VATICAN II AND YUGOSLAVIA 95tional colors, attempting to nationalize their history. Croat party
leaders like Savka Dabčević-Kučar and Miko Tripalo became na-
tional leaders, symbolically upsetting hierarchical relations in
the SKJ and the Yugoslav federation. The reopening of the na-
tional question—the place of Croats, Slovenes, and others in Yu-
goslavia, in the economy, and in the country’s international rep-
resentation—triggered a series of other questions, notably those
connected with the autonomy of culture and identity, as well as
the freedom of personality and belief. Ultimately, the suppressed
question of pluralism and democracy, too, rose to the fore.
The Croatian Spring of the early 1970s did not bypass the
conciliar Church. The important question of the Church’s role in
national identity, which had been present in various discussions
since the nineteenth century, at this point received new inter-
pretations. Tomislav Šagi-Bunić promulgated the incarnational
approach. According to this influential theologian, Christianity
incarnated itself in the pre-Christian forms of Croat natural re-
ligion, thereby becoming a part—though not a decisive part—of
the Croatian nation, since
to be a Catholic and to be a Croat is not the same, something that
we should have learned and assimilated not only because there ex-
ists a Muslim religious community of our language and kind, but
also because we have among us a significant number of people with-
out any religion. God in His Providence permitted that we, Croats
and Serbs, having accepted the novelty of atheism in our midst, be
forced to realize that it is indeed not the same to be a Croat and
to be Catholic or to be Serb and to be Orthodox, since nobody can
claim, even in jest, that our atheists are not Croats and Serbs. 46
Šagi-Bunić did not negate the national character of the
Church. As he put it, although Christianity is “an entirely differ-
ent kind of communal living from that of national communalism,
- Šagi-Bunić, “Ekumenska problematika kod nas,” Poslušni Duhu (Zagreb) 1,
no. 3 (1966): 79.