Željko Mardešić was born in Milna on Brač, but spent his childhood in the beautiful town of Komiža on Vis, where he is also buried. He was one of the most respected sociologists of religion, although he trained in law and worked as a lawyer. He was well versed in theology and greatly enthused by the Second Vatican Council. He wrote about matters of great interest and spoke with all kinds of people. He followed everything happening in Croatia and the world, on the social level and especially the ecclesial one. He wrote a few pages about himself in the Introduction to his book "The Faces and Masks of the Sacred". He tells us of three humiliations he experienced, which stirred rebellion within him, and how he managed to overcome them. They were the humiliation of reason, of personal moral inconsistency, and the humiliation of goodness. In the end he also experienced the humiliation of poverty, caused partly by the hardship of the Homeland War and partly by his own choice of a self-effacing life.

In the former state he wrote under another name – Jakov Jukić. Fra Ante Vučković says: "He hid himself so that he could do what his heart loved. On the outside he was a lawyer, but inside, behind that name, an important man was concealed. As a man he was important. What is more, he was an especially good man, open to everyone. When I think of him I think of him first of all as a man, even though I first came to know him through his texts. He is greater and more important than his texts. As a man he was very interesting. He had trouble with his digestion. He was rather thin. He was attentive. When he spoke his eyes were very lively. He wore glasses. He had a raised, distinctive voice." Fra Ante Vučković considers the very feeling of humiliation to be extremely important: "Oh, I am ashamed that I do not know. Oh, I am ashamed that I cannot. And then, when that feeling grips you, that you are ashamed of not knowing – you want to know. That is wonderful! Socrates discovered that. Socrates, when he spoke with the young, would press them until they felt humiliated, because they thought they knew and did not know. And then Socrates would say: 'Now, now that you have felt humiliation, now you can begin the true search. As long as you imagine that you know, you are proud, you are conceited. But in fact you are empty within.' And then Socrates would strip away those shells, one by one, until that humiliation flew out. And then Socrates would say: 'I thought I knew, but now I see that I do not know. And that is wonderful!'" Željko Mardešić speaks in language similar to that of Socrates.

He spent his childhood surrounded by the care of his parents in the almost idyllic surroundings of Komiža and the island of Vis: "Every memory begins with childhood, for that is what we remember most deeply. In my case, that memory began in Komiža on the island of Vis – turned towards the boundless open sea and exposed to the threat of its waves. One of the inevitable companions of that life was the traditional Christianity of the time, unforgettable in its customs and beautiful in its rites. My mother was very devout, my father less so because he worked so much, though it was only later that it became clear how good and concerned he had always remained towards all of us in the family. Today he would be called a Rahnerian anonymous Christian. Like all the other children, I loved playing around the church and imitating the priest's gestures during the rites. So in the cellar we would occasionally build little wooden altars and wear liturgical vestments gathered from old discarded fabrics. Everything was then a source of joy to us, and nothing saddened us in our naïve childhood religiosity."

The first humiliation Željko encountered he calls "the humiliation of the mind". This happened in Komiža when the Second World War ended: "In the large coastal town where I continued my schooling, they taught us Russian history, Russian literature, the Russian language; we watched their films, read their books. Today's generation can hardly picture the conditions under which we acquired our first knowledge. In that vast and terrible desert of true wisdom, in the absence of real learning, nowhere could we encounter deeper meaning, nowhere any stimulus for the mind, nowhere a coherent expression. Everything was flooded and drowned by a certain superficiality, shallowness, simplicity, unconvincingness, arrogance, kitsch and stupidity. In those circumstances of general Bolshevik ideologisation of society, our youthful reason – hungry for knowledge – would be humiliated to its very depths." Fra Ante Vučković comments: "You can imagine young people who want knowledge but are given ideology, who want answers to questions of how the world works, how the cosmos works, how to learn. And they are given only ideology. For him that was a tremendous humiliation. So that was the first humiliation, of reason. And it seems to me that this is very important. Reason wants true answers. Reason cannot be satisfied with the superficial. Reason cannot be satisfied with ideology. Reason is satisfied only by truth. Only and solely truth. And that is the best thing young people have. You can never be satisfied with something that has not given you an answer. You have to dig down to the truth, whatever it takes. He had that passion for truth precisely because he was in surroundings that did not give him the truth."  

From this came his first opposition and his first rebellion against such a humiliation of healthy reason. Immediately the question arose of how to escape that state of humiliation, and what new knowledge he had to acquire, and how to reach it. And then, quite suddenly, as happens when something is desired with all one's might, he came upon what he had so longed for: "So I threw myself into a feverish and impatient search for other sources, even though in that society it was in fact impossible to find them. And then one night, quite suddenly, in the cellar and the attic of the house, I discovered, gathered in many crates, a vast number of Catholic books and journals, which my uncle the canon had left behind shortly before his death. I felt as elated as someone who had managed to find buried treasure in pirate caves. Almost everything of greatest value published between the two world wars in theology, philosophy, science and history was unexpectedly found stored there. Within my reach was, literally, our entire modern Catholic culture, something I could not even have dreamed would happen. I threw myself passionately into reading, like one hungry for food and thirsty for water."

