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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."