Bernardin Sokol, baptismal name Luka, was born on May 20th, 1888 in Kaštel Sućurac near Split. He joined the Franciscan Order in 1905 and was ordained as a priest in 1912. He studied music in Klosterneuburg near Vienna from 1915 to 1917. There he also studied canon law, morality, pastorality and liturgy. Afterwards, he taught morality, canon law and music in Dubrovnik. He continued his theological and music studies in Rome where he received his doctoral degree in theology in 1925. He completed his music studies in 1926 at the Pontifical Music School. From 1927 to 1932 he taught introduction to choral singing and church musicology at the Faculty of Theology in Zagreb.
Afterwards he lived on the Island of Badija near Korčula where he worked as a music professor at the Franciscan High School. From 1929 to 1941 he published 80 volumes of collections of church and worldly music Pjevajte Gospodinu pjesmu novu. He also published Glazbeni monolozi that he described as “25 volumes with 125 larger or smaller works: for small, medium and big children, that is, youth, male, female and mixed“. There he also published eleven Angelus. During his lifetime, Sokol was listed in some foreign musical lexicons.
He went to Zagreb in 1941 once again to make it easier to continue publishing his musical project. However, an illness, as well as the war, prevented him from doing so. He returned to Badija in February of 1944 where he was falsely accused of betraying the partisans. On the night of September 28th, 1944, a few of them arrested him and removed him from the monastery. A few days later, the sea washed ashore his body on a beach in Orebić. A group of locals buried him there. He and his works were covered by a shroud of secrecy and this lasted until the Republic of Croatia became independent. When Fr. Bernardin Sokol was arrested, the members of the Department for People's Protection (OZNA) took various documents from his room. Some of them, now kept at the Croatian National Archives (HDA), saw the light of day 74 years later. In those documents he underlined the sentences with words such as “Croat“ and “Croatian“ making it obvious that his only “sin“ was that he was Croatian. He was executed without being charged and without a trial and his body has still not been found.
Stipe Nosić, PhD, Franciscan
