Evelyn Waugh on the Sarajevo Franciscans
Evelyn Waugh, the famous British novelist, spent the latter part of World War II as part of an Allied mission to the Communist-led partizans of Tito, together with his friend, Randolph Churchill. Waugh despised the Communists - and Tito in particular - and later savaged them both in his novel Unconditional Surrender. He also circulated a report damning the Yugoslav authorities for persecuting the Catholic Church. This excerpt from a letter to his superior describes the attitude of the Franciscans he had interviewed about the pre-war period. Since 1922 Sarajevo had been under the ecclesiastic administration of Archbishop Ivan Saric.
Evelyn Waugh, the famous British novelist, spent the latter part of World War II as part of an Allied mission to the Communist-led partizans of Tito, together with his friend, Randolph Churchill. Waugh despised the Communists - and Tito in particular - and later savaged them both in his novel Unconditional Surrender. He also circulated a report damning the Yugoslav authorities for persecuting the Catholic Church. This excerpt from a letter to his superior describes the attitude of the Franciscans he had interviewed about the pre-war period. Since 1922 Sarajevo had been under the ecclesiastic administration of Archbishop Ivan Saric.
For some time the Croat Franciscans had caused misgivings in Rome for their independence and narrow patriotism. They were mainly recruited from the least cultured part of the population and there is abundant evidence that several wholly unworthy men were attracted to the Franciscan Order by the security and comparative ease which it offered. Many of these youths were sent to Italy for training. Their novitiate was in the neighborhood of Pavelic's HQ at Siena where Ustasha agents made contact with them and imbued them with Pavelic's ideas. They in turn, on returning to their country, passed on his ideas to the pupils in their schools. Sarajevo is credibly described as having been a centre of Franciscan Ustashism.
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| Title: Evelyn Waugh on the Sarajevo Franciscans | |
| Source: Letter from Captain Evelyn Waugh to Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean. Quoted in Rhodes, Anthony. The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922-1945, p. 328. | |
| Date: | Added: October 2002 |