Frane Franić

Frane Franić (29 December 1912 – 17 March 2007) was a prelate of the Catholic Church who served as the archbishop of Split-Makarska from 1969 to his retirement in 1988. He also served as the last bishop of Split-Makarska before the diocese was elevated to the status of an archdiocese from 1960 to 1969. Prior to that, Franić was the apostolic administrator of the same diocese from 1954 to 1960 and an auxiliary bishop, holding the title of the titular bishop of Agathopolis from 1950 to 1954.

Franić belonged to a group of conservative prelates willing to engage in a dialogue with the communist government. After 1960s, however, he became a liberal and promoted ecumenical dialogue. During the war and the postwar world he turned increasingly conservative. As an archbishop in the communist Yugoslavia, Franić promoted a dialogue between Christianity and Marxism, entering in conflict with the Archbishop of Zagreb Franjo Kuharić who was an opponent of the dialogue.

Early life and education

Franić was born in Kaštel Kambelovac in southern Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary on 29 December 29 1912. He attended elementary school there from 1919 to 1923. From 1923 to 1931 he attended the Episcopal Seminary, a classical grammar school with public rights. In Split, he enrolled in the Central Theological School and completed philosophical and theological studies. On 25 December 1936, he was ordained as a priest. After the ordination, Franić served as a religion teacher and prefect of the Split seminary. Franić went to postgraduate studies in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where, in 1941, he gained a doctorate in theological sciences after successfully defending his doctoral thesis titled ''De iustitia originali et de peccato originali secundum Duns Scotum''.

Episcopacy

Franić was appointed auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Split-Makarska in 1950 and in 1954, he became the apostolic administrator of the diocese.
After returning from Rome, he held various positions in Split. For many years he was professor of philosophy, Latin, and religion at the Split High School of Liturgy, chaplain of the Prison of St. Roka (1941–1943), a prefect at the Seminary (1942–1945), a librarian in the small seminary and director of the central theological seminary (1945–1956).

He was promoted to Assistant Bishop on 17 December 1950, and since then acted as General Vicar. In 1953 he restored the Vjesnik of Split-Makarska diocese. In 1954 he was ordained as the Split-Makarska bishop. When Pope Paul VI established the Split-Makarska archbishopric on July 27, 1969, Franić was elevated to be the resident Archbishop of the metropolis. He remained at the head of the Split-Makarska Archdiocese until his retirement, October 16, 1988.

The communist government tried to impose its control of clergy by establishing various clerical associations. The Episcopal Conference of Yugoslavia at first discouraged, and then banned membership in such organisations. When such an association was established in Croatia in 1953, Franić issued a ban on the clerical associations, entailing a suspension if violation would occur. The order was sent to all priests in the Diocese of Split-Makarska, and according to Franić, was received "enthusiastically" by 90 percent of the clergy. In 1959, 18 priests in total were suspended in Croatia.

For his opposition, Franić was harassed by the communists. A week after he issued the ban, Franić was surrounded by several communists while visiting a village parish and was threatened with death. A few days later, he was taken to the occupied Franciscan friary in Makarska and was threatened again. In the fall of 1958, three men ambushed him and threatened to set him on fire. The communists closed the diocesan-owned theological faculty and seminary in Split for six years as a response. The closing of the Split seminary created a problem for raising future Dalmatian clergy. For that reason, Archbishop of Zadar Mate Garković opened a seminary in Zadar in 1959. When the Split seminary was reopened in 1963, the Dalmatian bishops tried to resolve the issue of the two existing seminaries by trying to establish a single bilocated institution. However, Franić was opposed to this idea, which led to a decline in relations between the Diocese of Split and the Archdiocese of Zadar.

At the very end of the Second Vatican Council, the Dalmatian bishops, including Franić, held a meeting in Rome on 18 November 1965. The bishop of Zadar Josip Arnerić proposed moving the two-year study of philosophy from Split to Zadar. The proposal was accepted by all the bishops except Garković. The meeting ended in agreement that the priests should receive two years of philosophical education in Zadar and four years of theology in Split. Garković sent the record of the meeting to the Holy See, which was satisfied with the agreement. The bishops met again at a friary in Čiovo on 6 May 1966, where Franić proposed that the Rome agreement should be implemented in the academic year of 1968/69. He further proposed that the head of the single institution should be the bishop of Split, while the studies of philosophy and theology in Zadar and Split would be headed by two different deans. His proposal included that an assembly of the Dalmatian bishops as the supreme organ of the college should appoint professors, while the deans would be elected among the professors. Garković proposed that both the professors from Zadar and from Split should receive the same payment. All of the proposals were accepted.

Second Vatican Council

Franić was among twenty-five Yugoslav bishops at the time who participated at the Second Vatican Council and among four Yugoslav bishops that served as members of various commissions. Franić himself served as a member of the Theological Commission, together with the Archbishop of Zagreb Franjo Šeper. The Yugoslav bishops were divided between the traditionalists, progressives, and those who held mixed views, like Franić. In his own words, he took a traditionalist stance on some and progressive on other issues. From the 1960s to the mid 1980s Franic was a promoter of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and a liberal. He pioneered dialogue between different Christian denominations to promote Christian unity; dialogue with unbelievers and bold "rapprochement with the liberalising Titoist self-management socialism." During the war and the postwar world he turned increasingly conservative. Franić said that the Council "condemned godless communism, but it opened the doors to a dialogue with Marxism".

Franić and Šeper supported the introduction of vernacular for Holy Mass and were proponents of ecumenism in an effort to mend the old conflicts between the Catholic Church and other particular churches. The split between Šeper and Franić was on the issue of married deacons, with Šeper supporting the move, while Franić and fifteen other Yugoslav bishops opposed the idea. Franić was a traditionalist on the issue of the Pope's primacy and suggested that the vow of poverty of religious orders should apply to secular clergy as well.

During the discussions about the episcopate at the Second Vatican Council, Franić insisted that the Council should adopt a dogmatic definition on the origin of the episcopacy, as stemming from the Devine law, not just the ecclesiastical law. In the end, the Council gave a non-dogmatic definition of the divine origin of episcopacy. Franić also wanted the Council to give a better interpretation of the episcopal power and order to confirm the authority of the bishops. Franić held that episcopacy is a different sacrament from that of a priesthood, and is "firmly rooted as such in the Christian tradition, which is based on the Holy Scripture". In his proposal to the Council, Franić stated that the "episcopacy is a sacrament, and as such it must be rooted in the divine law".

At the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, he was a member of the Theological Standing Committee (1960–1962), and was a member of the Parliament's Doctrinal Commission (1962–1965). Upon completion of the Parliament, he was an external member of the Roman Congregation for Sacraments and Worship (1968–1973 and 1975–1980) and the Congregation for the Declaration of Saints (1975 to 1985).

Metropolitan

Frane Franić became one of the leading intellectuals supporting dialogue with Marxism and the state authorities, others being theologians like Tomislav Šagi-Bunić, Vjekoslav Bajsić and Josip Turčinović. When the Archbishop of Zagreb Cardinal Franjo Šeper became the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, Franjo Kuharić entered the discussion as his successor as the archbishop of Zagreb. Franić, like other clerics who were open to collaboration with the state government, was acceptable to the regime as Šeper's successors. He complained to the state authorities that Šeper doesn't allow other bishops to influence the issue of his successor.

In November 1969, the Diocese of Split-Makarska was elevated to an archdiocese. The decision was made in Rome, rather than the Episcopal Conference of Yugoslavia, which couldn't come to a prescribed two-thirds majority for such a decision. Although the Vatican was first inclined to Archdiocese of Zadar

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