Word: stepinac
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...iron-barred gates of Lepoglava Prison swung open. Out walked Communist Yugoslavia's No. 1 ideological prisoner, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, the gaunt, peasant-born primate of his country's 7,000,000 Roman Catholics...
...walk into freedom. By order of the Tito government, Archbishop Stepinac had been conditionally released, after serving five years of a 16-year sentence on a trumped-up charge of wartime collaboration with the fascists. Actually, he was on his way to a roomier internment: his native village of Krasic, where, as a government communiqué said, "the former archbishop" would have to limit himself to the duties of a simple priest...
...Feel Guilty." There, in vestments borrowed from the parish priest, Stepinac said Mass for a dawn congregation of peasant women. Only his purple skullcap marked his ecclesiastical rank. Later, Stepinac talked with newsmen. He looked sallow, but otherwise fit. How did it feel to be out of prison? "I am satisfied," he answered softly. "Here, or there, it is my duty to suffer and work for the Catholic Church...
...with no trace of prison hobble or shuffle, from the church to the rectory. Outside, he glanced at the 400-year-old, dun-colored church, largest building in the village of 400. A militiaman with red-starred cap dawdled along a village street, the only uniformed person visible in Stepinac's new cell of confinement...
Marshal Tito, busy mending fences, made a direct offer to the Vatican last month to release imprisoned Archbishop Stepinac. Tito's condition: that Stepinac leave Yugoslavia the moment he is released. Last week the Vatican reported Tito's offer-and its own reply: no bargain. "The Holy See would be pleased if Monsignor Stepinac were freed," said the answer to Tito. "The Holy See is informed, however, that that Most Excellent Prelate, being convinced of his innocence, prefers to remain near his faithful." That seemed to hand Tito's awkward dilemma right back to Tito...