these agreements.
Some experts are also raising questions about the legal equality the new accords supposedly ensure.
Davorin Peterlin, director of the Keston Institute in the United Kingdom, notes that in Croatia, “The Roman Catholic Church is more equal before the law. Not only because the agreements--the so-called concordats--with the Holy See preceded the law, which was then regulated based on them.” According to Peterlin, the concordats are international documents and therefore have more weight than the constitution. By contrast, the agreements with other religious communities are ordinary documents to be implemented domestically. Peterlin explains, “If the government had signed the agreement with the Croatian Bishops Conference and not with the Holy See, their status would be the same [as the new agreements].”
Nonetheless, he agrees that the recent law is a significant improvement. “The adopted law is a satisfactory compromise, and I think that most religious communities share my opinion,” Peterlin notes.
Paul Mojzes, a well-known American sociologist of religion and editor of the journal ***Religion in Eastern Europe,*** is not surprised that not everyone is happy. He says minority religions, except for the most established ones, might even have lost ground after the fall of communism.
“During the communist period, some of these churches received equality with the large communities, at least on paper. It wasn’t much, but somehow it gave them a sense of recognition. Since the collapse of communism, it seems that in both majority Catholic and Orthodox countries, though with great variation from country to country, minority religious communities are being relegated to the margins and sometimes actually denied the right to operate,” Mojzes says.
He attributes this to “overzealous local authorities and priests, but at times high government officials [who also] block registration and deny permissions for activities for which in truly free societies permission could be obtained without difficulty.”
Indicative of the legal pitfalls inherent in the law is its minimum requirement of 500 members for any group to register. Groups that fall short--typically those that emerged over the last 10 years--are relegated to the status of nongovernmental organizations and are recognized as religious groups only after a five-year waiting period.
Peterlin seconds the view that this is a source of unequal treatment. “The state does not have a right to arbitrate and to define the criteria (such as the number of people or theological content) of a ‘real faith’. … Not just the number of people in a community, but also the distinction between new and traditional should be irrelevant for registration,” he says.
A PROBLEM OF ATTITUDE
A key problem specific to the countries of former Yugoslavia is the ethnic dimension of religious identity. According to Mojzes, “Recent wars have only more strongly brought about this identification [of religion with ethnicity] because it was of mutual benefit to both the state and the Church to insist on the identity of every Croat as a Catholic. Actually, the Catholic Church among Croats is sometimes so exclusive that it seems to provide no real space to its members who are non-Croatian.”
This statement doesn’t make sense to Bishop Vlado Kosic from the Zagreb archdiocese, a proponent of ecumenicity and dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and other religious communities. He points to the legal equality of religions and says, “As the largest religious community in Croatia, the Catholic Church broke the ice by signing the agreement with the state and thereby opened the door for others to do the same.”
While careful to maintain that no religious group should feel inferior, Kosic confirms that better relations exist with the so-called historical churches, that is, those communities that have been present in the area for many centuries. He adds that it is hard to maintain good relations with new religious movements since they are trying to win new members by converting Catholics.
Gordan Pandza, a Croatian journalist for the daily Vjesnik who writes on religious affairs, is not convinced. He persistently warns that “The Catholic Church tends to be friendly … in public, while its true interest is the full Catholic evangelization of Croatian society, for which it uses every opportunity at all levels of society, from kindergarten to the government.”
One example is a recent row over optional yoga classes in schools as part of physical education, an offer the Church sought to suppress. “Minority religious groups are not a real problem for the Catholic Church and are not perceived as a serious rival as long as their influence with the young population doesn’t increase,” Pandza says.
LITTLE RESPECT
The provisions of the law and the pronouncements of Church representatives do not always fully reflect social reality in Croatia. Pandza says that the Church rarely misses an opportunity to emphasize that the beliefs of the new religious movements run counter to the spirit of Christianity and do not lead to an authentic life.
In a broader sense, Pandza says, “Minority religions cannot be satisfied only with the goodwill of the government and a liberal law. More social respect and recognition, not just mere tolerance, are very much needed. This is especially true in the case of small communities such as Buddhists, Hindus, or Baha’i, which are highly marginalized.”
Nonetheless, the Croatian Baha’i community has been recognized under the law thanks to its decade-long presence in Croatia, despite having only 130 registered members.
The largest established religious minority in Croatia has a somewhat different set of concerns. The Serbian Orthodox Church was among the first to sign a special agreement with the Croatian government. Metropolitan Jovan Pavlovic says, “So far, we are very happy with the attitude of the Croatian government toward our position in Croatia, and we welcome the ongoing process of return of property, both to us and to our believers.”
Despite unresolved problems relating to the return of forests, land, and real estate, Pavlovic, whose jurisdiction includes Zagreb, Slovenia, and Italy, doesn’t hide his satisfaction with the recent cooperation with state ministries, notably those for education, culture, and finance.
The analyst Peterlin confirms that the Serbian Orthodox Church is treated equitably. “Even though there are still some tense feelings at the local level, I think that the government is trying to implement the law,” he says.
Pavlovic hopes that the current Croatian government will stay the course of improving relations with religious minorities and go beyond nice gestures such as the visit to an Orthodox Christmas celebration by Prime Minister Ivo Sanader.
The head of the Islamic community in Croatia also says the law is being implemented fairly. Mufti Sefko Omerbasic, who represents 56,777 Muslims, points to just one problem area: “So far, only the religious practice in the army has not been regulated. This affects around 100 Muslim soldiers who cannot enjoy their religious rights to pastoral care at the moment.”
Omerbasic is glad that a decision has recently been made to proceed with the construction of a mosque in Rijeka, the country’s third largest city.
In his view, relations between the Islamic community and the Catholic Church in Croatia are cordial. “By regulating their own rights with the state, the Catholic Church helped us to find our [own] place in the law,” he says.
These feelings are also echoed by the representative of the 2,000-strong Baptist community in Croatia.
THE LONG ROAD FROM LEGAL PROTECTION TO SOCIAL RECOGNITION
Small religious communities from the East, though satisfied with the implementation of the law, feel more marginalized than traditional groups. For example, the more-than-1,000 members of Hare Krishna in Croatia face social isolation despite the fact that the group has had a presence in the country for close to 20 years.
The community’s vice president, Renato Petek, says, “We have no official contacts either with the government or with the Catholic Church, except at an individual level.” This could change, however, with the planned conclusion of a special agreement that would recognize Hare Krishna marriages and religious instruction in schools.
Sinisa Zrinscak, a sociologist of religion and professor at the Faculty of Law at Zagreb University, agrees that legal protection and social recognition are two very different things.
“Except for the minimum membership requirement for registration, we can speak of a very liberal law, even in comparison to similar legal models in EU countries. The law enshrines a broad spectrum of rights,” he says. At the same time, “Social context and tradition, which shape the prejudices and attitudes toward minority religions, are far more important than legal status.”
The two years since the law’s passage have shown that while legal equality is important, social attitudes are harder to change.
Says Peterlin, “Croatian society still has great problems in recognizing the value of pluralism in a democratic sense. In the religious context, the members of minority religious communities are often perceived as suspicious or stigmatized as sectarians.” Vedran Horvat is a Zagreb-based journalist specializing in social and migration issues.