Bosnian bishop says U.S. policy fueling Catholic exodus

Voice of Bosnian church appeals for help from American Catholics to change course

by John L. Allen Jr. | Feb. 10, 2013NCR Today

The 67 million Catholics in the United States represent a theoretically powerful political bloc, though their impact is often splintered by internal divisions. If anything could elicit a unified front, however, perhaps it might be the realization that American foreign policy has effectively imposed a death sentence on the Catholic church in a small but symbolically important country, one that functions as a bellwether for the possibility of peaceful coexistence everywhere.

That, at least, is the dream of Auxiliary Bishop Pero Sudar of Sarajevo, a 61-year-old prelate who’s become the leading public voice of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s beleaguered Catholic minority.

The 1992-1995 Bosnian War that followed the breakup of the old Yugoslavia was one of the most shocking and symbolically charged conflicts of the post-Cold War era. A country long seen as a model for inter-religious harmony, where Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics lived side by side in peace, suddenly exploded into sectarian bloodshed. The 1995 Srebrenica massacre offered a new metaphor for genocide, and the upheaval in Bosnia reintroduced the concepts of “ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes” and “humanitarian intervention” into popular consciousness.

Today, the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina is widely seen as a litmus test not only for the stability the Balkans and southeastern Europe, but any region where people of differing religious and ethnic backgrounds share the same real estate.

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