Хорватия Католик Шіркеуінің Тарихы мен Қазіргі Күйі

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The Catholic Church in Croatia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church that is under the spiritual leadership of the Pope. The Latin Church in Croatia is administered by the Croatian Bishops' Conference centered in Zagreb, and it comprises five archdioceses, 13 dioceses and one military ordinariate. Dražen Kutleša is the Archbishop of Zagreb. A 2011 census estimated that there were 3.7 million baptized Latin Catholics and about 20,000 baptized Eastern Catholics of the Greek Catholic Church of Croatia and Serbia in Croatia, comprising 86.3% of the population. as of 2017, weekly church attendance was relatively high compared to other Catholic nations in Europe, at around 27%. A 2021 Croatian census showed that 79% of the population is Catholic and 3.3% is Serbian Orthodox. The national sanctuary of Croatia is in Marija Bistrica, while the country's patron is Saint Joseph: the Croatian Parliament unanimously declared him to be the national patron in 1687.

The western part of the Balkan Peninsula was conquered by the Roman Empire by 168 BC after a long drawn out process known as the Illyrian Wars. Following their conquests, the Romans organised the area into the province of Illyricum, which was eventually split up into Dalmatia and Pannonia. Through being part of the Roman Empire, various religious cults were brought into the region. This included the Levantine originated religion of Christianity. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 391. In 395, the Roman Empire was divided into two parts, and the dividing line went through the Balkans. Illyricum fell under the rule of Rome and the rest fell under the rule of Byzantium. at Solin in the Basilica of Saint Peter and Moses (known today as the Hollow Church) by Gebizon, a representative of Pope Gregory VII. Zvonimir took an oath of allegiance to Pope, by which he promised his support in the implementations of the Church reforms in Croatia. After the Papal legate crowned him, Zvonimir in 1076 gave the Benedictine monastery of Saint Gregory in Vrana to the Pope as a sign of loyalty and as an accommodation for papal legates coming to Croatia.

When Croatia lost its own dynasty and entered into a personal union with Hungary in 1102, the Benedictines were slowly dying out, while the mendicant orders, especially Franciscans and Dominicans were becoming more important. Religious and cultural formation of Croats was also strongly influenced by Jesuits. Church writers from northern Croatia and Dubrovnik, which was a free center of the Croatian culture, have done a lot for standardization and expansion of the Croatian literary language. Since the 9th century there is in Croatia a unique phenomenon in the entire world of Catholicism, liturgy that was held in Church Slavonic language with special Glagolitic script. Despite the various disputes, Pope Innocent IV approved use of Church Slavonic language and the Glagolitic script to Filip, bishop of Senj, thus making Croats the only Latin Catholics in the world allowed to use a language other than Latin in their liturgy prior to the Second Vatican Council in 1962. During the Croatian–Ottoman Wars that lasted from 15th to 19th century Croats strongly fought against the Turks which resulted in the fact that the westernmost border of the Ottoman Empire and Europe became entrenched on the soil of the Croatian Kingdom. In 1519, Croatia was called the Antemurale Christianitatis by Pope Leo X.

The Austrian Empire signed a concordat with the Holy See in 1855 which regulated the Catholic Church within the empire.

In Yugoslavia, the Croatian bishops were part of the Bishops' Conference of Yugoslavia. The situation of the Catholic Church in the new kingdom was affected by the pro Orthodox policy of the Yugoslav government and the strong influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the country's politics. After the coup of 1929, several Catholic organizations and institutes were closed or dissolved, specially in Croatia, as the Club of Seniorates, the Eagle Movement (Orlovstvo) and the Catholic Action. Some members of Eastern Catholic churches, such as Croatian Greek Catholics, were persecuted and forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity.

In 1941, a Nazi puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), was established by the fascist dictator Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše movement. The Ustaše regime pursued a genocidal policy against the Serbs (who were Eastern Orthodox Christians), Jews and Romani. Historian Michael Phayer wrote that the creation of the NDH was initially welcomed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and by many Catholic priests. Ante Pavelić was anti Serb and pro Catholic, viewing Catholicism as an integral part of Croat culture. A large number of Catholic priests and intellectuals assumed important roles within the Ustaše. The Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac, wanted Croatia's independence from the Serb dominated Yugoslav state which he considered to be "the jail of the Croatian nation", so he arranged the audience with Pius XII for Pavelić. Vatican under Secretary of State Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI)'s minutes before the meeting noted that no recognition of the new state could come before a peace treaty and that "The Holy See must be impartial; it must think of all; there are Catholics on all sides to whom the [Holy See] must be respectful." Phayer wrote that it is well known that many Catholic clerics participated directly or indirectly in Ustaše campaigns of violence. Despite that, Pavelić told Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop that while the lower clergy supported the Ustaše, the bishops, and particularly Archbishop Stepinac, were opposed to the movement because of "Vatican international policy".</blockquote>