What he had longed for he found in his own house, in foreign languages he did not know, and so he set about learning foreign languages and passionately reading everything he had found. This lasted more than ten years.  Fra Ante says: "Over ten years his spirit grew stronger, and he learned to distinguish truth from falsehood, what should be sought from ideology. He grew stronger by discovering what is true. He discovered important writers, above all those who came from the Catholic movement between the two wars. And with a strengthened spirit he had the strength to meet the world. He overcame the first humiliation of reason. To me that is wonderful. Because now, as a Catholic, he was aware, he had answers to questions. No one could stupefy him so easily anymore. No one could shut his mouth. He knew more than others. He broke through stupidity, through superficiality, through ignorance, into knowledge. And he felt strong. To me that is a fascinating story, where a man, simply because he knows, carries within him the freedom to meet others, to meet the world. That is the first story. But the story does not end there. That is the first story, which is probably the easiest. Perhaps the easiest thing of all is to acquire knowledge. Today knowledge is no longer as blocked for us, access to knowledge is no longer as blocked as it was for him on the island. Where on an island will you find books that speak of the freedom of the spirit? That was hidden, and he discovered it."

He himself concludes about that first humiliation he had to overcome: "Some extraordinary texts I still remember today, as if I had read them only yesterday. Slowly I emerged from the state of humiliated reason. The rebellion clearly subsided, and the burning desire for knowledge grew calm. Once again I regained – even in unfavourable surroundings – my Christian intellectual dignity, and I emerged from its childish interpretation. Unfortunately, even then I had not entirely reached the goal, for my head was indeed full of rational grounds for Christianity, but my heart was empty of its lived experience."

There followed, then, a second humiliation, far harder than the first, and this after he discovered that he could overcome humiliated reason – the humiliation of personal moral inconsistency, and the rebellion against it. He began to feel this rebellion within himself ever more strongly. Željko calls this second rebellion "the rebellion of humiliated morality": "To make of a Christian a moral person is far harder than to read books about Christian morality. The leap from knowledge about Christianity to lived Christianity is truly great, so it is no wonder that many postpone it. And when they finally decide to take that step, they are usually met by exceptional spiritual difficulties and unforeseen obstacles. For one must confront the weaknesses of one's own being and temptations that never cease. Jesus himself said that the one without sin should cast the first stone. On this thorny path there are, of course, no witnesses, for each person must alone win for himself the fragile freedom from the fall into temptation. Often what matters is not whether we have succeeded in everything, but how much effort and good will we have put in. The fruits are written in heaven, and not on earth. Beyond human sight and in the silence of a personal decision, everyone's drama of moral responsibility before their own conscience unfolds. In this it is decisive that the believer place trust in God's mercy, and not in his own virtuous abilities. For we never redeem ourselves, but rather it is our neighbours and God who do so for us. Onto this steep path I again set out out of rebellion. I already possessed sufficient knowledge of the ethics of my faith, but at the same time I was very far from living it consistently. Better to say, the more I knew about ethics, the more quickly the sense of moral responsibility awoke within me, often driving me to despair and anguish. I asked myself openly: how can you be so well versed in Christianity, and yet care so little for its moral duties? The decision could no longer be delayed, for the mark of hypocrisy – pointed out by myself to myself – was knocking at the door.

Fra Ante says of this: "He said to himself: 'Hey, Željko, you are a hypocrite. You know everything and yet you do not live accordingly. This is unbearable!' And that is the rebellion from within that uncovered the truth. But you have not yet shaped yourself according to that truth. And I cannot bear that. I must now rebel against myself.' At first he rebelled against the world that did not give him the truth, that held him back. And now he discovered that he himself was a greater obstacle than the world. He had overcome the world through knowledge, and the world no longer had power over him, but his moral life was not yet in order. And he rebelled against that. And then he set about correcting the crooked lines from his childhood, the war and the post-war years. He will not say exactly what was wrong, nor is that necessary. No one has to say in what way he had not put his moral life in order, because that is not important. But it is important to admit it to oneself. And he does this publicly, he admits that it was not in order and that it needed to be put right. And what did he then seek? He sought someone with whom to do this. And look at whom he found. He had to find an interlocutor": "So I rebelled against the humiliated morality within the system of my well-constructed intellectual Christianity, and set about correcting the crooked lines from my childhood, the war and the post-war years. And here philosophy, theology and science did not help at all, if anything they clipped my wings mid-flight. It was necessary to find faithful fellow travellers, who had passed along similar paths and lived through the same experiences of sin and redemption. My most precious friend in this trouble was certainly Dostoevsky. In that period of severe moral crisis, his novels meant more to me than all the philosophies of this world put together." It is interesting how the ideology that had blocked him came from Russia, chiefly Communist ideology. His salvation, too, comes from Russia. And that through Dostoevsky. He began to keep company with interlocutors no longer among the living, but who still had something to say to him, who nourished his spirit, especially the many witnesses of encounters with Christ, such as Papini, Mauriac, Claudel, Green, Bernanos and others.

