Knin, (IKA) – On August 5, Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day, Bishop Ante Ivas of Šibenik led the celebration of a Mass in Knin at the church of Our Lady of the Great Croatian Baptismal Vow. Together with a number of priests, the concelebrants included Bishop Mile Bogović of Gospić-Senj and the Military Ordinary of the Republic of Croatia, Bishop Juraj Jezerinac. The celebration was also attended by high government officials, President Ivo Josipović and Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, with their associates.
“There are those who ask: ‘What are you celebrating in Knin’ Perhaps there are indeed those who do not know what we are celebrating here today and why we are thanking God! There are those who have forgotten because, unfortunately, we quickly forget the important and sacred events of our history and leave it to others to interpret them for us, to distort them and write them in a different handwriting… Some also ask this because today they are still stubbornly twisting and suppressing the truth about the causes and effects, the aggressor and the victims, and even persistently and deviously claiming that what happened here is yet another Croatian ‘criminal act’ against the Serbian people… This lie has been persistently and aggressively told to all of us and others, even the international courts and world public opinion. They think that this day should not be celebrated here or anywhere else in Croatia,” said Bishop Ivas in his homily and continued: “We here today know what we are celebrating and what we should celebrate. Here today, once again, for the fifteenth time, for fifteen years, we proclaim to all, in the homeland and world, whether someone likes it or not: ‘We celebrate the Truth that occurred here among us and to us, to which we are living witnesses, for which many gave their lives… We celebrate the Truth that we cannot and will not allow anyone else to deny, alter, distort or invalidate, not for any price or ransom. We proclaim to ourselves, our people and everyone: Here today we are celebrating Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day. And for all of this, by this Holy Mass for the Homeland, we give thanks to God. We also pray that this day of thanksgiving will be celebrated and that the Croatian flag will fly forever throughout all of Croatia,” said Bishop Ivas.
“It is important to be always prepared to respond to those who inquire with good intentions, particularly our children and young people, to whom we are obliged to tell and explain the whole Truth about our history, the ‘pure’ Truth, not colored by ideology or political expediencies, not the crippled and forcibly edited or annihilated Truth. Unfortunately, it seems that there is no clear desire or will to investigate and make known the Truth of our history in an impartial and dispassionate manner, as St. Peter would say: ‘with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear!’ We should be prepared to provide a well-reasoned response in Truth, especially to those ‘who defame us.’ This is also for the sake of the Truth about our past and, especially, our future, because ‘only the truth will set you free. … And everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,’ says our Teacher and Lord Christ Jesus. The Truth is a gift from God that binds. The mutilated and distorted Truth, like untruth and lies, is a sin that breeds injustice and unrest, that portends new, painful and dangerous frustrations among the people, especially among those ‘little’ people, the silent majority, because their voice is not heard or is suppressed in the public media, who are being disparaged or labeled with already familiar ‘stock phrases from on high,'” said Bishop Ivas.