He also wrote a letter directly to Pavelić on 24 February 1943, stating: "The very Jasenovac camp is a stain on the honor of the NDH. Poglavnik! To those who look at me as a priest and a bishop I say as Christ did on the cross: Father forgive them for they know not what they do." Thirty one priests were arrested following Stepinac's July and October 1943 explicit condemnations of race murders being read from pulpits across Croatia. Martin Gilbert wrote that Stepinac, "who in 1941 had welcomed Croat independence, subsequently condemned Croat atrocities against both Serbs and Jews, and himself saved a group of Jews". According to historian Jozo Tomasevich however, neither Stepinac nor the Croatian Catholic hierarchy or the Vatican ever made a public protest regarding the persecution of Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church by the Ustaše and added that "it seems the Catholic Church fully supported the Ustasha regime and its policies".

The National Anti Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH) originally foresaw a greater degree of religious freedom in the country. In 1944 ZAVNOH still left open the possibility of religious education in schools. This idea was scuttled after Yugoslav leader Josip Broz removed secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia Andrija Hebrang and replaced him with hardliner Vladimir Bakarić. In 1945, the retired bishop of Dubrovnik, Josip Marija Carević, was murdered by Yugoslav authorities. Bishop Josip Srebrnić was sent to jail for two months. After the war, the number of Catholic publications in Yugoslavia decreased from one hundred to only three. In 1946, the Communist regime introduced the Law on State Registry Books which allowed the confiscation of church registries and other documents. On 31 January 1952, the communist regime officially banned all religious education in public schools. That year the regime also expelled the Catholic Faculty of Theology from the University of Zagreb, to which it was not restored until democratic changes in 1991. In 1984, the Catholic Church held a National Eucharistic Congress in Marija Bistrica. The central Mass held on September 9 was attended by 400,000 people, including 1100 priests, 35 bishops and archbishops, as well as five cardinals. The Mass was led by Cardinal Franz König, a friend of Aloysius Stepinac from their early studies. In 1987 the Bishops' Conference of Yugoslavia issued a statement calling on the government to respect the right of parents to obtain a religious education for their children.

After Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, the Catholic Church regained its full freedom and influence. First nuncio in Croatia was mons. Giulio Einauldi, appointed on 13 January 1992. Croatian Bishops' Conference was founded on 15 May 1993, by exclusion from the Bishops' Conference of Yugoslavia. During the Croatian War of Independence, Catholicism and Orthodoxy were often cited as a basic division between Croats and Serbs, which led to a massive destruction of churches (some 1,426 were destroyed or damaged). The Croatian Bishops' Conference established Croatian Catholic Radio in 1997. In the Republic of Croatia, the Catholic Church has defined its legal position as autonomous in some areas, thus making it able to provide religious education in state primary and secondary schools to those students who choose it, establish Catholic schools and conduct pastoral care among the Catholics in the armed forces and police. Through the ratification of treaties between the Holy See and Croatia on 9 April 1997, treaties that regulate legal issues, cooperation in education and culture, conducting pastoral care among the Catholics in the armed forces and police and financing Church from the state budget came into force. As regards to financing, the Church has received the following amounts of money over the 2000s: 2001; 461.3 bln kunas, 2004–2007; 532 bln kunas, 2008–2011;475.5 bln kunas, 2012–2013; 523.5 bln kunas, plus around 200 million kunas per each year for teachers of religious studies in schools, around 60 million kunas for maintenance churches which are considered to be a cultural heritage etc. The Catholic Church in Croatia in modern times is very active in social and political life. It has implemented a number of actions in conservative spirit in order to promote its values such as: non working Sunday, punishment of the crimes of the communist era, introducing religious education in schools, protection of marriage as the union of a man and a woman (2013 referendum), opposition to abortion (campaigning for "protecting human life from conception to natural death"), opposition to euthanasia, opposition to natural methods of family planning and the treatment of infertility, and opposition to artificial birth control methods.

Although the vast majority of Croatians declare themselves as Catholics, a certain share of them do not follow the Church's teaching on moral and social issues. According to a Pew Research poll from 2017, only 27% of respondents attended mass regularly, 25% supported the Church's stance on contraception, 43% supported the Church's stance on ordination of women and 38% thought abortion should be illegal in most cases. On the other hand, 66% supported the Church's stance on same sex marriage.