The Catholics are taking over! (minority, mission, church, faith)

[Djamila]

Jovana Bosnjak fled central Bosnia with her Roman Catholic family in 1992,
driven out of Banja Luka by Orthodox Christian friends just days before the city
was completely ethnically cleansed of its Catholic and Muslim populations. She
holds up a photograph of how her home looked when she was finally allowed to
return in 2003, with the completely rebuilt house visible in the background.

Of all the various religious groups in Bosnia, Roman Catholics have - since the war - had the least amount of success in reclaiming their pre-war homes. One out of every three Roman Catholics in Bosnia is still waiting for permission from various Orthodox Christian-controlled municipal governments to return to their pre-war homes.

Nowhere is the situation more dire than in Banja Luka. The local Bishop, Komarica (I believe that's his name), has even won awards from a whole host of international organizations during his decade-long battle to allow for Roman Catholics to return to their pre-war homes in the city.

That battle is starting, very slowly, to bear fruit. A new Roman Catholic Church was constructed in Banja Luka and two of the 13 that were dynamited during the ethnic cleansing campaign are being rebuilt.

Several thousand of the city's Catholic residents have reclaimed their homes, several high profile times by forcibly hauling Serbian settlers out.

Efforts to get the city of Sarajevo to authorize the construction of a new Catholic church continue (I still can't believe it's still going on. Their community is growing, they need another Church, what's the ****ing problem?).

Efforts to find permanant, refugee housing for those Catholics still living on airport runways in tents and other similar, horrible conditions (A DECADE AFTER THE WAR!) continue (that one is 100% the fault of Muslim leaders).

[Victor]

Do you know what exactly is holding this back?

[Djamila]

Originally Posted by Victor

Do you know what exactly is holding this back?

There are a number of factors, none of them especially evil.

1. Croatia is doing exceptionally well. When Croatia is surpassing Bosnia in most every sphere of a country's health, that can breed resentment towards Bosnian Croats (Roman Catholics).

2. The areas where Bosnian Croats are still waiting to return are populated mainly by Croatian Serbs (Orthodox Christians), refugees driven out of Croatia when that country violently beat back its Serbian occupation in 1995 - reclaiming its territory but driving out 250,000 Croatian Serbs in the process. Obviously, Croatian Serb settlers in Bosnian towns are none to thrilled to leave their occupied homes so any Croats can take them back.

3. Demographics. Catholicism is the smallest of Bosnia's three major faiths (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and Catholicism). Bosnian Croats tend to live in communities that have an overwhelming Roman Catholic majority. That means you have a small number of towns and cities which Croats control more or less completely, consequently in most Bosnian cities they are a very small minority with little or no say at all. There is no political reason, for example, to do anything for Roman Catholics in Sarajevo. Their votes make absolutely no difference on a city-wide scale.

4. Bosnian Croats, and to a similar extent Bosniaks, also committed crimes during the 1992-1995 war. They were not as systematic or as widespread as Serbian crimes, but they existed just the same. A Serbian woman in Celebici, for example, doesn't care that her people killed tens of thousands of Muslims in concentration camps. All she cares about is the day Muslim soldiers razed her village. Because she's not able to receive justice from the courts, she and others like her - adopted by significant numbers of nationalists who exploit such situations - manifest their hurt in other ways, like refusing the right of return.

[sweetiepie]

Hi ,I'm sweetiepie.