Except for sporadic and mild rapprochements, the Catholic Church did not contest the right of the Ustaša regime to announce, propagandize and politically manipulate in her name with conversion which is an act of eminent spiritual character, but the Church obediently executed the political will of the regime as if it had been her own, in the spirit of the archbishop’s instructions “on the sublime work for the protection and advancement of Independent State of Croatia (ISC)”. Pavelić issued a Legislative decree on conversion from one faith to another on 3rd of May 1941 whose aim was to stop the conversion from one faith to the other without government control: “For the conversion to be valid it is necessary that the individual that is changing his/her faith submit a written application to the governing body (...) and obtain a confirmation of the application”. The decree repealed all the existing laws on conversion from one faith to another including the religious regulations, which was made additionally clear by a classified letter the Ministry of Religion and Education sent to Catholic Bishop ordinatori on 14th May 1941192 and by the Instructions sent by the same Ministry on 27th May.193 Although the Archbishops’ Advisory Board in Zagreb reacted on 8th of May to this attempt of the state to instrumentalize the Church and the Church expressed disagreement with the letters sent by the Ministry of Religion and Education that stated that the Orthodox should not be allowed to convert to Greek-Catholic denomination because “the Greek-Catholic rite is considered equal to the Roman rite” and that Orthodox priests, teachers, intelligentsia, merchants and craftsmen should not be accepted into the Roman Catholic faith because that would be “contrary to the spirit and aims of the Catholic Church”,194 however the practice of mass forced conversion of Serbs that followed showed that the expressed reservations of the church were only of declarative nature. Together with extermination and enforced expulsion, one of the modules for “the solution of the Serbian question” was forced conversion of Serbs from the Orthodox faith into Roman Catholic or Greek Catholic faith. The aim of this forceful conversion was to assimilate the Orthodox population, that is, as the Ustaše used to say, “to return them to the faith of their fathers”. The forced conversions were most massive in the second half of 1941 and first part of 1942. Until the beginning of 1942, in just six months, about 100,000 Serbs were forcefully converted into the Roman Catholic faith.195 When the Croatian Orthodox Church was formed in 1942 the number of conversions suddenly decreased. The motives of the Serbs to accept forced conversion were fear in the face of a physical extermination or forced emigration. Thus, conversion was not based on voluntary and self-consciousness change from one Christian faith to another but was primarily motivated by a will to save one’s life and property.