Religion: How Are Things in Yugoslavia?

Is there any such thing as freedom of worship in Titotalitarian Yugoslavia? Well, yes, said seven U.S. Protestant clergymen just returned from a Tito-financed junket (TIME, Aug. 25). By last week, the visiting ministers’ cheery reports on Yugoslavia had won them some irate rebukes from both Protestants and Catholics.

Everybody’s favorite target was Episcopal Traveler Guy Emery Shipler, editor of the U.S.’s oldest religious journal, The Churchman, which frequently has hard words for Roman Catholics and soft ones for friends of Russia. Full of news and views after his Yugoslav tour, which included a visit to the prison cell of Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, Dr. Shipler stated flatly that he found no evidence of suppression of religious activity there.* Still, he “doubted very much” that Yugoslav clergymen could safely attack the Government from the pulpit.

Systematic & Sinister? That was too much for the Most Rev. Richard J. Cushing, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston. Said he: “I feel bound . . .publicly to denounce the systematic and sinister anti-Catholicism of organized groups like the committee of ministers which last week returned to this country from Yugoslavia. . . . The damage is being done by men who—may God forgive them—are introduced as ‘Reverend.’ . . . We live in evil times when things can happen like the sell-out to Tito of the eight Protestant clergymen who were hand-picked to defend Tito’s war on religion. . . . It is a problem for our non-Catholic neighbors when seven of their clergymen can become conspirators in a Communist campaign without being repudiated by their fellow non-Catholic Christians.”

That “handpicked” remark, retorted Dr. Shipler, was untrue. Furthermore, he found the Archbishop’s whole statement “ill-tempered.” Said Dr. Shipler: “If the Roman Catholic Church in America wishes to be free from criticism, let it become only a church and not a political state. . . . Increasing numbers are determined to fight the type of political clericalism which has been so disastrous to other countries. . . .”

Charge & Countercharge. Meanwhile Dr. Shipler was busy warding off other blows. Mrs. Natalie Wales Paine (the former Mrs. Wales Latham), socially prominent founder of wartime Bundles for Britain, resigned noisily from The Churchman Associates, a sponsoring group which appears on The Churchman’s masthead but has no connection with editorial policy. Mrs. Paine accompanied her resignation with a blistering letter:

“In spite of the appalling facts . . . you and your colleagues undertook to whitewash Tito’s regime of all charges of religious persecution. . . . I joined The Churchman Associates several years ago because of the magazine’s reputation as an outstanding religious paper. I have been shocked to discover that The Churchman has used its position . . . to launch repeated attacks on the Roman Catholic Church.”

Dr. Shipler replied: “May I remind you that you have never been a member of The Churchman Associates except by sufferance, since you have never paid your dues. . . . If you had read The Churchman during the past 15 years, or even the past year, you would not have been shocked to discover what we have consistently said . . . about . . . the political activities of the Roman hierarchy. . . . It is strange reasoning . . . to assert that a report of facts on freedom of worship in Yugoslavia is openly defending the character and motives of the Tito regime.”

Out of Rome came an angry echo from Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official voice. Testimony of the U.S. clergymen, declared an editorial, did not meet “the first condition of seriousness and authority for any judgment.”

Divide & Weaken. The free-for-all was finally joined by somebody who really knows Yugoslavia, even though he has not been there for six years: the Rt. Rev. Iriney Georgevich, Serbian Orthodox Bishop of Dalmatia, now living in exile in the U.S. Said he: “I was shocked. . . . I cannot understand how as servants of God [the seven Protestants] can accept so gladly an invitation from one of the most ruthless tyrannies the world ever has known. I can only ask these clergymen whether they would have thought it proper to accept an invitation from Hitler. . . . The tactics used by Tito, as by Stalin, are to divide the churches so as to weaken their power to unite for resistance.”

If the committee of seven clergymen had not been “handpicked” by Tito, some of its members had apparently gone to Yugoslavia predisposed to a rosy view. One of the visitors, Dr. Claude C. Williams of Birmingham, Ala., was “exposed” last week by the New York World-Telegram’s Red-hunting Frederick Woltman as an ex-holder of a party card.

*From Trieste this week the Associated Press reported that a Yugoslav priest, Father Miro Bulesich, was beheaded when he tried to ward off a knife-brandishing mob that attacked and seriously wounded Msgr. Giacomo Ukmar, a Vatican prelate, after a ceremony at a church in Lanische, Venezia Giulia. Meanwhile, authorities found the mutilated body of a third Roman Catholic priest, bearing the “marks of horrible torture.”