Although during the war in the early 1990s the church was frequently the target of attack and vandalism, it has remained the only place of meeting and activism for local Catholic Croats, the media said.
"Hrtkovci has had its joys and its successes, but also its difficult days. There have been times of co-existence, but also of intolerance, expulsions and killings," Bishop Fabijan Svalina said during Mass.
Addressing the congregation, the leader of the Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina (DSHV) and minister in the Serbian government, Tomislav Žigmanov, said that it was encouraging to see that the Hrtkovci community was able to celebrate this jubilee and renovate the church.
Parish priest Ivica Živković thanked the donors for helping with the renovation, notably Croatia's Central State Office for Croats Abroad and Ministry of Regional Development and EU Funds, the Vojvodina government, the local faithful and believers from Croatia.
In the early 1990s, during the war in Croatia, the Church of Saint Clement was frequently the target of vandalism. The parish priest was harassed and had to flee the church and go into hiding. On 5 May 1995, the church was broken into and a fire was set inside, causing extensive damage.
On 6 May 1992, the Serbian Radical Party, led by Vojislav Šešelj, held a rally in the village at which the names of 17 local Croats were read out and were ordered to move out of the village. Šešelj was later convicted of war crimes by the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
This incident was later recognised as the beginning of the expulsion of about 40,000 ethnic Croats from the Srem region. Twenty-five of them were killed and another three are still listed as missing. This led to a drastic decline in the number of Croats in the communities in which they had constituted a majority, and to their exclusion from social and political life, the DSHV said.