The Smiljana Rendić Collection is stored at the Archdiocesan Archives in Zagreb. The collection documents the cultural and opposition work of Croatian journalist and intellectual Smiljana Rendić. The collection is particularly important to learning about the existence of the Catholic "underground" in socialist Croatia, which included an entire network of Catholic lay people who gathered around the Catholic Church and were opposed to the regime and its official ideology.
The collection pertains to the work of Catholic journalist Smiljana Rendić from her youngest days until her death in the 1990s. Rendić donated the collection to the publisher of the Catholic newspaper Glas Koncila, a weekly for which she had worked as a contributor and which published a high number of her articles and essays over the decades. After her death in 1994, the collection stayed with Glas Koncila for about ten years. At around 2005, it was submitted to the Archdiocesan Archives in Zagreb for better maintenance, preservation and public use. At the time it was transferred in eight very large boxes. At the initiative of the COURAGE Project, this collection was processed in 2018 by the archivist Stjepan Razum, and all the materials were distributed into 52 archival boxes.
Rendić's collection offers significant insight into the world of Catholic laity that was at the periphery of public life in the socialist era. Rendić was one of the prominent members of this Catholic milieu, which was virtually invisible during socialism and out of the public eye, as it mostly gathered around ecclesiastical institutions. On the heels of the persecution of numerous Catholic intellectuals, leading to their post-war emigration, and the ban on participation in public life for Catholicism, Rendić's circle represented a sort of Catholic "underground." The documents in the collection are mostly written in Croatian and Italian. The collection is very well preserved, and an inventory has already been compiled as useful information for research. It is in paper format and digitization has not been implemented yet.
The collection was not formed with some clearly defined goal, but it was created over time through the journalistic and intellectual work of Smiljana Rendić as her personal archive. The collection is located at the archival institution that administers it. All of the costs incurred during its processing were covered by the regular income of this archival institution. This collection is not publicly available yet, since 100 years have not passed since the creator's birth or 70 years since its formation. However, it may be accessed with the prior permission of the collection’s owner, the Archdiocese of Zagreb (Interview with Razum, Stjepan).
Opis obsahu
The collection of Smiljana Rendić is divided into several units, mostly consisting of personal documents, largely from correspondence with well-known people and institutions, and most of her journalistic work. The articles were classified by Rendić in her collection into those with religious and secular content, and to those she had published in Glas Koncila or in other newspapers. There are also six photo albums, all of which are properly organized. In the first set of records, the first three archival boxes of the collection contain personal documents, various certificates, private accounts and bills, and articles which she had written for the Italian Catholic magazine Avvenire.
This is followed by correspondence with numerous Catholics and other institutions she collaborated with in her journalistic work, stored in 15 archival boxes. The third largest unit of the materials consists of 19 boxes of her manuscripts of newspaper articles, most of them published in the most important Catholic newspaper during the socialist era, Glas Koncila. The fourth section of the collection pertains to Rendić’s literary work and her translations from the Italian and French languages, which consists of 4 archival boxes. In the fifth unit consists of various materials which were used by Rendić to prepare for her work, such as articles, while the sixth unit of the collection contains photo albums, mostly personal photographs and photographs of people from the Catholic clergy and laypersons people of her time.
Rendić, Smiljana. Katolički identitet i hrvatski preporod: rasprave, kritike, izvještaji (Catholic identity and the Croatian national revival: Discussions, Criticism, Reports). Zagreb: Glas Koncila, 2013.
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Kljaić, Stipe
zoznam odkazov
Mikić, Anto. Crkveno i društveno značenje Glasa Koncila od 1963. do 1972. (Church and the social meaning of Glas koncila from 1963 to 1972.). Doctoral thesis, Zagreb: University of Zagreb, 2016.
Rendić, Smiljana. Katolički identitet i hrvatski preporod: rasprave, kritike, izvještaji (Catholic identity and the Croatian national revival: Discussions, Criticism, Reports). Zagreb: Glas Koncila, 2013.
Razum, Stjepan, interview by Kljaić, Stipe , October 02, 2018. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection
