Growing up or selling out?:

...Before the '89 revolution, I had fallen in with such a bunch government of another ex-Communist, Marian Colfa...

...sult is a kind of quiet economic chaos...

...Western ways had set countries, unable to ship merchandise from one region to the in...

...gov- again entrepreneurs profiting from privatization ernment TV hardly paid a producer enough to survive...

...No one had much money (you percent...

...I do believe there is something," she said...

...That, at any rate, was the local per- to invest...

...his apartment, too, because apartments at less than London rates were almost impossible to find and it was still uncertain who Corporate conflicts aside, most of the local bornowned what...

...Everything is so uncertain for the baby," he said...

...When their way back to the top, sloughing their pasts like snake skins...

...to sort it all out...

...An exhausted peoers had decided to do next...

...pause...

...Now in the post-Communist semi-theologians, incredibly naive, unable to distinguish society it is essentially the same mediocrities running the between religion and politics...

...They are proving incapable of responding to the Christian political parties look back to Tiso as a role model challenges of a pluralist society or delegating to the laity...

...CZECHS FACE THE FUTURE She got pregnant in Prague about the time of the exhausted peoples, economic and social chaos, a political vacVelvet Revolution...

...The three of us stared at it exposed on its string against her chest...

...was there...

...JANICE BROUN In Slovakia, where the hierarchy is particularly con- Janice Broun writes frequently on Eastern Europe and servative, I heard disturbing reports about the toll regi- the Balkans for Conmmonweal...

...them, proceeded to negotiate an end to the seventy-four-yearPeople had time to become friends, hedge the meaner real- old union between Czechs and Slovaks...

...Tank tracks the Magika Laterna theater to hear what the Civic Forum lead- chewed into the spiritual landscape as well...

...ety and indeed in Polish politics...

...Whatever envy some felt was Renovations are under way to Americanize the stores, but what far more passing than their regret...

...He was on assignment in Central Europe for the National Catholic Reporter in 1990...

...not to "become like them" (referring to the political witch hunts Now that they were free to read whatever they wanted, many of the old regime), parliament in 1991 passed a lustration law Czechs stopped reading anything but the new blaze of tabloids, designed to cleanse state employment rolls of anyone who had and looked at the plethora of pornography...

...The American church asparliaments and governments that are anxious or even willing serts itself in a myriad of ways, of course, but it focuses much to legislate Catholic teachings...

...More than forty years ago Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that one day totalitarianism would "simply disappear, leaving no other trace in the history of mankind than TIM MCCARTHY is a free-lance journalist...

...My look shot a question toward them...

...The two of them, redisguise mildly subversive material from dimwitted censors) fusing to call the national referendum they knew would defeat sold out a year in advance...

...In 1992 shock-therapy zealot Vaclav Klaus for the economic soup left a lot of people working part-time became the Czech prime minister, while Slovaks elected for full-time pay...

...are ex-Communists, former party functionaries Once devoted journalists, following the money, jumped who were about the only ones who knew the into advertising, often with American-owned firms...

...his neck...

...But she was still blushing as though surprised in an unworthy act...

...The rewit, wonder, and a run of children underfoot...

...foresaw...

...As a result, Orthodox conof the church as reactionary would have been hard to erase...

...The big winners were the unbridled capitalists and a clutch amount of leisure time...

...He was leaving his job...

...ironic sense of humor fails them, Czechs can be a melancholy Against warnings from President Vaclav Havel and others lot...

...She blushed to the bone...

...Communists old enough still to believe in socialist ideals, she wore a crucifix hidden beneath her clothing for much of her pregnancy...

...Havel, probably with a wistful glance back Politicians old and new, from free-marketeers to "convert- to the purer days of political dissidence, eventually signed the 14: 24 September 1993 Commonweal lustration bill...

...The influence on the state...

...Daughter of church...

...and seem to want to recreate his theocracy in a materialScared by the inrush of Western materialism, Western ist, socially disoriented...

...Germany, in opposing Stalinist oppression...

...t seemed real-at its best a witness to truth against that Kmart jumped in early, buying thirteen government-owned tortured lie communism had become-and, yet by the department stores in the Czech lands and Slovakia...

...We have exchanged one occupier for another," one tion was this, when so many of the old guard, state socialists journalist lamented...

...Apart from that, most people Forum disintegrated, polarized between hard-nosed capitalists lapsed into apathy and ennui, worked the system for what they and more traditional humanists still holding out for the promise could get without getting into trouble...

...Her husband shrugged...

