About Crkva na kamenu

Crkva na kamenu

Crkva na kamenu, "Church on the Rock", is a Croatian-language pastoral-informative newspaper of the Catholic dioceses of Mostar-Duvno and Trebinje-Mrkan, published monthly in Mostar since 1980. It was founded by Bishop Pavao Žanić of Mostar-Duvno, who was also apostolic administrator of Trebinje-Mrkan, and who wrote frequently in it. The Diocese of Mostar-Duvno describes it in English as its monthly magazine, while scholarship treats it as a pastoral newspaper: Ilija Drmić's full-length review article in Hum, the journal of the University of Mostar, analyses its establishment, purpose and form, its content and its relationship with its readers across four periods — the communist period, the period of democratic elections, the Croatian War of Independence, or Homeland War, and the post-war period. Under Žanić's successor, Bishop Ratko Perić, Crkva na kamenu served as the diocese's authoritative public voice on the contested Medjugorje apparitions, publishing Perić's interviews and disciplinary statements in full. It is not an official website-era publication but a print institution of the Herzegovina Church whose history, in Drmić's conclusion, has given it a great religious, historical and cultural role in the Church and in society.

Foundation by Bishop Pavao Žanić in 1980

Crkva na kamenu was founded in 1980 by Monsignor Pavao Žanić, the bishop of Mostar-Duvno and apostolic administrator of Trebinje-Mrkan. The timing mattered: Žanić became ordinary bishop of Mostar-Duvno in 1980, and the newspaper was a foundation of the first year of his episcopate, created while the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia still operated under a communist state. Žanić wrote frequently in the newspaper he had founded, making it from the beginning a bishop's own instrument of communication with his dioceses rather than a detached commercial venture. Its readership was the Catholic, overwhelmingly Croat, population of Herzegovina served by the two dioceses. The newspaper's title, "Church on the Rock", announced its self-understanding in biblical terms, and its founder's dual role — bishop of one diocese and administrator of the other — meant that from its first issues Crkva na kamenu spoke for both Herzegovinian dioceses at once, a position it has retained in the diocese's own descriptions of it as the monthly pastoral bulletin of the Dioceses of Mostar-Duvno and Trebinje-Mrkan.

Purpose and form: a pastoral-informative newspaper

Drmić's study begins with the newspaper's establishment, purpose and form, treating it as a pastoral-informative newspaper — a publication whose first task is the pastoral care of its readers and whose second is to inform them. The Diocese of Mostar-Duvno presents the same publication in English as its monthly magazine, while the scholarly classification as a newspaper reflects its regular monthly rhythm, its news and commentary content and its role as the diocese's printed organ. Drmić grounds the newspaper's mission in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, in particular the Council's decree on the media of social communications, Inter mirifica, and in the Decalogue and evangelical and Church teaching more broadly. His conclusion states the permanent task in those terms: since 1980 the newspaper has played a great religious, historical and cultural role in the Church and society, and its permanent task is contributing to the benefit of people in social and Christian communities on the basis of the Decalogue, evangelical and Church foundations. Truth is among the keywords of his analysis, reflecting the newspaper's own presentation of its work as a truthful diocesan record in contested times.

The communist period

Drmić divides the newspaper's history into four periods, and the first is the communist period, covering its life under socialist Yugoslavia from 1980 until the end of the 1980s. A diocesan newspaper founded in 1980 operated in a state whose authorities monitored and pressured the Catholic Church, and Crkva na kamenu's first decade was shaped by that environment: it was a printed space in which the diocese could address its faithful in its own words, record its life and teach, at a time when the Church's public presence was restricted. It was also during this first period, in June 1981, that the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary began at Medjugorje, a parish in Žanić's diocese — the event that would dominate the newspaper's later history and define its public identity outside Herzegovina. Among the young priests who worked on the newspaper in this period was the future archbishop Tomo Vukšić, who served as a journalist for Crkva na kamenu from 1980 to 1982 while a chaplain at Mostar cathedral, at the very start of the newspaper's life and of his own career in Church media and scholarship.

Democratic elections and the Homeland War

The second of Drmić's four periods is the period of democratic elections, the transition from communist Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, when the political order in which the newspaper had been founded dissolved. The third period is the Croatian War of Independence — the Homeland War — covering the wars of the 1990s in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, during which Mostar itself was a divided and heavily damaged front-line city and the Catholic Croat population of Herzegovina was displaced, bereaved and mobilised. For a diocesan newspaper, these were years in which pastoral information — about parishes, clergy, the dead, the displaced and the Church's appeals — was also war reporting for its community. Drmić's periodisation treats these years as a distinct phase of the newspaper's history, different in tone and task from both the constrained communist decade that preceded them and the reconstruction that followed. The fourth period, the post-war period, covers the newspaper's life in the Bosnia and Herzegovina that emerged from the war, where it continued as the dioceses' monthly record amid the slow work of return, rebuilding and argument about the country's future.

