About Catholic Press Agency of the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina (KTA BK BiH)

Catholic Press Agency of the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina (KTA BK BiH)

Catholic Press Agency of the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina (KTA BK BiH) — Katolička tiskovna agencija Biskupske konferencije Bosne i Hercegovine — is the Catholic news agency of the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BK BiH). It is a non-profit agency headquartered at Kaptol 32 in Sarajevo, operating in the premises of, and financed by, the Bishops' Conference. Founded on 3 July 1996, less than a year after the end of the Bosnian War, its mission is to collect and distribute significant information about the life of the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina and about the Church worldwide, making it available to domestic and foreign media. It publishes in Croatian at ktabkbih.net, with its dispatches signed "(kta)", and its own site describes its task as bringing credible news and information about the life of the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the world. KTA BK BiH is one of the two religious-community news agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, alongside the Islamic Community's MINA agency.

Founded on 3 July 1996

The agency's statute was signed in Sarajevo on 3 July 1996. The four signatories were the Catholic bishops of the country: Cardinal Vinko Puljić, Archbishop of Vrhbosna; Franjo Komarica, Bishop of Banja Luka; Ratko Perić, Bishop of Mostar-Duvno and apostolic administrator of Trebinje-Mrkan; and Pero Sudar, auxiliary bishop of Vrhbosna. The founding came at a formative moment for the Church in the newly independent state: the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina itself had come into existence only in December 1994, during the war, when the Bosnian bishops began acting as their own conference separate from the Croatian Bishops' Conference. A conference needs a voice, and within nineteen months of its own establishment the BK BiH had created a press agency to supply one. The date also places KTA's birth in the first year of peace after the Dayton settlement of late 1995 — a period in which the Catholic community, like the country's other communities, was counting its losses, receiving back refugees and rebuilding parish life, and in which a flow of reliable church news had immediate pastoral as well as journalistic value.

Mission and working principles

KTA's stated mission is to collect and distribute significant information about the life of the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina and about the Church worldwide, and to make that information available to domestic and foreign media. It works in all journalistic forms — news reports, announcements, documents and reviews among them — with an emphasis, set down in its own description of its work, on the ethical, human and human-rights dimensions of events. That emphasis distinguishes a church agency from a general wire: the same event may be covered by FENA as politics and by KTA for what it means for human dignity, religious freedom or the position of a minority community. The agency cooperates with similar agencies abroad and with electronic and print media at home, so its material is produced both for direct publication by Bosnian outlets and for exchange with the wider network of Catholic news services. Its own homepage summarises the promise to readers in one line: it brings credible news and information about the life of the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the world.

Premises, financing and non-profit status

KTA is headquartered at Kaptol 32 in Sarajevo — Kaptol being the seat of the Archdiocese of Vrhbosna — and it operates in the premises of the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina and is financed by the Conference. It is a non-profit agency: it does not sell a commercial wire in the manner of a private agency such as ONASA, nor is it funded from a state or entity budget like FENA or SRNA. Its institutional home inside the Church's own structures is also reflected in its leadership arrangements, in which the editor-in-chief of the agency is appointed together with the general secretary of the Bishops' Conference, the two duties being combined in one officeholder. Reference listings of Bosnia and Herzegovina's news agencies, including the Press Council of BiH listing carried in the IREX Media Sustainability Index, record KTA BK BiH among the country's standing agencies, identified there by its owner, the Conference of Bishops of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Publishing in Croatian, signed "(kta)"

The agency publishes in Croatian at its website, ktabkbih.net, and its dispatches are signed "(kta)" — the lower-case credit by which Bosnian and Croatian media attribute material taken from the agency. A look at the site's output shows the range that the credit covers: in October 2026, for example, its pages carried reports from Sarajevo, Zagreb and Đakovo on the Catholic press and church life, including new issues of the Sarajevo Catholic weekly Katolički tjednik, of Zagreb's Glas Koncila, of the Franciscan review Svjetlo riječi, of the liturgical music journal Magnificat of the Vrhbosna Archdiocese, of the family magazine Kana and of the Đakovo journal Vjesnik, as well as saints' features and parish notices. The pattern illustrates the agency's working territory: the four Bosnian dioceses first, but also the Church in neighbouring Croatia, with which Bosnian Croat Catholic life is closely intertwined, and the universal Church beyond. For secular Bosnian media, the (kta) credit is the standard source for such verifiable church facts as bishops' appointments, conference sessions, pastoral letters and statements.

