Orthodox schools were shut down, and the Church was prohibited from collecting contributions from believers, robbing it of income. Orthodox Church properties were confiscated by the Ustaše, some turned over to the Croatian Catholic Church. Finally, to destroy the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Ustaše tried to create its own, alternative Croatian Orthodox Church, with an imported Russian priest. but failed to gain adherents. Despite these many actions by the Ustaše to destroy the Serbian Orthodox Church, Tomasevich found no condemnations of these crimes, public or private, by Stepinac or any other members of the Croatian Catholic Church. On the contrary, he states that this massive Ustaše attack on the Serbian Orthodox Church "was approved and supported by many Croatian Catholic priests", and that the Croatian Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and the Vatican "regarded Ustaše policies against the Serbs and Serbian Orthodox Church as advantageous to Roman Catholicism". Tomasevich assesses Stepinac's wartime words and deeds in three categories : (1) Private actions to help certain individuals and groups, where he states Stepinac "deserves highest praise, although his actions were not always successful", (2) Proclamations of general human rights, expressed in his sermons at first "occasionally and mildly", but more strongly after 1943 (after the Ustashe had already perpetrated most of the genocides, and it was clear the Nazis and Ustashe would be defeated), also deserve praise, and (3) Statements dealing with overall Church policy toward the wartime Croatian state. Here Tomasevich states "there are serious shortcomings in Stepinac’s statements and actions toward the Ustashe regime and its genocidal actions against the Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church". Thus, despite the Ustashe genocide against the Serbs, the ethnic cleansing and forced conversions, the killings and expulsions of most Orthodox priests, the destruction and desecration of many Orthodox Churches, “neither Archbishop Stepinac, nor any other Catholic bishop in the state...uttered one word of public protest” against these crimes. “This was not a mere oversight. It was a deliberate policy” as stated by the papal legate Abbot Marcone, when he wrote in 1943 that given the fact that most guerrillas were “schismatics” (i.e. Eastern-Orthodox Serbs) “our Croatian episcopate does not have any special motive to protest publicly against the government in favor of the schismatics” In Stepinac's case this was compounded by his “dim view of Orthodoxy and thought that an unbridgeable gulf existed between Croats and Serbs”.