VATICAN II AND YUGOSLAVIA 93logian, famously preached. The Movement of Croat University
Students (Pokret Hrvatskih Sveučilištaraca, 1970–71) was the
principal agent of democratization for Croatian society during
the reform movement of 1967–71, and it cannot be conceived
without the infrastructure provided by the Church. This topic
is still largely unexplored in historical research. To this must be
added the summer youth camps on the Adriatic, which were or-
ganized by Josip Ladika, the chief administrator of Glas Koncila,
as well as a number of groups that functioned in other major cit-
ies such as Split (St. Francis, the Assumption of the Blessed Vir-
gin Mary, Pojišan) and Rijeka (Synaxis Youth Community, led by
Tihomir Ilija Zovko, OP).
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the youth groups were formed
somewhat earlier, after Ignacije Gavran translated the Catholic
catechism from German in 1963. A notable gathering point was
the Church of St. Anthony at Bistrik in Sarajevo, where Bono Lekić
and Ljubo Lucić were especially active. Students of the Franciscan
Theological Faculty in Sarajevo, members of the “Jukić” Assembly
of Franciscan Seminarians, responded to the student movement,
founding the journal Jukić (editor: Mile Babić) already in 1968.
The confluence of these tendencies helped to create vast ex-
pectations in all segments of society. This was especially the case
given their convergence with the beginning of the reform move-
ment in Croatia, after the Croatian party organization dismissed
its unitarist fraction. The so-called “Croatian Spring” thus fol-
lowed the Tenth Plenum of the Croatian party’s central commit-
tee in January 1970. The election of Ivan Zvonimir Čičak, himself
a leading participant in the Catholic student groups, to the post
of student-rector of the University of Zagreb in December 1970
was the first victory of a declared Catholic by secret ballot since
the introduction of Communist power in 1945.41
The “mass movement,” as the Communist authorities dubbed
- Tihomir Ponoš, Na rubu revolucije: Studenti ’71 (Zagreb: Profil, 2007), 75–78.