“We here today gratefully praise God for the gift of this country, our beautiful homeland of Croatia. We give thanks for God’s great gift, through which, according to the free will and vote by the majority of the Croatian people, the independent and free state of Croatia has finally been established, for ‘the gift in which Almighty God has given us all treasures,’ in the words of the famous Croatian poet Gundulić. We also thank God today for all those who, with the complete support and prayers of the people, created and built our Homeland with their hands, minds and hearts, which they defended for centuries, many of them by the martyred sacrifice of their own lives. It was necessary to defend it for centuries from the slavery and yolk of many: from Venetian, Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav, Nazi-Ustasha-Chetnik-Fascist, and communist oppression under the emblem of the ‘red star’ … In order to represent the whole Truth, it is necessary to say that many (including genuine antifascists) had to wear it, although it was contrary to their beliefs. We remember how destructive this same ‘star’ was, abundantly protecting and helping the aggressors and destroyers of this land. Therefore, here today we thank God for all those who protected and defended our homeland and were victorious, we believe forever… Therefore, we pray: ‘God, protect Croatia, my dear home!’ said Bishop Ivas in his homily. We today gratefully praise God for the magnificent Operation Storm, this brilliant victory by our Croatian army, its supreme commander President Franjo Tuđman, its generals, officers and the armed forces. We believe that this is a victory of the centuries-old and unshaken faith of the entire Croatian nation in the homeland and dispersed throughout the world, the victory of faith that the free homeland is God’s gift to man. Every person and nation, and thus, the Croatian nation, has an inalienable right to a home and homeland, is permitted to defend this right from ‘aggressors’ and must safeguard it from thieves. Operation Storm in 1995 is also the victory of the persevering prayer of supportive believers, especially the prayer of Our Lady’s Rosary, the ‘background prayer’ by which we accompanied, supported and encouraged those engaged in difficult defensive campaigns, on the front lines of the battlefields of the dismembered, suffering and annihilated homeland. Many defenders were killed performing this holy task and have incorporated themselves in the bloodstained Calvary of our people. However, we Christians believe, as Our Lady has taught us, that from Calvary emerges the divine vision of the Resurrection… We believe in the authenticity of the saying by our martyred Zrinskis and Frankopans: ‘He who dies honorably lives forever!’ Today we listen to the song: ‘Hear how it thunders, how the sea foams. They ask us, are they forgotten.’ And here, today, we hear the cry of the homeland: ‘Pray for them, let my brothers know, heroes are never forgotten!’ Today we thank God for the gift of the courage with which our defenders went before tanks and planes, before the ruinous and murderous military technology and propaganda of the Yugoslav National Army, and before the antagonistic policies of many world powers, potentates and ‘go-betweens.’ It is necessary to repeat the Truth clearly that a large part of Croatian land was seized and occupied by those who systematically, over many years, from the ‘memorandum to Croatian Kosovo,’ had created and spread an atmosphere of the ‘vulnerability’ of the Serbian people in the Croatian state, who ignored all its legally elected institutions,” said Bishop Ivas.
My predecessor of blessed memory, Bishop Srećko Badurina, a direct witness to those painful days and events, who tirelessly prayed, pleaded and negotiated, here in Knin and everywhere, and tried to find peaceful and democratic solutions, said then with passion in his soul: ‘Instead of the initial steps for democracy to develop and mature, another path has been chosen that dashes headlong to catastrophe, and this with great assistance and support precisely from “the setting red star”‘… It is necessary to repeat the Truth that they violently wrenched our Croatian motherland from us, as they said (and still say, as we heard yesterday), their ‘home for centuries,’ and created the so-called ‘Serbian Autonomous Oblast (SAO) of Krajina.’ In it, although we do not know who the perpetrators were, we have personally witnessed that in the most heathenish manner all Croatian cultural monuments have been demolished and burned, destroyed or defiled, especially churches and altars, paintings and sculptures, thousands of them, and that they ethnically ‘cleansed’ whole parts of Croatian Lika and Dalmatia, Banovina and Kordun, eastern and western Slavonia… We remember thousands of our displaced persons and refugees (today, many act as if all of this did not happen), and all of this took place before the eyes of the European observers, under the infamous slogan ‘this is Serbia,’ which they decided to connect to the so-called ‘Greater Serbia.’ Thus, a terrible war was imposed upon Croatia that it did not want because ‘war is the destruction of human nature,’ said the long ago inhabitants of Dubrovnik, and we, unfortunately, endured this bitter experience. When all attempts at finding a peaceful solution failed, all prayers and all negotiations for domestic and international negotiating tables, when no other way was possible, Operation Storm had to proceed. The Truth, which must be repeated because it is being systematically negated and dangerously falsified, is that all the time the authorities of the so-called SAO of Krajina were preparing and organizing the people in the event of the arrival of the Croatian army for a mass exodus from the state ‘that they did not want to be theirs’ … When Operation Storm began, they called for and organized the moving out of the majority of the people. Even prior to Operation Storm, Bishop Srećko was told by the European observers that the Serbian Orthodox bishop in Knin had said: ‘If Croatia attacks us, we shall urge the people to move out!’ Despite urging by the Croatian Army and the President personally to remain in Croatia, they chose to leave,” said Bishop Ivas and recalled how the late Bishop Badurina during the first Mass following Operation Storm, at the charred remains of the church of St. Anthony in Knin on August 13, 1995, said: “‘We accept God’s gift of Operation Storm with gratitude and celebrate this Mass in the first place for the Catholic community in Knin, which is dispersed… However, we also celebrate it for those people of Knin who according to reason, belief and morality should be in their houses, should remain here and live together with us. We shall pray for the dead, for the living, for the fallen, for the suffering and for all our homeland. We shall pray for peace and justice, … with confidence toward our future. We shall pray that our strength does not fail before the difficult task of renewal facing us. For us to persevere in everything on God’s path, lest we turn away, lest we betray our baptism, our moral and spiritual Croatian heritage… They did unto us what they would not have others do unto them: homes were burned, demolished and robbed. The dead, tortured and wounded. However, even in this case, the following applies to us: “Do not do unto others what you would not have others do unto you.” There is the inherent danger that our actions would not be a sign that God is our Father, that we would forget to forgive, that the temptation of revenge could overcome us.'” Then Bishop Ivas, as all the Croatian bishops had done many times in their appeals, expressed regret that in this terrible war there were also evils and crimes perpetrated by our defenders, and called for repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. “Bishop Badurina said that we need to heal our wounds, heal our suffering, heal the spiritual destruction. It is necessary to rise from these ruins, material and spiritual. It is necessary for us to allow the Spirit of God to heal us, educate us, so that here, where God sent us so many centuries ago, we may be God’s leaven among the people in history, now and in the future. Today, fifteen years after Operation Storm and everything that it calls to mind, all the evils of the causes and consequences of the war, as well as all the gifts and fruits of this great victory that we enjoy today, although sometimes, rightly or wrongly, disappointed or resigned, I repeat the thought of Bishop Srećko, which is also an important message for us, today and tomorrow: ‘We must surrender to the Spirit of God and cooperate with Him to be the leaven, that divine evangelical leaven among the people and our history, now and in the future…’ Indeed, like all peoples and nations, we need commemorations and memorials. We need remembrance and celebration. However, most of all, we need the Spirit of God, in order for us to preserve the living (Christian) spirit and the soul of our history, our nation. We also need the spirit of those who created our history and our homeland, who built its spiritual and material cultural heritage, our identity and recognizability, here and within the community of the nations of Europe and the world. We need these values and the richness of life, to transmit them to the young like good yeast, and thus to build the future on solid, permanent, Divine and evangelical foundations. This would be the best sign of the homeland’s gratitude to our defenders, without the danger of false, showy, empty and sterile commemorative celebrations. Certainly, we see the future of our country and the Croatian nation in the new united Europe. It is known that the Croatian government is conducting access negotiations, which are already well advanced. On the feast of St. Joseph this year, the Croatian bishops sent a letter about this to the faithful and public,” noted Bishop Ivas, quoting some passages from the letter.
“‘There is a rock in the heart of Knin, on which the banner flies and fights the wind.’ Here toay, at the foot of this solid rock, powerful and strong, at the foot of the celebrated Knin fortress, fifteen years since the red, white and blue flag has been flown there, do we listen, do we hear, brothers, how it speaks to us and how it entreats us? ‘The old Hungarians wanted you, the Turks and Venetians wanted you, all sorts of barbarians have beaten you. Rock, tell all of them to whom you belong! I am the rock of King Zvonimir. I am Croatian forever and ever. Brothers and sisters, give me a little peace because I am the rock of your great grandfathers…’ ‘Who writes his history on hard rock, no one can ever erase it! …!’ Brothers and sisters, all of you present, all of you throughout the homeland and in the world: I wish you a Happy Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day, wherever you are! It is our turn to continue to write the history of our race honorably, with Croatian handwriting, according to God’s outlines. Our Lady of the Great Croatian Baptismal Alliance, guide us and pray for us,” said Bishop Ivas in his homily.