Nuncio in all but name. Mancone reported to Rome on the deteriorating conditions for Croatian Jews, made representations on behalf of the Jews to Croatian officials, and transported Jewish children to safety in neutral Turkey. Forced conversions In a circular letter to his clergy, Stepinac initially insisted that conversion had to be done freely, and only after religious instruction. While this and subsequent regulations were designed to protect "the church hierarchy against charges of promoting forced conversions", they also indicated "the church was willing to cooperate with regime's forced conversions, provided the canonical rules were followed". On 3 December 1941, Stepinac sent the pope a report, wherein he notes "the best prospects exist for the conversions". However, the church's instructions were ignored by the Ustaše authorities. The authorities not only conducted forcible conversions, but on occasion they used the prospect of conversion as a means to gather Serbs together so they could kill them, which is what occurred at Glina. Some Serbs demanded that the local Catholic clergy convert them in order to save their lives. Later Stepinac advised individual priests to admit Orthodox believers to the Catholic Church if their lives were in danger, such that this conversion had no validity, allowing them to return to their faith once the danger passed. On 18 May 1943, Stepinac wrote a letter to the pope, in which he estimated 240.000 conversions to date (despite some disputes Tomasevich states this letter is authentic). The Catholic Church in Croatia has also had to contend with criticism of what some have seen as a passive stance towards the Ustaša policy of religious conversion whereby some Serbs – but not the intelligentsia element – were able to escape other persecution by adopting the Catholic faith. According to Cornwell, through his role in the forced conversions, Stepinac displayed a "moral dislocation" that "endorsed a contempt for religious freedom tantamount to complicity with the violence". While Stepinac did suspend a number of priests, including Ivo Guberina and Zvonko Brekalo, he only had the authority to do so within his own diocese; he had no power to suspend other priests or bishops outside of Zagreb, as that power was reserved for the Vatican. Due to the arbitrary nature of justice in the NDH and the absence of proper systems for complaint and redress, people such as Stepinac developed an approach of intervening personally with senior government figures on