VATICAN II AND YUGOSLAVIA 81ats and Catholics.”15 He begged “our Orthodox brethren to forgive
us just as crucified Christ forgave all.”16 Pichler found a ready in-
terlocutor in Andrej Frušić, the Orthodox bishop of Banja Luka,
who allowed the Franciscans of the nearby Petrićevci monastery
to hold Mass in the Orthodox church of Slatina. After the de-
structive earthquake that greatly damaged northwestern Bosnia
in 1969, Frušić on occasion turned over his Banja Luka cathedral
to Bishop Pichler.
Tomislav J. Šagi-Bunić, the most important Croat theologian
of the conciliar period, recorded four crucial conciliar insights
about the Church, all tied “with growing consciousness about the
centrality of Eucharistic liturgy. These are the insights that the
Church is the People of God, that the Church is a mystery, then
the growing consciousness about the importance of the local Church
in relation to the universal Church, and the insight about the
cruciality of the concept of communion.”17 This is why the Coun-
cil opted for the vernacular liturgy, greater participation of the
laity in liturgy and the life of the Church, and the autonomous
rights of Eastern churches in communion with Rome (Orienta-
lium ecclesiarum).
Twenty years after the Council, Šagi-Bunić held that, in the
meantime, a “new world had come into being that is best re-
flected in the deep schism and misunderstanding between the
old and the young.” He attributed this schism to the growth of
the media (notably TV) that divided the old world of ideas and
logical discursive thought, to which the conciliar generation be-
- The Ustaša collaborationist regime, which was responsible for major crimes
against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, sought to legitimize itself in wartime Croatia
through a show of fidelity to the Catholic Church; on this subject, see Tomasevich,
War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 517–68. - Quoted in Tomo Vukšić, “Međucrkveno i međunacionalno pitanje u djelu
i misli biskupa Alfreda Pichlera (I),” Crkva u Svijetu (Split) 39, no. 1 (2004): 143–44. - Tomislav J. Šagi-Bunić, “20 godina poslije II Drugog vatikanskog koncila,”
in Jeka jednoga Koncila, ed. Vlado Košić and Antun Peranić (Zagreb: Kršćanska
Sadašnjost, 1984), 47; italics in the original.