Two years ago, John Vice Batarelo took the stage before a packed hall in Zagreb’s downtown Hotel Dubrovnik. It was the opening night of the first ever TradFest, the Festival of Tradition and Conservative Ideas, organised by Batarelo’s Vigilare Foundation.

A 49-year-old Australian of Croatian origin, and a devout Catholic, Batarelo wore a broad smile as he addressed the audience, which included the conservative American Cardinal and critic of Pope Francis, Raymond Leo Burke.

The first speech of the night, said Batarelo, would be about Poland, by Slawomir Olejniczak, the head of the Father Piotr Skarga Association for Christian Culture, an ultra-conservative Catholic organisation in Poland.

“I love Poland, and we are glad to see that they are trying to implement a culture of life there, particularly concerning the complete protection of unborn life,” said Batarelo. “Poland is becoming a beacon of hope in the West.”

Poland’s Law and Justice government, in power since 2015, has indeed become an inspiration for conservatives across Europe, an ideological ally of Viktor Orban’s Hungary in its espousal of traditional ‘family values’ and distaste for the secular liberalism of the European Union.

In Croatia, Catholic pressure groups have grown increasingly vocal, forcing a referendum in 2013 that effectively outlawed gay marriage and pressing for greater restrictions, even an outright ban, on abortion.

Batarelo, however, owed a greater debt of gratitude to Poland than he let on in that 2016 speech.

According to official documents obtained by Novosti, Batarelo’s Vigilare Foundation, one of the most powerful players in an increasingly powerful conservative movement in Croatia, was in fact co-founded in July 2016 by the Father Piotr Skarga Association for Christian Culture, an ultra-conservative Catholic organisation in Poland.

Polish control

“March for Life and Family” in Warsaw, Poland, 15 April 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/Adam Guz POLAND OUT

The Statute of the Vigilare Foundation, submitted to the Croatian Ministry of Public Administration and seen by Novosti, specifies that the Father Piotr Skarga Association paid 5,400 euros in founding capital, on top of 100 euros from Batarelo’s original Vigilare NGO.

It names Slawomir Olejniczak, the head of the Father Piotr Skarga Association, as president of the Supervisory Board and fellow Father Piotr Skarga associates Arkadiusz Stelmach and Valdis Grinsteins as vice president and secretary respectively.

Under the Statute, the Supervisory Board sets the guidelines for the Foundation’s activities, adopts its annual and multi-annual action plans, approves, appoints and suspends members of the Management Board and controls management of the Foundation’s finances.

The Management Board, presided over by Batarelo, is in charge only of day-to-day activities and representing the Foundation before the Croatian authorities.

The Vigilare NGO, on its website, describes the Vigilare Foundation as a ‘sister organisation’. The Foundation does not appear to have its own website and the Tradfest site was offline for maintenance at the time of publication. The Vigilare NGO site makes no mention of the Foundation’s Polish roots.

Contacted by phone, Batarelo said he did not have time to talk regarding this story. The Father Piotr Skarga Association did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

According to the official information in the Croatian Register of Foundation, should the Vigilare Foundation cease operating, its assets would pass to the Stichting Civitas Christiana organisation in the Netherlands.

Stichting Civitas Christiana is part of the transnational Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) network of Catholic fundamentals, founded in Brazil in 1960 by the ultra-traditional Catholic Plinio Correa de Oliveira, whose book Revolution and Counter-Revolution inspired like-minded Catholics around the world.

Olejniczak was drawn to the local TFP organisation in the Polish city of Krakow in the 1990s, before he founded Father Piotr Skarga Association and the Piotr Skarga Institute for Social and Religious Education.

The latter, in 2013, established Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, which has taken a leading lobbying role in favour of an outright ban on abortion in Poland, where access to abortion is already severely restricted.

Transnational dimension

“Walk for life rally” against abortion and banner “All human rights begin conception”, in Zagreb May 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANTONIO BAT

Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (EPF), a network of lawmakers from across Europe working to protect the sexual and reproductive health of vulnerable people, said the Vigilare Foundation’s Polish roots were typical of how such conservative Catholic organisations wield their influence and spread their message.

“Even though the connections between the Piotr Skarga organisations and Ordo Iuris, as well as the Vigilare Foundation, are newly found, they definitely follow a routine pattern,” he said.

“The way in which TFP started creating a series of organisations from Brazil throughout South America in the 1970s, and later in France in the 80s, was very well documented. From France, TFP’s organisations have spread to other European countries.”

“This whole discovery… contributes to the creation of a clearer image about TFP’s network and the way in which it works,” Datta told Novosti. “It is clearly alive and continues to function transnationally. Moreover, its transnational dimension is more important than the members of the network wish to reveal.”

Ordo Iuris works closely with the ruling Law and Justice party; Ordo Iuris board president Aleksander Stepkowski served as an under-secretary of state at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2015. Vigilare, too, has friends in the conservative ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Alliance, HDZ; Davor Ivo Steir, the then deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Croatia, opened the 2016 Tradfest.

Stepkowski also spoke at the 2016 Tradfest. The 2017 edition hosted his vice-president, Jerzy Kwasniewski, who spoke about how the anti-abortion movement campaigned to win over public opinion in Poland.

‘Legal adviser’

Demonstration against ratification of Croatia by the Istanbul Convention in Zagreb, Croatia, 24 March 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE / DANIEL KASAP

Kwasniewski, however, has taken an even more direct role in the push by conservatives in Croatia to overturn the 1978 Yugoslav-era law that permitted abortion in the then Yugoslav republic.

The Tradfest website, before it went offline, described Kwasniewski as an “international legal adviser” to the Vigilare legal team who “participated in drafting the constitutional complaint against the existing, formally unconstitutional abortion law from 1978.”

Croatia’s Constitutional Court has ordered parliament to draft a new abortion law, which pro-choice activists fear may make access harder while stopping short of a complete ban.

Vigilare officials are frequent participants in seminars organised by TFP-affiliates in Poland.

And tactics employed by Ordo Iuris appear to have rubbed off. In October 2017, Vigilare activists led by Batarelo parked 12 baby prams in front of the Croatian parliament containing what he said were 168,000 signatures in favour of banning abortion. Such mass petitions are a favourite ploy of Ordo Iuris.

Last year, the Vigilare Foundation sent donation slips to thousands of private addresses, a fund-raising tactic employed in the past by the Father Piotr Skarga Association.

This article was originally published by ‘Novosti’, a Zagreb-based weekly magazine published by the Serb National Council in Croatia.



Ana Brakus is an investigative journalist based in Zagreb, Croatia focusing on human rights, particularly concerning minorities.