Asked by a reporter of the Jutarnji List daily who interviewed him why at the time Serbian media wrote that the pope had beatified an Ustasha (which was a synonym for WW II Nazi-styled Craotian army), Metropolitan Jovan Pavlovic answered that he "does not think that they had any right to make objections".
"While the process for gathering relevant documents for his beatification was open, everybody had the right to give their opinion in favour or against" the beatification of the cardinal, Pavlovic said in the interview the daily published on Monday, adding that nobody expressed objections while this possibility was open.
"After the conclusion of the process of beatification they had no right to make objections," Pavlovic said adding that the Pope was authorised in his church to finish that process in accordance with criteria for somebody's beatification.
If Stepinac is beatified according to rules of the Catholic Church, this does not have to bind others, he added.
Commenting on the trial of Cardinal Stepinac in the Communist-led Socialist federal Yugoslavia after the Second World War, Pavlovic said Stepinac was put on trial "in an extraordinary situation which was clear to everybody. That was the (Josip Broz) Tito regime and who could oppose the (then) state policy. If there were a democratic system and if people could present their arguments, and if it were possible to establish the truth..."
Stepinac was charged with war crimes after he rejected any possibility for the Catholic Church in the then Yugoslavia to sever connections with the Vatican and become an autonomous entity.
Pavlovic said that according to the Christian ethics everybody who does good will be awarded, and those who violate human and God's moral laws must account for that in front of competent courts, adding that nobody can avoid God's court.
The Croatian State Archive recently published the diary of Diana Budisavljevic, covering the period from 1941 to 1945, in which this woman wrote about campaigns in which she together with Roman Catholic Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac had rescued several thousand children of Serb origin. She also drafted records with data for some 12,000 children, which helped those children to preserve their identity and return to their families.