There were one million Catholics in Bosnia-Herzegovina before the war that devastated the former Yugoslavia, but their number has now fallen to half a million. Warning of the decline in the number of Catholics was given by Franciscan Father Mijo Dzolan, superior of the province of Bosnia and Srebrena, and reported by the Apic press agency. From a “special region from the political and religious point of view” Bosnia “has returned to being a mission country where Catholics, who are in large part of Croatian descent, represent by now just a small group”. Father Dzolan, who lives in Sarajevo, says “we are witnessing a process of political and religious radicalization. And, of all the anxieties deriving from the social and economic consequences of the war, this is the most worrying. The Catholics of my country he explains are dissatisfied with the partition of Bosnia, as provided by the Dayton accords, into a Serb Republic on the one hand and a Croatian-Moslem confederation on the other. They do not feel safe and that’s why they are thinking of emigrating to Croatia or to other European countries”.
