on 4 August 1944 (at the time, Romania was also under the control of the Fascist regime of Ion Antonescu). According to historian Jozo Tomasevich, although the Church was established as a way to appease the remaining Serb Orthodox population in the NDH, it was ultimately a means to destroying religious, cultural and national ties between Serbs in Serbia and Serbs in the NDH because the Ustashe could not achieve their goal of exterminating the whole Serb population of Croatia. Persecution of Serbs persisted even after its establishment, though it was not as intense as before. Proposals for a revival On 6 March 1993, Juraj Kolarić, dean of the Catholic Faculty of Theology in Zagreb, was reported by the Tanjug news agency as stating that the "Orthodox Church in Croatia should be organized along the Macedonian principle, with its patriarch, and break away as far as territory was concerned, from Serbia”. Kolarić tried several times to establish such a church by the "Croat Orthodox believers and possible Croatian Orthodox clergy, because then all the conditions for an autocephalous church would be met". Kolarić claimed that if such a church were formed, it would eventually be recognized by the Patriarch of Constantinople as the Serbian Orthodox Church would never again be present in Croatia. References Sources Further reading External links Savic Markovic Stedimlija - Ideologist of "Red Croatia", njegos.org; accessed 20 April 2015 New Attacks on the Serbian Orthodox Church, hri.org, 4 April 1996 The Orthodox Church in Croatia , Vreme News Digest Agency No 77, 15 March 1993 Ustaše Independent State of Croatia Eastern Orthodoxy and far-right politics