"If you live in Croatia and are not a Catholic, you have to feel being pushed aside. The feeling is enhansed by the Croatian Television and the media, and there is nobody to protect the atheists in the country. Croatia doesn’t like diversity. This is a society in which everybody should be Croat, Catholics and support Dinamo or Hajduk” – Nenad Puhovski

The quote above, by a prominent Croatian film director, best illustrates the secularity of Croatian state or, to paraphrase the Prime Minister of Croatia, the modern, European Croatia that moves at full throttle towards full membership of the European Union.

In spite of efforts to present Croatia in the best light, as a modern, secular state, with strict separation of church and state “affairs”, the situation on the ground is somewhat different. From the early days of independence won in the war of the first half of the 1990s, the Catholic Church had a say in state policies, both national and foreign. Through the viewpoint of patriotism and liberation of “chains of communism”, the people were presented with the opinion of the church as undisputable and unquestionable, with bishops turning into highly important public figures in Croatian political life during the decade. The Church maintains its strong influence in society to this day. Its presence in Croatian politics, education, economy and even advertising is stronger today than ever, presented to the citizens as a national interest and a factor that cannot be avoided in everyday life in, what still is, secular Croatia.

Catholic Croatia

Croatia is a catholic country, an indisputable fact for now. The believers and the dogma they accept are the measure, the supreme criteria that is not and should not be questioned. Article 40 of the Constitution that guarantees the free expression of religious and other beliefs is interpreted as referring to just the freedom to express religious belief, if possible the one and only right faith, the state’s one.

To support the claim that Catholic Church maintains strong influence in Croatia, we have the fact that, in 1997, the Croatian Sabor (the Parliament) ratified the so called Vatican Agreements, a set of four agreements Croatia signed with the Holy Sea. The agreements entitles the Church to organized religious education in schools and kindergartens, name army chaplains, representative in the Council of Crotian Radio and Television and specialized TV programmes, and has a say in adoption of new legislation. The direct lobbying by the Church has led to the adoption of the Law on Non-Working Sunday, conservative concept for the Law on Artificial Pregnancy and even the Law on Noise Pollution which prohibits excessive noise, apart from church bells knell.

“There seems to be an understanding in a major part of Croatian public and political elites, contrary to the Constitution and provisions on church-state separation, that if one group is more numerous, especially if it is much more numerous than the others, that all those others are treated as if they didn’t existed. They should fit in, send their children to religious education, have a church wedding. Let them get comfortable under the crucifixions in the schools and court rooms. They should accept the religious norms built into the laws, for if they are good for the majority, they have to be good to the minority. Most importantly, they should not stir up the harmony with their dissent. They should keep silent”, writes Bojana Genov in an article for Zamirzine, published March 10, 2009.

Official statistics show that only one in twenty citizens said they were not religious. The other 95 percent declare themselves believers, naturally, most of them Catholics. Bearing in mind the influence the Catholic Church has in Croatian society, it is difficult to imagine the streets of Zagreb, Split or Marija Bistrica roamed by “atheist busses”, seen since the start of the year on the streets of London, Barcelona, Genoa and other cities in Western Europe.

Secular State – State Called Desire

Secularism means that the state shall stay out of religious matters and will prevent religious dogma to turn into political laws. By that criteria, Croatia is, on declarative level, a secular state, but her legislative and executive institutions remain under the indirect influence of the Church. For example, the Sabor has adopted the Law on Non-Working Sunday we mentioned above under the direct lobbying ofthe Church.

Secularism also means that believing or not believing is a private matter for every individual person and women and men shall not be asked to identify themselves in public work through their religious affiliation. That is hardly a case in Croatia, especially among public personalities and office holders. Six-feet long candles carried by politicians are unavoidable sight at religious processions. The Sabor pulpit often turns into a preacher’s pulpit used to put emphasis on MP’s personal Catholicism as an argument in favour of legislative decisions. Politicians, decorated with crosses and crucifixes eagerly, and with full media entourage, celebrate religious holidays and try to fit into the framework provided in the instruction of the ruling Church.

Secularism means that believers and non-believers will be treated equally, including the right to advertise on means of public transport. A small women association in Croatia recently joined the European atheist campaign, and rented one public tram-car with the slogan “Without God and Master”. In spite of the fact that the whole procedure was regular and followed all regulations, the weight that the Church carries in Croatia is too big, and the tram-car that “insulted the ears of the faithful majority” was let to circle the streets of Zagreb for just a couple of hours. The tram-car was removed from traffic with several absurd excuses, of which only the one that the entity that commissioned the ad wasn’t signed held some water. In spite of the fact that the proper signature was secured, the so-called secular tram-car never took to the streets again. So much about freedom and equal treatment for all in secular Croatia.

Secularism also means that the management of any enterprise, and in particular public enterprise, in a capitalist economy faced by the tide of the coming recession reported endlessly by the public broadcaster, can’t apply self-censorship of a type that would make them refuse profits and business ethics due to the fact that the message will not be generally acceptable.

Secularism means that there will be no animosity towards any other religion, but also towards atheism and agnosticism. Still, while agnostics and atheists may be a minority, the leadership of the Catholic Church and religious media use every opportunity, even in other electronic and print media and in sermons, to warn of the danger of anti-religious tendencies. In Croatia there are several pieces of legislation that largely ignore the positions of non-believers as well as liberally oriented believers.

Secularism means that only those symbols seen as common to all citizens will adorn the public spaces, not just the symbols of a single religious community, in spite of it being the largest in the country. In Croatia, we have something else. Crucifixes are to be found in almost all classrooms, in all schools. Religious symbols, mostly Catholic crucifixes hang on the walls of all public institutions, courts, public offices and hospitals.

Secularism means it shouldn’t be possible for a public television, the same one that dedicates more coverage to the recession abroad, dedicating it time disproportionate to the time left until the Local Elections, to completely ignore in its central news the fact that Croatian Women’s Network started campaign for enforcement of Constitutional provisions on separation of church and state.

“It is hardly a secret, or a surprise, that the institutionalized Church believes it has a monopoly on the knowledge of creation of life on the planet and which values human society should follow, or how that society should be set up. The Catholic Church in Croatia is not an exception and has made significant advances compared to Catholic Church in the other countries that it is probably subject of great envy. Some of those advances are listed in the agreements with the Holy Sea, some result from the skilful use of turbulent events in Croatia in the early 1990s and the pervert need of the newly emerging political elites to such up to the Church and get her support”, note the web-page of the Coalition for Secularism.

The very creation of the Coalition for Secularism, gathering quite a few organizations and individuals, at a time when governing institutions, under the leadership of the Catholic Church and unnerved by the secular tram-car, ostracized the organizers of the campaign, speaks volumes about the need for Croatian society to move from declarative to applied secularity.

Most members of the Coalition share the opinion that it was the fear of the Government to get cross with the Church that encouraged the Church to increasingly openly attack the state institutions and try to subdue them. Whenever the Sabor adopted legislation not to its liking, the Church raised its voice. Since it has not reconciled with the secular character of Croatian society, the Church still tries to change its Constitutional status, fortunately, without much success. For that reason, of maybe because it doesn’t know otherwise, every different worldview will be presented as relict of communist mentality, so that anybody who disagrees with the Church’s worldview should be considered communist.

Atheists, agnostics, secularists and other members of society that refuse to bow to the social norms dictated by the Catholic Church, therefore, have the right to keep their mouths shut, hide the fact that what they are, i.e. that they are not what they should be. If they fail to do that successfully, everybody can use that to attack them whenever or however he or she wishes, allegedly insulted in his or her beliefs.