The head of the Catholic Church in Bosnia-Herzegovina has said he hopes the Pope's June visit will bring new interest in his “forgotten country” and foster hope among Catholics 20 years after the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord.
“Since the visit was announced, Bosnia-Herzegovina has moved away from the oblivion it was confined to by the international community and begun to exist again internationally,” said Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo. “There’s no equality between citizens here, and Catholics are particularly penalised. So the Pope’s presence is needed to give a strong impulse to the Catholic community in its attempts at fruitful dialogue with other confessions and religions.”
The 69-year-old cardinal was speaking amid preparations for Pope Francis' 6 June visit to the Bosnian capital. In an interview on his archdiocese’s website, he said Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish leaders had agreed to help organise the pilgrimage, but added that he hoped it would also help tackle the serious problems facing Catholics since the end of the four-year civil war in 1995.
“The Dayton Accord effectively established the principle of ethnic cleansing - this meant injustice and inequality, since only a small part of the Catholic ethnic Croats living in the Serbian Republic have been able to return to their homes,” Cardinal Puljic said. “For reasons of political and economic strategy, the United States placed Muslim interests at the forefront, while Europe has also turned its head away for many years, not wanting to look. Europe was and is too busy thinking about money, banks and profits. Catholics do not exist for the European Union, which ignores us completely and has no sympathy for us.”
Mostly ethnic Croatian Catholics currently make up 15 per cent of the 4.3 million citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Muslims and Orthodox Serbs comprising 48 per cent and 37 per cent respectively. Church membership was much higher before the 1992-5 war.
In his interview, Cardinal Puljic said the Catholic Church had spent years negotiating the construction of a single new church in Sarajevo's Grbaviza suburb, when dozens of mosques had been built over the same period, and had been prevented by “bureaucratic problems” from building a new Catholic hospital in the city.
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