Alojzije Stepinac was Archbishop of Zagreb during the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustasa regime installed under Axis occupation in 1941 which carried out mass killings of Serbs, Jews and Roma. He was tried by the Yugoslav communist authorities in 1946, convicted, imprisoned and later held under house arrest until his death. He was made a cardinal in confinement and beatified by John Paul II in 1998.
The two accounts of him are not slightly different, they are opposed. In the Croatian Catholic account he welcomed the state at its formation as most Croats did, then protested repeatedly against its killings and its forced conversions, sheltered people, and was convicted in a show trial for refusing to break the Croatian church from Rome. In the Serbian Orthodox account, and in a substantial body of critical scholarship, his protests were too late, too private and too weak against a regime whose crimes he had the standing to denounce publicly and did not.
What makes this case unusual is that the two churches tried to settle it together. At the initiative of Pope Francis, a joint commission of Catholic and Serbian Orthodox members examined the record and met over an extended period. It did not reach agreement, and said so. The canonisation has not proceeded.
That outcome is worth recording precisely because it is a failure. Two churches with every institutional incentive to produce a form of words examined the same documents and could not converge, which is a stronger statement about the state of the evidence than either side's advocacy. This entry does not adjudicate it either.