Aloysius Stepinac, Croatian cardinal (b. 1898)
Aloysius Viktor Cardinal Stepinac (Croatian: Alojzije Viktor Stepinac, 8 May 1898 – 10 February 1960) was a senior-ranking Yugoslav Croat prelate of the Catholic Church. A cardinal, Stepinac served as Archbishop of Zagreb from 1937 until his death, a period which included the fascist rule of the Ustaše over the Axis puppet state the Independent State of Croatia (Croatian: Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH) from 1941 to 1945 during World War II. He was tried by the communist Yugoslav government after the war and convicted of treason and collaboration with the Ustaše regime. The trial was depicted in the West as a typical communist "show trial", and was described by The New York Times as biased against the Archbishop (he didn't become a Cardinal until 1953). However, Professor John Van Antwerp Fine Jr. is of the opinion that the trial was "carried out with proper legal procedure". In a verdict that polarized public opinion both in Yugoslavia and beyond, the Yugoslav authorities found him guilty on the charge of high treason (for collaboration with the fascist Ustaše regime), as well as complicity in the forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism. Stepinac advised individual priests to admit Orthodox believers to the Catholic Church if their lives were in danger, such that this conversion had no validity, allowing them to return to their faith once the danger passed. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison, but served only five at Lepoglava before being transferred to house arrest with his movements confined to his home parish of Krašić.
In 1952 he was designated for elevation to cardinal by Pope Pius XII. He was unable to participate in the 1958 conclave due to the house arrest to which he had been sentenced. On 10 February 1960, still under confinement in Krašić, Stepinac died of polycythemia and other illnesses he contracted while imprisoned. On 3 October 1998, Pope John Paul II declared him a martyr and beatified him before 500,000 Croatians in Marija Bistrica near Zagreb.His record during World War II, conviction, and subsequent beatification remain controversial. On 22 July 2016, the Zagreb County Court annulled his post-war conviction due to "gross violations of current and former fundamental principles of substantive and procedural criminal law". Pope Francis invited Serbian prelates to participate in canonization investigations, but in 2017 a joint commission was only able to agree that "In the case of Cardinal Stepinac, the interpretations that were predominantly given by Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs remain divergent".