Bosnia-Herzegovina: Thousands of Catholics want to return

ACN News

6/4/2012

In the past two months alone 800 Catholic refugee families living abroad turned to Bishop Franjo Komarica 
of Banja Luka to obtain assistance for their return to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thousands of refugees are 
likewise ready to come back. The chairman of the Bishops’ Conference for Bosnia and Herzegovina passed 
on this information at a recent meeting with the international Catholic charity “Aid to the Church in 
Need”. Those willing to return expected assistance from the Church in rebuilding their houses and restoring 
infrastructure. “That is, in fact, the job of the government,” he emphasised. However, Catholics received 
only a minimal fraction of the international aid. 

The bishop complained about the lack of political will on the part of the Bosnian government and the 
international community to enable Catholics to return to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this context he referred 
to a “well formulated strategy” aimed at eradicating the Catholic presence in the country. Individual 
politicians openly admitted in personal conversations, he said, that they felt Catholics had “no business 
being in Bosnia”. 

Komarica stated that he has been struggling for many years to “create a state founded on the rule of 
law”. The Catholic Church simply wants to have the same rights as other sections of the population and 
“meet its obligation to work together for a better future for the country”, he said. It is “not good 
for Bosnia to exclude an entire ethnic group”, he added. In his view the Catholics of Croatian origin 
are “not guests, but the oldest ethnic group”. 

Of the 835,000 Catholics who lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina before the war between 1992 and 1995, only 
450,000 have remained. 40% of the population is Islamic and around 31% belongs to the Serbian Orthodox 
Church. The rest belongs to other religious communities. Catholics still make up around 10% of the population