Is Croatia’s Catholic Church facing a ‘Spotlight’ moment?
The backlash is growing over a decision to appoint a priest previously jailed for abusing a minor to oversee two parishes
A prominent Croatian archbishop is at the center of a growing storm over his handling of a clerical abuse case.
Archbishop Zdenko Križić, the Archbishop of Split-Makarska since September 2023, is facing intense criticism over his decision to appoint a priest who was previously jailed for abusing a minor to oversee two parishes in his previous Diocese of Gospić-Senj.
The 72-year-old Carmelite archbishop further inflamed the controversy when he accused media outlets of seeking “to create scandals out of thin air when it comes to the Church, with a very clear goal.”
One commentator described the chain of events as “the greatest scandal in the history of the Church in Croatia.”
How exactly did Križić handle the case? How has he responded to the criticisms? And what’s likely to happen next?
A little background
Before we tackle that, it might be helpful to consider the broader context.
Croatia is a Balkan nation of 3.8 million people that borders Slovenia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Around 80% of the population identifies as Catholic — a far higher proportion than in neighboring countries.
In Croatia, as in Poland, nationhood and culture are deeply intertwined with Catholicism. The Church plays a substantial role in public life and has a degree of influence on politics.
In 2013, for example, Catholic leaders helped to pass a referendum defining marriage as being a union between a man and a woman in Croatia’s constitution.
There are, of course, counter-currents. Legislation known as the Life Partnership Act passed a year later, granting certain rights to same-sex couples.
As in other Catholic-majority countries in Europe, bishops are concerned about diminishing faith and rising secularism.
How did Archbishop Križić handle the case?
The abuse victim and his mother reportedly brought the case to Archbishop Đuro Hranić, the head of Croatia’s Đakovo-Osijek archdiocese, in 2014.
Hranić responded by suspending the accused priest. When police became involved in the case, the archdiocese paused its inquiry, as usually happens in such cases.
In 2021, a county court sentenced the priest to 10 months in prison for sexual offenses against a minor. That same year, the country’s supreme court upheld most of the lower court’s verdict, but reduced the sentence to nine months.
The priest served his sentence from June 2022 to March 2023. Five months later, in August 2023, Hranić reinstated the cleric, allowing him to move to the Gospić-Senj diocese.
Local Bishop Zdenko Križić placed the priest in charge of two parishes in Lika-Senj County, in one of his last decisions before he was named Archbishop of Split-Makarska the following month.
In December 2024, the priest reportedly reached a settlement with the victim, but the settlement did not include an admission of abuse.
That same month, Bishop Marko Medo became the new Bishop of Gospić-Senj. In January this year, Medo relieved the priest of his duties after an inquiry from the left-wing weekly magazine Novosti.
“Until last week, the priest had been working with altar boys and Catholic youth for a year and a half without any restrictions,” Novosti said in a Feb. 1 report headlined “Protector of Abusers.”
The magazine said it would not name the priest to protect the identity of his victim, who it identified only as a 17-year-old altar boy.
Novosti suggested that canonical criminal proceedings, which were paused until the resolution of the civil case and then reactivated, could not have resulted in a guilty verdict.
“Because, if the priest had been found guilty in their canonical proceedings, he would almost certainly not have been reinstated to such a public office,” it argued.
“Even without a canonical conviction, his return to the altar also violated the more recent practice of the Catholic Church, which prohibits a priest convicted in a state court from working with the faithful.”
The magazine noted that if priests were convicted in ecclesiastical and civil courts, then “return to active parish ministry has become almost impossible.”
In rare cases, a priest has been convicted in a civil court but acquitted in a Church court.
“Such an epilogue can occur if the victim refuses to cooperate with the Church and if the criminal act has not been established with ‘moral certainty’ in the canonical process,” said Novosti, which noted that the victim refused to give a statement to the archdiocese.
“However, even in such cases, the Vatican, due to a secular verdict, most often limits or prohibits the priest’s return to public service, among the faithful, to avoid scandal and protect minors,” the magazine said.
“Given the described practice and publicly available data, the case of Hranić’s priest, who after imprisonment received two parishes from Križić, and led them without any restrictions or supervision, is a global rarity and an undeniable scandal, even by the standards of the Catholic Church.”
Commentator Valentino Findrik said the situation had the potential to become the Croatian Church’s “Boston case,” referring to scandals in the Boston archdiocese, uncovered by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team, that led to a nationwide reckoning with clerical abuse in the U.S. Church.
“When I say ‘Boston case,’ I mean that this could be a case after which nothing will be the same,” Findrik said, acknowledging that the number of abusers and victims was likely smaller in Croatia.
How did Archbishop Križić respond to criticism?
Trag vjere (“Trace of Faith”), a Croatian Radio program focused on Catholic Church news, asked Archbishop Križić whether he knew the priest had served a prison sentence for abuse at the time he was assigned to his diocese.
The archbishop confirmed that he did.
The program also asked whether the civil and Church courts had come to different conclusions in the case.
Križić replied that the difference between the courts is that a Church court can’t sentence anyone to prison, though its verdicts are often stricter than those of civil courts.
He noted that the civil court did not place any restrictions on the priest after he served his sentence.
“After receiving no restrictions from the civil court, Archbishop Hranić sent a question to the Holy See about how to proceed in this case, i.e. whether the priest can or cannot perform pastoral activities,” Križić recalled.
“The Holy See’s response was for the archbishop to assess this himself. Having followed [the priest’s] behavior throughout all those years of suspension, Archbishop Hranić believed that he could be trusted with certain conditions. This was primarily spiritual monitoring of the priest by an experienced spiritual director and checking his pastoral work.”
Križić said he asked Hranić to send the priest to his diocese because it suffered from a priest shortage.
“It is ridiculous to claim that there was an intention to hide something with this move,” he insisted. “How can you possibly hide a priest who is publicly active in two parishes?”
Križić said the priest’s pastoral work generated positive feedback.
“This is confirmed by the reactions of the parishioners who, as the apostolic nuncio told me, are constantly writing letters asking for the priest to be returned to the same parishes,” he said.
“I myself am of the opinion that he should be returned, because no law was broken by installing him as pastor in those parishes, but that is now up to his Ordinary to decide.”
Summing up his position, the archbishop insisted that “no law, neither civil nor ecclesiastical, was violated” when he accepted the priest in the Gospić-Senj diocese.
What’s next?
Croatian media continue to cover the case days after Križić’s statement, suggesting he has failed to quell the critics. Much of the coverage focuses on the archbishop’s suggestion that some outlets were seeking “to create scandals out of thin air.”
If the media unearth other scandals, the coverage could gain more momentum and lead to a “Spotlight moment” for the Croatian Church.
Croatian Catholic leaders have begun the process of publicly reckoning with abuse, but are they starting later than their counterparts in other European majority-Catholic countries such as Ireland, France, and Spain.
The question is whether they can learn from the Church’s painful experience in those nations and move fast to ensure that abuse cases are handled according to the highest standards.
If they fail to react quickly, they may be engulfed, sooner or later, by a nationwide crisis.
> [Križić recalled.] "The Holy See’s response was for the archbishop to assess this himself."
He asked for advice and they said figure it out yourself? In 2023? Do they not have pro tips by now?
I really hope the next Pope, whoever he may be, does a better job of cracking down on clergy abuse than the current one and his administration are doing. Skip the moral-high-ground political statements and actually clean our own house.