racism in several sermons, starting from 1938. "To consider oneself as some higher beings - superhuman and despise another, when it is known that all men are in themselves dust and ashes, and by the mercy of God, all the children of one Heavenly Father", he preached in 1938. Stepinac considered Nazis as „pagans“, and always held a reserved attitude, in any contact with German representatives. Gestapo in Zagreb reported that Stepinac held a clear antipathy against Nazism, and made numerous acts to help prosecuted Jews 1941–1945. In 1940, Stepinac had told Prince Paul: The most ideal thing would be for the Serbs to return to the faith of their fathers, that is, to bow the head before Christ's representative, the Holy Father. Then we could at last breathe in this part of Europe, for Byzantinism has played a frightful role in the history of this part of the world. Of all the threats he perceived to the Croatian people and the Catholic Church, Stepinac railed most against the dangers of communism. In August 1940, in response to the recent establishment of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, Stepinac sermonised that there could be no co-operation between the Church and communists, stated that the Church was not afraid of communists, and that communists would make Croatia "a nation of killers and robbers, debauchees, and thieves". Stepinac was particularly obsessed with Freemasonry, which was closely associated with support for the unification of Yugoslavia and opposed what it considered the Catholic Church's "authoritarianism and anti-liberal ideology." In 1934 Stepinac wrote in his diary: "In Yugoslavia, today, Freemasonry rules. Unfortunately, in the heart of the Croatian nation also, in Zagreb, this hellish society has entrenched itself, a lair of immorality, corruption, and all kinds of dishonesty, the sworn enemy of the Catholic Church and therefore also of the Croatian nation. Without the knowledge and approval of the Freemasons, nobody can be appointed to any influential position. It is no joke to join battle with it, but it must be done in the interests of the church, the Croatian people, and even the state of Yugoslavia if it wants to continue to exist, because the violence that rules today is supported by Freemasonry." Tomasevich notes that such vehement sentiments against Freemasonry were was not unusual among conservative senior churchmen prior to the Second Vatican Council. Tomasevich further observes that despite papal encyclicals