The Vijesti bulletin

Alongside its rolling news output, KTA periodically prints and distributes its Vijesti (News) bulletin, reviewing current news and documents. The bulletin gives the agency a documentary function that a daily wire alone does not: it gathers the texts — statements of the Bishops' Conference, documents and significant addresses — that parishes, church institutions and researchers need in complete form rather than as news summaries. In a small church media system, where the Bishops' Conference, the dioceses, religious orders, Caritas organisations and Catholic publications all produce material of their own, the agency's bulletin serves as a periodic collected record. The combination is characteristic of church press agencies of KTA's generation: a news service for the media, and a printed documentary bulletin for the Church's own institutions.

Leadership: from Ivo Tomašević to Bojan Ivešić

For about twenty years the combined duties of general secretary of the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Press Agency were performed by Msgr. Ivo Tomašević. In 2024 the bishops elected Rev. Bojan Ivešić as general secretary of the BK BiH and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Press Agency for a five-year term beginning in September 2024, succeeding Tomašević. The succession, reported from the 90th regular session of the Bishops' Conference, marks the agency's second editorial generation: an editor appointed in the year of the agency's founding era handing over, after roughly two decades, to a successor elected for a fixed five-year term. Because the editorship is combined with the general secretariat of the Conference, the change at the top of KTA is simultaneously a change in the administration of the Bishops' Conference itself — one reason the agency's leadership news is reported as church governance news, not merely media news.

One of Bosnia and Herzegovina's two religious agencies

Reference works on Bosnian media describe a field of nine active news agencies in 2014: two publicly owned entity agencies, FENA and SRNA; the main private agency, ONASA; the Turkish government's Anadolu Agency; a regional private service; and two agencies owned by religious groups — the Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference's KTA and the Islamic Community's MINA. KTA and MINA form a recognised pair in these listings: each is the news service of one of the country's traditional religious communities, each is headquartered in Sarajevo, and each exists to report its own community's life to the wider media. The pairing is also how the Press Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina's agency listing, carried in the IREX Media Sustainability Index for 2017, presents the sector. KTA's distinct contribution within that pair is documentary and international: as the Bosnian bishops' agency, it is the channel through which the Conference's sessions, statements and appointments reach both Bosnian outlets and Catholic media abroad.

The community it serves

The audience for KTA's work changed profoundly during the agency's lifetime, and the figures are part of its story. According to Church data cited in studies of the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the number of Catholics in the country was 812,256 in 1991, the vast majority of them Croats; by the blessing of houses at the end of 2014 the number was 420,294 — a fall of about 48 per cent. In what is now the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina the Catholic population fell from 631,535 in 1991 to 403,988 in 2014, and in Brčko District from 27,865 to 6,951. War, displacement and continuing emigration halved the community the agency was founded to serve, and its bishops have repeatedly drawn attention to that decline and to Catholics leaving the country. A church news agency in such conditions does two jobs at once: it informs the media, and it holds together a dispersed community's picture of itself — reporting ordinations, parish jubilees, episcopal visits and publications from Banja Luka to Mostar for readers who may now live in Zagreb, Germany or further away but still follow the Church of their home parishes through the (kta) wire.

KTA in the Bosnian agency landscape today

Three decades after its statute was signed in July 1996, KTA BK BiH remains what its founders designed: a small, non-profit, church-financed newsroom at Kaptol 32 in Sarajevo, publishing in Croatian, signing its work "(kta)", periodically issuing its Vijesti bulletin, and supplying Bosnian and foreign media with verified news of Catholic life in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Church worldwide. It is routinely listed — by the Press Council, by international media monitors and by reference works — among the handful of agencies that make up the country's wire sector, alongside FENA, SRNA, ONASA, Patria, MINA and Anadolu. Within that company it is the specialist: the only agency whose entire output is the life of one church, produced to journalistic forms but with a stated emphasis on the ethical, human and human-rights dimensions of the events it covers.