376 The Presidential Years
the pope even tried to convince the local bishops not to take an openly hostile
attitude toward him. In spite of the opposition of some influential circles in the
Roman Curia and in the Serb Orthodox Church, John XXIII’s successor, Paul
VI, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Yugoslavia after secret talks
with Belgrade in 1966 and established diplomatic relations in 1970. In fact, the
Vatican saw in Yugoslavia a model of cooperation between the Church and the
State that could also be applied in other communist countries.^611 For his part,
Tito too made symbolic gestures toward the Catholic Church, for instance
visiting the Charterhouse of Pleterje in Slovenia with his wife Jovanka in 1964,
and the following year sponsoring a law on religious communities that guaran-
teed more rights to believers.^612 After 1966, he had contacts through reserved
channels with Paul VI, exchanging opinions on the most controversial interna-
tional issues. Pope Paul VI was so impressed by Tito’s statesmanship and his
ability as mediator that he considered him one of the world’s most eminent
defenders of peace. This was underlined in his words of greeting on the occa-
sion of the marshal’s visit to the Vatican, during which the excommunication
proclaimed by Pius XII against all the Catholics implicated in the Stepinac
trial (which included Tito) was obviously forgotten. The pope praised his
efforts to build better and more fruitful relations “between peoples and conti-
nents,” stressing that the collaboration of Yugoslavia and the Holy See had
already yielded promising results in this field.^613 The attention lavished on
Tito’s visit was evident from the moment he arrived in Rome, given that he was
welcomed at the airport not just by Italian dignitaries, but also by Vatican rep-
resentatives—a historical first. The secretary of state, Cardinal Jean-Marie Vil-
lot, declared that Yugoslavia was fortunate to have Tito, while Cardinal Eugène
Tisserant added that “Tito was the pride of the Yugoslav peoples,” and that “if
other countries had a Tito, there would be world peace.”^614 The pope received
him on 28 March—the day that other communist leaders were gathering in
Moscow for the Twenty-Fourth Soviet Party Congress—and held a conversa-
tion with him for two hours, which in itself was significant.^615 At the congress,
Brezhnev only mentioned Yugoslavia in a single sentence, including it among
the socialist countries, as if it were within the sphere of Soviet influence. But
the efforts of Tito and his collaborators to oppose such pretensions were not in
vain, as shown by his visit to the Vatican.^616
Brezhnev in Belgrade, Tito in the USABelieving it necessary to “keep Yugoslavia afloat,” the West was not stingy in its
economic and political aid. The political aid consisted mostly of more or less
explicit declarations that NATO would not allow the extension of Soviet influ-
ence to the Adriatic coast.^617 Due to inflation, the foreign trade deficit, and