All this was still not enough; he lacked something crucial, which he recognised in himself as missing: "All the same, the fundamental turn nevertheless took place entirely outside that circle, and in an entirely spiritual horizon: prayer. Perhaps certain Muslim theologians are right when they claim that prayer divides believers from unbelievers more than belief in one God does. Until a person falls on his knees before God, and cries out from the deepest wounds of his soul the cry of weakness and despair, it can hardly be said that he has become a religious being. But here begins a personal mystery and a realm of human intimacy, of which – as Kierkegaard wrote somewhere – nothing is ever told to anyone, except to oneself and to God."

He almost never spoke about prayer. Fra Ante Vučković testifies: "He came to the point of realising that he would not be able to order his life morally according to the knowledge he had acquired earlier, unless he knelt down, unless he began to pray. He was interested in everything, especially what was happening in the Church, all the movements. There was no journal in the Church that he did not read. He knew everything – who was on the right, who was on the left, who was for the bishops, who was against the pope. When I needed to know what was happening in the Church, my favourite thing was to go in front of the Church of Our Lady of Health, or down along Marmontova Street, counting on meeting Željko, and then talking with him for a short while. Then I would learn everything that was happening. He would tell me everything: 'This one writes this, read this, please do not miss this.' In a short time you would get information about what was happening in the Catholic Church – unless what happened to me, and to others too, happened to you: that you would come across Željko on Marmontova and he would not greet you. You would go towards him to say hello, and he would do nothing, would pass right by you. Until we discovered that he had a twin brother, who of course did not know his friends. In this way Željko was a source of information about what was happening in the Catholic Church. He was extremely interested. He cared to find out about new movements too, about how people prayed in those movements, say among the charismatics or the neocatechumenate, what their prayer meetings in homes looked like, what phenomena there were, what was going on there. He was very curious. But he had his own deep experience of prayer. He would go to the Church of Our Lady of Health. That was a dear place to him, and he would pray there in silence, when no one was around. And he would sometimes go there for Mass. He had a friend, Fra Špiro Marasović, whose Mass he also attended. So, everything interested him."

In his mature years it became ever clearer to him that Christianity is not merely wisdom and moral living, but something far more and far deeper than that. Željko calls this: goodness. In his work and life, and in society in general, he encountered the humiliation of the good man: "Through years of reading and penetrating the texts of the Gospel, a whole network of strangely coinciding meanings was revealed to me, which flowed irrevocably always towards the same destination: that of man's need for conversion to goodness, which is God himself, for he is defined by Love. The synonyms of the notion of goodness are many: to love one's enemies, to give one's life for one's neighbour, to have a pure heart, not to judge others but oneself, to be meek, humble, a peacemaker, merciful, to forgive one's brother, to pray for one's persecutors, not to do righteousness so that people may see us, to choose the narrow gate and the hard road. It was precisely in my mature years that I began to feel how this good man within me had been humiliated and mocked in the most drastic way, as reason had been earlier under Bolshevik ideologisation, and moral responsibility in an overly rationally lived Christianity." Fra Ante says of this: "Christianity will not be saved by scholars, although knowledge was important to him and he constantly read books. He knew what knowledge without morality and goodness means. Not even moral people will save it. Morality is too short. I can put my own moral life in order, I can be moral and yet judge other people. I can be moral and not be good. That is very strange. I can observe all the moral laws in my life and yet be gruff, rigid, judgemental. There are people who live morally and yet whose hearts condemn everyone else around them. Željko discovered that he had to rebel, in order to break through that membrane, in order to be able to free himself from that humiliation and break through to goodness. This is a man who discovered why the Church is here. For the sake of this world. He knew how to distinguish that better Church, the militant Church which says: 'We know, we are the best, we are the strongest, no one can stand against us.' That militant spirit in which believers consider themselves better than others. And he knew the Church of the Second Vatican Council, which was reconciled with the world, which discovered goodness, discovered people's need for goodness. And he chose that Church. For he knew that he was losing, that he would be mocked, that he would be rejected. But he walked through that humiliation and became a good man."

