October 5, 2020 – As Fratellanza umana reports, in his third encyclical "Fratelli tutti", published on October 4, 2020, Pope Francis quotes the most important and unfortunately forgotten document of the Croatian Bishops' Conference.
In an issue number 253 of his new encyclical named "Fratelli tutti" on fraternity and social friendship, Bishop Francis of Rome quotes the Letter of the Croatian Bishops' Conference on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, signed on May 1, 1995.
In addition to this document, Pope Francis quotes several other bishops' conferences elsewhere, which is not a novelty of this encyclical, but it is a novelty of his pontificate.
In any case, this is the first time that a bishop of Rome has quoted a Croatian Bishops' Conference's document in an encyclical. And he did not choose this 25-year-old document by chance, since the bishops in it ask very important moral questions for the believers and the entire Croatian society:
"It is not the main weightiness of the question in how to mourn the victims of one’s community and how to recognize the guilt of another community. Croats and Serbs, Catholics and Orthodox, Muslims and others are faced with a more difficult moral question: How to mourn the victims of another community, how to admit guilt in one's community? And then: How to atone for guilt, how to obtain the forgiveness of God and human, peace of conscience and reconciliation between people and nations? How to start a new age based on righteousness and truth?" reads the Letter of the Croatian Bishops' Conference on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, on May 1, 1995.
In this new encyclical "Fratelli tutti", Pope Francis cites an excerpt from the CBC's letter which precedes this one, and is also related to the attitude towards the victims of the "other side". Thus the 253rd issue of the Pope's encyclical reads:
"When there have been injustices on both sides, it must be recognized that they may not have been of equal weight or they are not comparable. Violence perpetrated by the state structures and powers is not on the same level as violence by individual groups. In any case, it cannot be expected that only the unjust sufferings of only one of the parties will be mentioned. As the bishops of Croatia have taught, 'we owe equal respect to every innocent victim. There can be no ethnic, confessional, religious, national, or political differences'.“
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