prophet who "demolished the principles of legal authority given by the Lord". He went on to blame Protestantism for the "hell in which human society suffers today", and said that it had opened the road to "anarchy in all forms of human life." Stepinac was also highly critical of Eastern Orthodoxy, seeing it as a serious danger to both the Catholic Church and Croats in general. The day after the Yugoslav coup d'état of 27 March 1941, carried out by British-supported Serb officers against a pact with the Axis powers, he wrote in his diary: All in all, Croats and Serbs are two worlds, the north and south poles, which will never become close except by a miracle of God. The schism is the greatest curse of Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. In it there is no morality, no principle, no truth, no justice, no honesty. On the same day he issued an encyclical to his clergy, calling on them to pray for the young king, and that Croatia and Yugoslavia would be "spared the horrors of war". This was consistent with long-standing practice of the Catholic Church to show loyalty to the state and its leadership. Stepinac was well aware of the fact that an estimated 200,000 mostly Croatian Catholics had converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church in the interwar period. Actual census data contradict these claims, showing slightly greater percentage increase in the number of Catholic Croats compared to Orthodox Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia. He later claimed that Catholics were forced to convert to Orthodoxy during the period between the wars, but according to the historian Jozo Tomasevich, the principal reason for their conversions was the pro-Serb public policy in the Serb-dominated Yugoslav state meant that it was advantageous both politically and for career prospects to be a member of the dominant religion. Tomasevich also notes that despite the fact that it was the national church of the dominant nation in the country, the Serb Orthodox Church felt threatened by Rome, particularly in Bosnia where the Catholic Church was extremely dynamic - in just one diocese, encompassing half of Bosnia's Catholics, it created 17 new parishes in the interwar period. Tomasevich cites Vladko Maček, the leading prewar Croatian opposition leader, who when attacked by an Ustaše priest, for failing to state in his autobiography that the Catholic Church was persecuted in prewar Yugoslavia, Maček responded: "I