From this arose his third rebellion, and his struggle for goodness, for the good man within himself: "I noticed that the good man had shown himself to be not merely superfluous, but had become a laughing-stock, a monster, a freak and a disgrace to the worldly world, but also to many Christians who had adapted themselves to that world. Can we still even imagine that a good man could survive today in the economy, in politics, in the entertainment industry, in the mass media, in social life, in the army – where everywhere the merciless law of competition reigns – let alone in the underworld of drugs, violence, cruelty, crime, misery and death? Everyone wants to be strong, loud, famous, beautiful, learned, respected and influential, and no one wants to be gentle, peaceful, modest, withdrawn and quiet. These qualities remain present and alive only in art, for there they trouble no one."

Željko did not consider himself a good man, but he knew that without goodness, as he himself described it, he could not call himself one, nor could he be a Christian: "Indeed, without goodness there is neither Church nor believer. All of this is carried and upheld on the frail shoulders of the good man of the Gospel. To be wise is certainly necessary, and to be moral is necessary. And yet, without goodness, which is a scandal to the world, there is no Christianity. It is enough for us to let the good man live among us – without crucifying him on a cross – and we have already done everything necessary for our salvation. Let us not mock the good, then, but try at least in part to imitate them. This core Christian truth was surely worth living and bearing witness to. In my life I walked for a long time along crooked lines and passed through inverted paths, thus arriving at the three rebellions I have mentioned, which, however, I never raised against others, but only against myself, dissatisfied with my own Christian thinking, morality and goodness."

The last humiliation he experienced is not found in the book, but Fra Ante Vučković tells of it: "He experienced it in his last years. It was the humiliation of poverty. The war laid waste to everything. The war brought poverty too. He lived modestly. He was extremely curious. And so out of his curiosity, since he could not buy every newspaper, he wanted at least to see with his own eyes what was written on the front pages. Once it happened that he was humiliated because the shop assistant shouted at pensioners who did not want to buy but wanted to read. And so he experienced an inner humiliation because of poverty. What he did was unpaid – he presented books, gave lectures, held retreats, even for bishops, travelled to various places, wrote for journals, wrote books – but he was not paid for it. He knew precisely that for most of the things you do in the Church and for the Church, you will not be paid. He never complained to anyone about it. But through this he drew far closer to Christ, to the poor Christ. Through this he was probably closest of all to Socrates. Socrates, when he was put on trial, when he had to justify the truth of his life, called on poverty as his witness. Socrates says: 'You have people around you who sell knowledge. They are the sophists, who say: Give us your children, give us your sons, and we will teach them knowledge. You will pay us for it.' Socrates says: 'I have never charged anyone for speaking with them. I gave them the best and the most I had. My poverty testifies to my sincerity and my truthfulness.'"

That is the last poverty, the last resistance that Željko passed through, and it testifies to the seriousness of all three of these ruptures, these humiliations he lived through in his life. They were like membranes that burst one after another, so that the purity within him might be clarified. And so he died with that purity, with the simplicity of a curious child, who knew everything about the Church and yet loved it to the end with his whole heart. Nothing that was bad, or evil, happening around him was hidden from him. There was never any condemnation of people in his tone. He would always say: 'People are more than what they say. People are deeper than what they themselves think of themselves.' So he uncovered goodness and depth in people, more than they themselves had seen. And that is why he would never quarrel with people over what they had said. He would say: 'He said that, and perhaps it sounds harsh. But he is more important, he is more than that. We cannot reject him because of his harsh words. He must be preserved. He is far more important.' Whenever I met him, whenever we worked together, did something together, it was always a refreshment. He belongs among the truly inspiring people, especially for those interested in the state of the Church, who want a certain kind of clarity, a critical outlook – but a look that is not harsh, that is not full of hatred, but that loves what it speaks of. When he spoke about the Church you could feel it precisely: not that he spoke of it from outside, but that he spoke from within, as one who loves her. Whenever he spoke of what he believed, of what mattered to him, he always returned to the Gospel. And that is what he did in his last column, which he published in the journal "Svjetlo riječi" (Light of the Word), where he dealt with what was the heart of his entire work, namely peacemaking. He was a very committed peacemaker. Of course, he lost many friends because of this. He often felt lonely. But he found other relationships and other friends, with a certain peace within himself, because he could not betray what came to him as a clarity of what needed to be done. And then, at the last moment, when you must give everything of yourself. And when you have given everything and nothing is left, the most precious thing appears – a life that stands in the light of God's word. He has something to give us that is not mine, but when I encounter it, it is as though it were mine, something given to me as a gift. I am grateful to Željko, because even after he left he has remained among us. He is still giving. Regardless of poverty, he is richer than many others. That wealth will not come, nor can it come, through the material. It can come only from this purity that has remained among us."