...No one in Prague...

...We must bar our trusted institution in the country...

...The majority of Catholics who clung to their religion in In overemphasizing Slovak national identity, the hierpostwar Czechoslovakia regarded their church primarily archy shares responsibility with Vladimir Meciar's govas a refuge and remained psychologically in a pre-Vatican ernment for the breakup of Czechoslovakia...

...Influence can be defined in many ways in is the right word) the loss of privileged status and have also a democratic system, and often the hardest dilemma for any rebeen challenged to define their political roles in new ways, in ligious institution to resolve is balancing accommodation to pluterms of their access to individual Catholics rather than their ralism with faithfulness to a moral and religious tradition...

...One truck driver now owned a small split, operations in Czechoslovakia were not going well...

...post-Communist society...

...Some still have not foropposed it, helped create the monster that devoured them, and given it for its betrayal and execution of religious reformer Jan the SIB files, blatant injustices notwithstanding, provided trou- Hus in 1415, whose monument dominates Prague's Old Town bling evidence of that...

...The Catholic hierarchies of This is a lesson that the Polish episcopate may have to learn Spain and Ireland, to name two examples, have suffered (if that in the coming years...

...Those were careless days in uum and a spiritual tabula rasa...

...Czechs hiked, camped, skied, biked, and par- Vladimir Meciar, nationalist demagogue, an economic "go-slow" tied with a vengeance...

...Everyone had a job, but too many cooks of ex-Communists...

...Thus, the sects, and Western theology, today the Slovak church ap- Catholic church in Slovakia, despite its high profile and pears to be trying to turn the clock back and insulate Catholics the enthusiasm on which it can still draw, is now the least from what it regards as contamination...

...Not the least of them was a generous apy...

...Americans system and had any (usually ill-gotten) capital were overrunning Prague...

...After the winter of 1992, hardly more than two years after the January 1 split, the corporation finds itself with stores in two revolution, all of this was gone...

...Everyone was scrambling for a living, overworked other without paying a value-added tax...

...Nobody slept much...

...The church in Czechoslovakia played nothing like Trouble is, more names than almost anyone might have imag- the vital role of the Polish church, or of the Protestants in East ined had found their way into the SIB files as informers...

...Some ple turned inward, hunched its shoulders against the dead would say four years later that it still is...

...Both the blush and the belief in something said a great deal about where many Central Europeans still find themselves...

...ities of oppression with casual communities they could count Klaus had been finance minister in the first postrevolution on...

...Many who had yearned for freedom and They were married the next spring, when words like "mar- truth settled for a new car and a cottage in the country...

...secret police (StB...

...Like so many of those who have been carrying Milton could make more peddling newspapers than you could as a med- Friedman's colors across Central Europe, Klaus, who drove a ical doctor), but always they made do...

...weight of oppression...

...Generally, riage" and "children" were still blossoming with a promise the only those with little to lose (or to gain) dared to be seen in young Czechs had not known in several decades...

...Everything was up for grabs...

...Monsignor Jozef Tiso's attempt to create a theocrat- church in public opinion...

...Theaters (where it was a little easier to advocate, and former Communist thug...

...But most Slovaks I met, including people Catholic, the extent of the church's marginalization and who are not radicals, rate the church's attitude as mistak- identification with nationalism should give the hierarchy en if not disastrous...

...They bicycled into the BMW while colleagues were still riding in Soviet clunkers, has mountains, chipped in for festive meals, drank all night, sang never had to suffer the everyday effects of his own economic Czech lyrics set to American folk tunes, indulged their theatrical shock therapy...

...having on the mental health of seminarians...

...For Cardinal Glemp and the rest of the church and state is actually a good thing because it frees the Polish episcopate, this dilemma may be the unavoidable price church from potentially crippling alliances with narrow and es- of establishing a truly sovereign and free Poland...

...The group no longer met...

...What sort of revoluception...

...embraces the past Prolonged wrangling over property, in both Slovakia and he Catholic church in what is now Slovakia the Czech Republic, has soured relations between govhas historically been associated with the suppression of lib- ernment and church, and has lowered the perception of the erty...

...Others believe that all the Catholic church really placency, an appeasement of collective guilt...

...Every day In August 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia around midnight they waited in the cold outside crushed more than a bid for a political reform...

...Suddenly there was an underlying air of turned capitalists, Stalinists turned democrats, wormed their anger, bitterness, disillusionment, and distrust...

...No one quite knows how to go about it...

...Public resentment simmered...

