The administrator of Austria’s southernmost diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt, Engelbert Guggenberger, has refused the Croatian bishops’ conference permission to hold Mass at the annual commemoration of the 1945 massacre at Bleiburg on 18 May.
The memorial Mass, which the Croatian Church organises and finances, has annually commemorated the killing of sympathisers of Croatia’s Fascist Ustashe regime in a field outside the small Austrian town of Bleiburg by Yugoslav partisans on 15 May 1945.
Bleiburg, called Pliberk in Slovene, is a bilingual township four kilometres from the Slovene border, which in 1945 was the border with Yugoslavia.
The annual commemoration at Bleiburg has attracted thousands of Catholics, chiefly from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in recent years but has also increasingly become a magnet for fascists, who have made no secret of their radical right-wing views brandishing Ustashe flags and other fascist symbols.
In his letter to the Croatian bishops’ conference, Guggenberger explained that last year’s commemoration had shown that the conditions under which the Commemoration Mass had been permitted, had not been kept to and the Mass had been “part of an event which was politically instrumentalised and has now become part of a national-political ritual”. The general impression of the Bleiburg Commemoration was harming the Church’s reputation and above all implied that the Church lacked the necessary distance to fascist ideology.
The Governor of Carinthia, Peter Kaiser, welcomed the diocese’s decision as the “correct step to take”. He expected the Austrian government’s full support.
The Croatian bishops’ conference, on the other hand, sharply criticised the decision. “Prohibiting prayers for those who were massacred in this horrific tragedy of the Croatian people lacks respect for the victims”, it declared.
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