On August 18, 2025. some media in Croatia published a post by Vlatka Pokos, which she published on her Instagram profile. Pokos wrote:

It is necessary to check her claims that point to the criminal essence of the Catholic Church both then (during the Second World War) and today. We will not go into her assessment of who would kill whom, because it is a freely expressed opinion.

The first thing that needs to be determined is: which religious community, and which one operates in Croatia, was Vlatka Pokos really referring to? Namely,  there are a large number of religious communities in Croatia. Given the content of her other posts, we assume that she was referring to the Catholic Church in Croatia. 

There is a significant number of relevant historical sources created, to a lesser extent during the existence of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and for the most part after the abolition of the ban on writing about the real relations between the Catholic Church on the one hand, and the criminal regimes that operated in the territory of the then Independent State of Croatia: the Ustasha, the Nazi, and the Fascist. The author of this analysis wrote one of these books,  which was created by analyzing the personal files that were written on Cardinal Blessed Alojzije Viktor Stepinac by the secret services of three criminal regimes: the Nazi by the activities of the RSHA (GESTAPO), the Ustasha by the activities of the UNS and the communist by the activities of the OZN-a/UDB-a.

Based on this research, together with a colleague from Poland, the same author published a scientific article that proves that the secret services of the communist states of Yugoslavia and Poland constructed indictments against the Catholic Church during the Cold War. This paper proves that the book by Carlo Falconi "The Silence of Pope Pius XII", which is one of the main sources of such claims accusing the Catholic Church (at the level of the Vatican and Zagreb) of collaborating with the Nazi and Ustasha regimes, was created on the basis of forged and tendentiously changed documents in communist Poland and Yugoslavia by members of their secret services. Ive Mihovilović, then an agent of the secret services of Yugoslavia, writes about this in a letter that can be found in the Croatian State Archives (HDA, file Alojzije Stepinac, 1561, box 4, cover 63, 11 pages) as well as the analysis of the then head of the Office for the Clergy in the UDB of Croatia, Srećko Šimurina, written on 3 pages (written in Zagreb on November 27, 1964, signed: I/2-SŠ).

   

Figure 1-3: Different editions of Carlo Falconi's book

In the Croatian State Archives, in the file of A. Stepinac of the OZN and UDB (f.1561.sds-rsup-srh), which remained after at least two rounds of destruction of documents, the following documents can be found, which shed a completely different light on the views on the relations between the Catholic Church in Croatia and the criminal regimes.

This file contains numerous documents that prove that the Catholic Church in Croatia was not connected with criminal regimes during the existence of the Independent State of Croatia. This is also shown by the ban that the then Archbishop Stepinac sent to his clergy about the ban on the participation of priests in political elections, both in 1938 and later:

Figure 4: Ban on the participation of Catholic priests in political trials from 1938 ordered by Archbishop Stepinac (source HDA)

Figure 5: Ban on the participation of Catholic priests in political processes from 1942 ordered by Archbishop Stepinac (source HDA)

The file also contains testimonies of people such as Slavko Kvaternik, who presented facts and claims that Archbishop Stepinac presented about all criminal regimes, including their leading persons. The file also contains a document written in the UDB in 1952 in which the authors make more serious and politically less passionate (compared to the analyses written immediately after the end of World War II) assessments of the activities of Archbishop Stepinac (source HR-HDA-1561 SDS RSUP SRH, 063.1 personal file of Alojzije Stepinac, code 001, red. Number 1: The Catholic Church as an ideological and political opponent of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia)):

This document also proves that the book by the author Viktor Novak: Magnum Crimen (its second edition is at the link) was created in the author's workshops of the UN and if such a book is given to the author to sign it (he is credited with the authorship of the shorter parts of the book). A significantly larger number of facts supported by original documents can be found in the works of the authors of this analysis.

On the topic of the activities of Archbishop Stepinac during the Independent State of Croatia, the verifier of the Voice of Truth, published individual analyses that further negate the claims of Vlatka Pokos:

  

 

Figure 6-8: Report and proposals of Srećko Šimurina (later head of the UDB for Croatia) – source HDA: HR-HDA-1561 SDS RSUP SRH, 063.1 personal file of Alojzije Stepinac, Box 4, cover 63, pages in digital format: 001.jpg - 003.jpg).