resulted in the edition being confiscated by court decree. In May 1979, Archbishop Franjo Kuharić told Croatian pilgrims and Pope John Paul II at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome that Cardinal Stepinac should be beatified. The beatification process began on 9 October 1981. The Catholic Church declared Stepinac a martyr on 11 November 1997, and on 3 October 1998 Pope John Paul II, on pilgrimage to Marija Bistrica to beatify Stepinac, declared that Stepinac had indeed been martyred. John Paul had earlier determined that where a candidate for sainthood had been martyred, his/her cause could be advanced without the normal requirement for evidence of a miraculous intercession by the candidate. Accordingly, he beatified him. The beatification re-ignited old divisions between Serbs, who are mainly Eastern Orthodox, and Croats. Shortly prior, the Paris-based Simon Wiesenthal Center requested that the Holy See delay the beatification until the case was given further study only to infuriate Croatian officials as well as the Vatican. According to Ljubojević, Gavrilović and Perica, the mythology regarding Stepinac was created during the Cold War and newly independent Croatia with the cardinal's beatification in 1998. Their assessment is that this myth positioned Stepinac as the primary character in Croatian mythology, crediting him as a hero and martyr who was politically impartial. This myth alleges that Stepinac resisted all forms of totalitarianism in equal measure. The authors claim that Stepinac was a much greater opponent of communism than he was of Nazism and fascism, but his story was used by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to legitimise Croatian independence and to bolster the role of the Catholic Church as a central pillar of Croatian statehood. The statement by Pope Francis regarding the canonisation of Cardinal Stepinac made in early May 2019, in which he said he had sought advice and help of the "great" Serbian Patriarch Irenaeus on the issue,Pope inflight press conference: 'I thank the Lord for the energy he gives me!' vaticannews.va, 7 May 2019. elicited a formal reaction from Archbishop Želimir Puljić, President of the Croatian Conference of Bishops, in which he stated that the involvement of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Stepinac's canonisation represented a precedent in the Catholic Church.Mons. Puljić: 'Papina izjava uzburkala je javnost i izazvala vjernike'. Croatian News Agency via RTL Group, 9 May 2019. In an interview that was published on the official information web site of the Catholic Church in Croatia on