How to Win Friends

Marshal Josip Broz. alias Tito, is one of the world's leading anti-Stalinists, but he is still a Communist in spirit and practice. Last week Tito, who plans a friendly visit to Britain in March, was trying to curry favor with Roman Catholics while continuing to attack the Vatican; and he was being downright gracious to a former enemy, Germany.

Late in 1952, when the Vatican made a cardinal of Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac --a man long persecuted by the Tito regime and still confined to his native village--Tito broke relations with the Holy See and sent the papal charge d'affaires packing. Last week the Marshal invited seven high Yugoslav prelates to a conference at his villa. The churchmen came, smiled, registered for the nth time some old complaints, but agreed to join a church-government commission to study religious problems. Tito's propaganda organs claimed that the conference showed the government's "tolerance" of religion. But the Vatican saw it as a first step to ward nationalizing the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia.

The Yugoslavs have not forgotten Nazi brutalities during the war, and West Germany distrusts any Communist regime, however anti-Russian it may be. But trade between the two countries (e.g., German machinery for Yugoslav metals) is flourishing. Last week Bonn announced that Yugoslavia this year would return to Germany 15 German nationals and 150 Volksdeutsche (Yugoslav nationals of German blood) now held in Tito's detention camps. This presumably cleans the slate of all German war prisoners in Yugoslavia.

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