SARAJEVO (Vrhbosna), Archdiocese of. - It is located in Yugoslavia and comprises part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the acts of the provincial Synods of Split of 530 and 533 an "Andreas episcopus Bestoensis" is mentioned. It appears that in the 7th century it was a metropolitan see.
A sect of Manichaeans, called according to times and circumstances Paulicians, Fundariti, Encratites, Marcionites, Christopolites, and known in history under the name of Bogomils (v.) from the name of the Bulgarian priest Bogumil, caused grave difficulties for the Church of Bosnia. The diocese of Bosnia is remembered in the falsified bull of Alexander II of 18 March 1067 and in the genuine one of Clement III of 8 Jan. 1089 as a suffragan of Antivari; in 1192 it was subjected to the metropolitan see of Split, and in 1247 by Innocent IV to that of Kalocsa. From 1292 the Franciscans bore the principal burden of the care of souls. When in 1463 Stephen Tomašević, the last native king of Bosnia, fell into the hands of the Turks and was beheaded, many Catholics and the greater part of the Bogomils passed over to Islam. The Franciscans took charge of the remaining Catholics from Dalmatia, at the risk of their own lives.
By decree of 5 Sept. 1735 Propaganda appointed a Franciscan vicar apostolic with episcopal character and with jurisdiction over the whole of Bosnia under Ottoman rule. This apostolic vicariate was divided into the two apostolic vicariates of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 Sept. 1847. After the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria in 1878, Leo XIII erected on 5 July 1881 the archdiocese of S. with the suffragans of Banjaluka and Mostar, entrusting them all to Propaganda. Given the political situation in which it finds itself, it is not possible to provide statistics: the last are from 1940. At that time, out of 1,410,000 inhabitants there were 341,700 Catholics with 252 priests.
Bibliography2 works
Nicola Kowalsky
OLOVO (Piombo). - A small town of eastern Bosnia in the diocese of S. and a famous Marian sanctuary of the Balkans during the Turkish domination (15th-17th centuries), where countless masses of pilgrims flocked from all the regions of Bosnia, Croatia, Slavonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Albania (and also from Italy, Germany and Poland), not only Catholics but Orthodox, Muslims and Jews, and where miracles were continually wrought so astounding that they can be compared only to those narrated in the Gospel. From this sanctuary there radiated forth, as from a driving center of Christian life, the missionary work of the Franciscans throughout the Balkan lands. The distant origins of the Franciscan convent and of the venerated miraculous image of the Madonna, painted on panel, go back to the era preceding the Turkish domination. The Turks, having seized Bosnia (1463), continually subjected the sanctuary to vexations, exorbitant extortions of money and fines, until on 1 Aug. 1704 they set it on fire, amid which the sacred image also disappeared. Nevertheless the people never ceased to go to venerate the Madonna upon those ruins, from which the Franciscans of Bosnia, only after 234 years (1938), succeeded in raising a new modest church, thus reviving the ancient popular devotion.