VATICAN II AND YUGOSLAVIA 85“Letter of a Village Parish Priest,” in which the various foibles of
the regime were exposed to ridicule.29 All the same, the state au-
thorities were convinced that they had the upper hand after the
Council, whose logic, they thought, pushed church into accom-
modation with state.
Although concessions to religion in Communist party states
were not always a sign of reform, Yugoslavia in the early 1960s
was spared Soviet criticism on this account, as the Soviet leader-
ship—certainly at the end of the Khrushchev era and the first
Brezhnev years—was itself responding positively to the Vatican’s
new Ostpolitik. Nevertheless, Tito’s constant tension with the
Soviets and the Soviet model, since the reconciliation of 1955, in-
cluded a degree of defensiveness about Yugoslavia’s closeness to
the West. (In 1955, Tito told Khrushchev that the West “demand-
ed the establishment of a multiparty system [in Yugoslavia] and
a détente [with the opposition]: for example, in the case of St-
epinac—cardinal and archbishop, whom we had in prison.”)30
Just as Hungary was negotiating an agreement with the Holy
See in September 1964, Yugoslavia was in the midst of an internal
conflict over a series of reforms, economic and political, that had
commenced in 1961.31 Moreover, at the Eighth Congress of Yu-
goslavia’s ruling League of Communists in 1964, after the initial
failure of economic reforms, the leadership was divided over a
series of administrative issues that reopened the ever-dangerous
- A typical example was the lampooning of a noted journalist who over-
reached in an attempt to explore theological dilemmas that might result for the
Church, should space exploration discover extraterrestrial intelligent life; Don Jure,
“Tete Luce i Marsijanci,” Glas Koncila, September 5, 1965. - Tok konferencije jugoslovenske i sovjetske delegacije, 69. Archives of Yugo-
slavia (AJ), Belgrade: KPR I-3-a SSSR. Tito added that, in a 1950 draft, the U.S. am-
bassador conditioned American aid on the release of Stepinac: “I responded in the
following way: ‘Tell your government... if the American leaders put Stepinac on one
side and the Yugoslav people on the other, then we require no help.’ He transmitted
this message, and we got help.” - See chapter 2, by Árpád von Klimó, in this volume.