Content and relationship with readers

The third and fourth parts of Drmić's analysis examine the newspaper from two further angles: its content side, and its communication attitude to readers together with the readers' attitude to Crkva na kamenu. The pairing is characteristic of his approach. A pastoral newspaper is judged not only by what it prints but by whether a real two-way relationship exists between the diocesan publisher and the faithful who receive it, and Drmić structured his review to test the newspaper on both. The content he surveys is that of a diocesan organ: the bishop's words and letters, diocesan and parish news, teaching and commentary grounded in scripture and Church doctrine, and the record of the dioceses' public positions on the questions that agitated them. That the newspaper sustained a readership relationship strong enough to be worth scholarly analysis across nearly three decades — Drmić's article appeared in 2008, covering the years from 1980 — is itself evidence that Crkva na kamenu functioned as more than an official noticeboard: it was the Herzegovina dioceses' continuing conversation with their own people in print.

The diocese's voice on Medjugorje under Bishop Perić

It was under Bishop Ratko Perić, who succeeded Žanić in 1993, that Crkva na kamenu acquired its widest international readership, as the authoritative channel through which the Bishop of Mostar stated his position on the reported Medjugorje apparitions. In October 1993 an interview with Perić was published in Crkva na kamenu, conducted by the newspaper's editor, Father Ante Tončo Komadina. In it Perić set out the diocesan position: he had followed the events carefully, had assisted Žanić, and maintained that Žanić had taken a wise stand — open at the beginning to the possibility of a supernatural event, and later opposed as the diocesan investigations proceeded. The same October 1993 issue carried Perić's open letter connected with the diocese's dispute with the Franciscans who promoted Medjugorje. The interview was translated and excerpted abroad, including in the February 1994 issue of Fidelity, making the diocesan monthly from Mostar a cited source in the worldwide Medjugorje controversy. For supporters and critics of the apparitions alike, what the Bishop of Mostar said in Crkva na kamenu was the position that had to be answered.

The 2006 ad limina interview and the 2007 disciplinary texts

The newspaper continued to serve as the place where Perić placed his fullest statements on the record. Its issue 4 of 2006, on pages 22 to 24, carried his interview after his ad limina visit to Pope Benedict XVI in February 2006 — an interview the bishop himself excerpted and circulated in English in a letter of 9 April 2006, identifying the publication precisely as "Crkva na kamenu – The Church on the Rock, monthly pastoral bulletin of the Dioceses of Mostar-Duvno and Trebinje-Mrkan, no. 4/2006, pp. 22–24". In that interview Perić described handing the Pope a written memorandum setting out joyful and less joyful matters in his dioceses and discussed the problems still burdening the diocese, in a line of continuity with his earlier work alongside Žanić on the same questions. In issue 5 of 2007, on pages 33 to 35, episcopal disciplinary discourse connected with the Herzegovina disputes was published in full in the newspaper. The pattern across 1993, 2006 and 2007 is consistent: when the Bishop of Mostar needed a complete, citable, on-the-record text, he published it in Crkva na kamenu, and the monthly's pages became the documentary archive of his episcopate's most contested decisions.

Scholarship and assessment

Crkva na kamenu is unusual among diocesan publications in having received a full-length scholarly review of its own. Ilija Drmić's article "Pastoral newspaper Crkva na kamenu and its role in the Church and society", published in Hum, the journal of the University of Mostar, runs from page 287 to page 312 and examines the newspaper's establishment, purpose and form, its four historical periods, its content and its relationship with its readers. Drmić's conclusion is an assessment of the whole enterprise: from its foundation by Bishop Pavao Žanić in 1980, the newspaper has played a great religious, historical and cultural role in the Church and in society, and its permanent task remains the benefit of people in social and Christian communities on the basis of the Decalogue, evangelical and Church foundations, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council's teaching on social communications. For media historians, the newspaper documents how a small diocesan monthly in Herzegovina carried a local Church through communism, democratisation, war and post-war division — and how, because of Medjugorje, its bishop's words in its pages came to be read, translated and argued over far beyond the two dioceses it was founded to serve.