MOSTAR-DUVNO, DIOCESE OF. - It has an area of 8,368 sq km and 165,000 faithful, who form the absolute majority in comparison with Muslims and Orthodox. It comprises (1941) 8 deaneries, 51 parishes with 50 churches and 296 chapels, and numbers 151 priests (13 secular and 138 Franciscans). The female religious congregations (Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent and Teaching Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis) have 131 sisters in 13 houses. At Siroki Brieg there is a classical lyceum and at Mostar a theological institute, both Franciscan.
In the 6th century the dioceses of Narona (Vid, near Metkovic), Sarsenterum (Aržano?) and Delminium (Tomislavgrad in Bosnia, a fortress on Mount Lib) still extended over the territory of the present diocese of M. In 591 St. Gregory the Great wrote to the turbulent bishop Malchus of Delminium, a place that was the center of the valiant Illyrian stock of the Dalmatians and where, according to tradition, in 925 the first Croatian king Tomislav was crowned. Shortly afterward the diocese disappears and reappears after 1300 as a dike against the danger of the Bosnian heresy (Patarenes). Having remained vacant at the end of the 17th century, on July 5, 1881 it was united to the diocese of M., then erected.
Already in the 9th century mention is made of the diocese of Zahumlje (Chelmensis or Zachulmensis) with its see at Ston (Stagno); it comprised the territory of the Duchy of Hum (Chelm) or Zahumlje, whose ruler is called in the Venetian chronicles "prince of the Croats." When in 1448 the voivode Stephen Vukčić assumed the title of herceg (duke), the territory of ancient Hum began to be called Hercegovina. Owing to grave difficulties with the Serbian rulers in the 13th century, the persecuted diocese of Ston was in the 14th century replaced by the restored dioceses of Makarska and Duvno. In the period of the harsh Turkish domination, which lasted four centuries, this region boasts several martyrs. In 1735 the apostolic vicariate of Bomae Othomanae was instituted, from which in 1846 the vicariate of Herzegovina was detached. In 1881, when the ordinary hierarchy was restored in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the vicariate became the diocese of M.-D. From July 8, 1890 its bishops also administered the diocese of Trebinje.
Among all the Croatian dioceses the one most struck by the current communist regime in Yugoslavia is perhaps that of M.-Trebinje. Not only have all Catholic works been destroyed: schools, nurseries, Catholic Action, the press, printing houses, religious instruction; the losses of the clergy and the massacres of the population are also at times horrifying. Of the secular clergy 12 priests still work in the diocese with the greatest difficulty, 5 are in prison together with the diocesan bishop Msgr. Pietro Čule, sentenced to 12 years of forced labor, 6 have withdrawn to other dioceses, within or outside the country; 13 have been killed and tortured, in part also by the Serbian Chetniks of Draža Mihajlović. The Franciscans had an even harder fate: against 64 fathers still working in 1951, another 25 languish in prisons, 27 have gone into exile and 75 have been killed. In the convent of Siroki Brieg alone 28 Franciscans were massacred and in part burned alive.
Bibliography4 works
Krušal Šef. Draganović