...According to dissident priest Anton Shrolec, they are "under close obSlovakia servation, controlled by each other, just as they were under the Communists...

...The Slovak hierarchy and church...

...More evidence of that possibility has surfaced in Slovakia Given the political, economic, and social turmoil, what else than in the Czech lands (Slovakia is about 60 percent Catholic...

...to early middle age, carpenters, journalists, TV producers, His economic reforms had pushed unemployment in Slovakia, filmmakers, printers, truck drivers, models, computer techni- with its antiquated heavy industry, from near zero to about 12 cians, and a professional chef...

...Many believe that the deepest impulse Square and is one of the city's most popular warm-weather gathof the lustration campaign was a reaction against that com- ering places...

...Indeed, the American hierarchy has been response that the Polish church gives to this dilemma may dearguing in Rome for over two centuries that the separation of fine its role for decades...

...No one saw him much...

...Late in her term, her husband flipped it free at lunch one day...

...do you do with all that extra help (850 in one store alone), and Another of the old crowd was being divorced, devastated about all that inefficiency (wait in one line to buy something, a seclosing his wife to a newborn entrepreneur, afraid he would lose ond to pay for it, and a third to pick up what you bought...

...Commonweal 24 September 1993: 15...

...gregations in almost totally Orthodox villages have had to instead it is now being reinforced...

...The Slovak 11 time warp...

...Havel had long ago written that Stalinist op- Drawn though they might be toward spiritual alternatives, pression endured because the people, even those who openly many Czechs do not trust the church...

...Sources close to and worried, with no time to spare...

...surrender their churches...

...She recently visited the Czech mentation and suppression of intellectual freedom are and Slovak Republics...

...There were about thirty-five of them, late twenties could accuse the aristocratic Klaus of having been a Communist...

...Catholic percent who belong to the church hard to bridge, In seminaries in Slovakia, long starved of theology, have re- Slovakia, where less than half a century ago most people jected gifts of libraries from German Catholic faculties for were still peasants and 60 percent are still nominally fear of heresy...

...Commonweal 24 September 1993: 13 A few hundred dissidents, artists, and intellectuals, Vaclav ed" Communists, writers to rock musicians, scrambled to fill Havel prominent among them, shunned exile and pressed on the political vacuum Hannah Arendt had predicted...

...Even so, state socialism of a "third way" between socialism and free-market shock therhad its compensations...

...Only look at the tribulations of the U.S.-based Kmart corporation...

...prices had exploded...

...flair with costumed weekends in storybook castles, slept on the Even at that, privatization in what is now the Czech Republic floor, repaired their own cars, all with grace and good humor, has been slow...

...That is remarkably close to November and December 1989, breathless, drawn what happened, especially in Czechoslovakia...

...The Civic in their opposition to the regime...

...They were not Christians...

...O GROWING UP OR TIM McCARTHY SELLING OUT...

...Why take chances...

...with danger...

...Most priests were selected by state officials underground church was 10,000 strong but because of its for their mediocrity and were trained by theological nonen- lack of participation in political dissidence Charter 77 was tities: the best theologians, after years in prison, were re- mainly Czech-it produced what Shrolec terms "young stricted to the underground...

...Czech fleet, had an international business and three gold chains for and Slovak managers snubbed their American counterparts...

...After Catholics of all their churches awarded to the Orthodox forty years of Communist indoctrination, the perception by the Communists in 1950...

...Kmart's Michigan headquarters revealed that, even before the A few had grown rich...

...In Slovakia, the church was also ic Nazi puppet state in 1939 ultimately failed and the church party to an ill-judged law ordering the return to the Greek fell easy prey to the Communist revolution in 1948...

...But that does not mean that the of its energy on persuading Catholics and non-Catholics through church could not continue to play a central role in Polish soci- education, preaching, and various forms of lobbying...

...Theater seats went collaborated with the Communist government, especially the begging while some of America's worst movies were sold out...

...It was, in any wants is to regain the property and power it held in the years case, a negative attempt to fill the spiritual tabula rasa Arendt before the Communists took most of it away...

...doors to the West" Slovak archbishop, Cardinal Jan In the Czech Republic even a vibrant, renewed church, Sokol's dictum-is supported by many Catholics genuinely would find the gulf between the average Czech and the 40 distressed by the corruption of values in the West...

...And it still is not Sometimes the collaboration was an outright fiction created to offering any compelling alternative, especially to the generamake some StB agent look good, but at this distance it is hard tion that came of age after 1968...