Alojzije Aloysius Stepinac was born to a large prosperous peasant family in the village of Krašić, Croatia, about 40 miles from Zagreb, then a part of Austria-Hungary, on May 8, 1898. He was the fifth of nine children, and he had three more siblings from his father's first marriage.
His mother, a devout Roman Catholic, prayed constantly that he would enter the priesthood. The family moved to Krašić in 1906, and Stepinac attended primary school there, then attended high school in Zagreb from 1909-15, boarding at the Archdiocese of Zagreb orphanage. This was followed by study at the lycée of the archdiocese, as he was seriously considering taking holy orders, having sent in his application to the seminary at the age of 16.
He was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army for service in World War I, and had to accelerate his studies and graduate ahead of schedule. Sent to a reserve officers school in Rijeka, after six months training he was sent to serve on the Italian Front in 1917 where he commanded Bosnian soldiers.
After the war, Stepinac attended the University of Zagreb in the new state of Yugoslavia, and in 1924 he enrolled in the Gregorian University in Rome to prepare for the Roman Catholic priesthood. A brilliant student, he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology and was ordained a priest in 1930.
Wounded and captured by the Italians, he subsequently joined and fought with the Allied-sponsored Yugoslav Volunteer Corps at Salonika. By 1919 he had earned several decorations for valor and had attained the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, he returned to Yugoslavia to serve as a parish priest in the slums of Zagreb. Thereafter, his rise in the church hierarchy was extremely rapid, propelled by his growing reputation for deep piety and capable administration as well as his friendship with Papal Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who was to become Pope Pius XII in 1939. Stepinac was appointed secretary to Archbishop Ante Bauer of Zagreb, then (in 1934) titular Archbishop of Nicope and co-adjutor to Bauer, and finally (in 1937) Archbishop of Zagreb. The new primate of Yugoslavia was one of the youngest archbishops in Roman Catholic history.
In 1941, when Yugoslavia fell before the attack of Nazi Germany, Croatia declared itself an independent state. In reality, it became a puppet ally of Germany under the fascist (Ustaša) regime of Ante Pavelić. Stepinac, a dedicated Croatian patriot, accepted the Pavelić government as the legitimate representative of Croatian aspirations to political self-determination. To the very last days of World War II he publicly exhorted his clergy as well as the Croatian masses to support and defend the Ustaša state. He himself accepted the post of Supreme Apostolic Vicar General of the Croatian army and became a member of the ruling Council of State. His other actions and attitudes are in dispute.
At war's end Marshal Tito's partisans took control of a reunited Yugoslavia and set up a Communist state. In November 1945 Stepinac was arrested, then released, ostensibly at the order of Tito himself. In a pastoral letter, Stepinac openly denounced Communism. He adamantly refused to accept the new regime's secularization of education and the destruction of the Catholic Church's privileges and the nationalization of its property. In September 1946 he was arrested and charged with wartime collaboration with the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy, and the Ustaša, as well as other war crimes and crimes against the new Yugoslav state. In October 1946 he was found guilty by the Supreme Court at Zagreb and sentenced to the confiscation of all of his property, the loss of his civil rights for five years, and imprisonment at hard labor for 16 years in Lepoglava Prison. The Vatican promptly excommunicated all persons connected with his arrest and trial. The tall, ascetic prelate quickly became a world-wide symbol of the growing church-state conflict in the new Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.
In prison, the sentence of hard labor was not enforced. Stepinac was permitted to live in modest but clean quarters, to receive books, and to perform religious services and take communion. When Tito broke with the Soviet bloc in 1948, Stepinac's imprisonment threatened to embarrass his attempts to improve Yugoslav relations with the West. Stepinac was, therefore, released in December 1951, but was forbidden to act as a bishop and restricted to his native village of Krašić. There he served as a simple parish priest to the local inhabitants, numbering about 400 persons. In November 1952 the Papacy announced Stepinac's long-awaited elevation to the rank of cardinal. The following month Yugoslavia, in return, severed diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Stepinac did not go to Rome to be invested as a Prince of the Church, knowing that he would not be permitted to return home by the Yugoslav government. He also refused to go abroad for treatment of a blood-clotting problem (polycythemia) from which he suffered after 1953. Two American physicians were, however, permitted to come to Yugoslavia to treat him and to operate to remove blood clots from his bloodstream. He died of a heart ailment complicated by pneumonia in Krašić on February 10, 1960. His tomb in Zagreb has since become a place of pilgrimage for Croatian nationalists.
Alojzije Stepinac became a world-wide symbol of Roman Catholic resistance to Communism when he was imprisoned by the Communist regime of Yugoslavia in 1946.
In 2007, the municipality of Marija Bistrica began on a project called Stepinac's Path, which would build pilgrimage paths linking places significant to the cardinal: Krašić, Kaptol in Zagreb, Medvednica, Marija Bistrica, and Lepoglava. The Aloysius Stepinac Museum opened in Zagreb in 2007.
Croatian football international Dario Šimić wore a T-shirt with Stepinac's image on it under his jersey during the country's UEFA Euro 2008 game against Poland, which he revealed after the game.
In 2008, a total of 119 streets in Croatia were named after Alojzije Stepinac, making him the tenth most common person eponym of streets in the country.
His defenders insist that, unlike other prominent Croatian Catholic churchmen, and at great personal risk to himself, Stepinac denounced the barbarous Nazi racial theories and practices adopted by the Ustaši and that he conducted extensive relief work among Christian and Jewish war refugees, even hiding them in episcopal buildings. They also deny that he condoned the forced conversions of Orthodox Christians to Catholicism or the notorious massacres of many thousands of Serbs, Jews, Slovenes, and anti-fascist Croats.
Quotes from others about the person
Stella Alexander, author of The Triple Myth, a sympathetic biography of Stepinac, writes about him that "Two things stand out. He feared Communism above all (especially above fascism); and he found it hard to grasp that anything beyond the boundaries of Croatia, always excepting the Holy See, was quite real. . .. He lived in the midst of apocalyptic events, bearing responsibilities which he had not sought. . .. In the end one is left feeling that he was not quite great enough for his role. Given his limitations he behaved very well, certainly much better than most of his own people, and he grew in spiritual stature during the course of his long ordeal. "
The historian Jozo Tomasevich wrote that while Stepinac is to be commended for his actions on behalf of individuals and groups, as well as his general proclamations of human rights, Stepinac’s failure to publicly condemn the genocide against the Serbs, “cannot be defended from the standpoint of humanity, justice and common decency” The historian Robert McCormick states, “tor all the Archbishop’s hand wringing, he continued to be a tacit participant in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC). He repeatedly appeared in public with the Poglavnik (the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić), and issued Te Deum’s on the anniversary of the ISC’s creation. His failure to publicly denounce the Ustaše’s atrocities in the name of the ISC, was tantamount to accepting Pavelić’s policies. "
