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this does not mean that Christians can be outside their ethnos
and nation, that they can be without interest or responsibility
for their terrestrial homeland.” At the same time, he made plain
the expressly anti-Christian nature of selfish nationalism, which
“certainly must be condemned,” especially as “it cannot be in har-
mony with the Christian attitude to life.”47 Moreover, Šagi-Bunić
advocated a politically powerless Church, responsible to the peo-
ple, not to the authorities. He most decisively rejected the idea
that the Catholic Church, as a church, could be responsible for the
safeguarding of the Croatian nation. According to him, the nation
was not a transcendental value, nor would there be national man-
sions in the Father’s house. In the opinion of Živko Kustić, Šagi-
Bunić’s understanding “about the relationship between church
and nation, about the rootedness of the Church in the national
soul, about how the Church must not be chauvinistic or nation-
alistic, but must be national, about how the Church has responsi-
bility for the destiny of the nation, about how the Church is less
concerned with the state and far more with the people” repre-
sented ideas that would later be celebrated by John Paul II. Yet
these ideas were “coming out on the pages of Glas Koncila by Dr.
T. Šagi-Bunić at least five, six, and more years before Pope Wojtyła
started expressing them.”48
Perhaps it is only natural that Šagi-Bunić’s incarnational view
developed in the era of optimism preceding Tito’s coup against
the reform-minded Croatian party leadership. That coup took
place at the Twenty-Second Session of the SKJ Central Commit-
tee, which convened at Tito’s hunting resort Karađorđevo (Vojvo-
dina) in December 1971. Duly condemned for “nationalist devia-
tions,” the reformers were obliged to resign from the leadership
and party membership. There ensued a purge of several thousand
- Šagi-Bunić, Crkva i domovina (Zagreb: Kršćanska Sadašnjost, 1970), 19, 21.
- Kustić, “ ‘Glas Koncila’ u postkoncilskom vremenu.”