The opposition centre-left party Civic Liberal Alliance, also known by its acronym Glas ("Voice"), held a news conference on Friday asking for a revision of the agreements signed between the Holy See and Croatia.

“Our goal is to protect the secular identity of Croatia,” said leader of Glas, Anka Mrak-Taritas.

“The topic of this news conference is the need to revise the Vatican agreements. In July, when we have formed our party, we said this is one of the issues we would stand up for. On four occasions we wrote to the government asking about the financial burden incurred by these agreements, but we never received a reply. We then determined that the agreements cost Croatia about 900 million kuna (€121.4 million) per year,” Mrak-Taritas said, as reported by Index.hr news website.

The agreements, signed in the 1990s, define the financial assistance that the government gives to the Catholic Church, including the financing of priests’ salaries, Bible study teachers in public schools, and more.

“That’s more than the annual budgets of the Foreign Ministry and the Tourism Ministry put together. So we decided to do what needs to be done, and we proposed a notion in parliament based on which we request the launch of the procedure to negotiate revisions of the agreements between Croatia and the Holy See,” Mrak-Taritas added.

Mrak-Taritas said all four agreements are unilateral, because they regulate Croatia’s obligations towards the Church, but do not do the same for the Holy See.

The Glas party has four MPs in the 151-seat parliament and was formed in July 2016 by a group of MPs formerly representing the liberal Croatian People’s Party (HNS), in protest against HNS’s decision to join the ruling centre-right coalition in Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s cabinet.

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