Slovakia embraces the past:
Broun, Janice
lustration bill. was there? The church in Czechoslovakia played nothing like Trouble is, more names than almost anyone might have...
...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...
...post-Communist society...
...In In the morning, you can buy your fresh breakfast rolls and newsimages transmitted immediately around the world, Berliners papers in either East or West Berlin...
...Of course there are still reminders of what ed them, many residents on both the western and eastern sides used to be...
...One sees tourists wandering aimlessly around where the Wall used to be, not quite sure of themselves...
...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...
...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...
...Bits of the Wall have been preserved for graffiti of my street respond in a rather j aded and undramatic way...
...The Wall Nevertheless, asked how the opening of the Wall has affectis no longer there...
...The Slovak 11 time warp...
...Given that wrapped in a cloth far coarser than velvet...
...Guard towers, barbed wire, searchlights, German shepherds, machine guns-they are all commemorated here and there...
...Today her baby is a toddler...
...These are bright, committed people...
...Where would the Korec (now a cardinal), like most of the Slovak bishops, has country be without the likes of them...
...I interviewed the Jesuit, Jan Korec, den crucifix was exposed...
...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...
...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...
...The church in Slovakia has I remember my friend's bone-deep blush when her hidbeen frozen in the fifties...
...In flea markets at the Brandenburg Gate you can still buy Soviet and East German army paraphernalia, as well as Communist buttons, badges, and orders...
...having on the mental health of seminarians...
...The Wall used to run right beneath my apartment building...
...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...
...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...
...turned out to be an ardent nationalist...
...Germany, in opposing Stalinist oppression...
...His sacrifices tamination they now see little chance of righting in their lifeunder totalitarianism were deep and impressive...
...symbolic order that governed our world for half a century...
...our own environmental and moral contamination...
...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...
...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...
...0 LIVING WHERE STEPHEN BROCKMANN THE WALL WAS WHAT STILL DIVIDES THE GERMANS it s the divided capital of a divided country, had been no traffic, and the street had been very quiet...
...surrender their churches...
...However that may kind of example, it is no wonder that many Slovak Catholics be, what happens as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are disillusioned, and even more Czechs, with their predomi- struggle for political and economic order, social integrity, and nately humanistic bent, are less than inspired by a Christian spiritual renewal could be crucial for all of us, a way out of alternative...
...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...
...As a result, Orthodox conof the church as reactionary would have been hard to erase...
...It still shocks me and gives danced and sang not so much in West Berlin or East Berlin me a feeling of deep satisfaction, after so many years of abas in No Man's Land, on the Wall itself...
...The doorbell at his Bratislava apart- and her husband want nothing more than to emigrate and ment still flashed a table lamp instead of ringing, so that spy- raise their daughter outside the environmental and moral coning neighbors would not know he had visitors...
...foresaw...
...Berlin is now stripped of its most potent symbol...
...The spine-tingling evil just isn't there...
...She recently visited the Czech mentation and suppression of intellectual freedom are and Slovak Republics...
...We must bar our trusted institution in the country...
...Monsignor Jozef Tiso's attempt to create a theocrat- church in public opinion...
...They artists and tourists...
...to sort it all out...
...The Slovak hierarchy and church...
...The opening of the Berlin full of trash and burned-out automobiles...
...While I was in Berlin this summer, after a three-year absence, I lived in an apartment building in the "East," in a district between the former Soviet and American sectors...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Others believe that all the Catholic church really placency, an appeasement of collective guilt...
...The Wall Museum in the House at Checkpoint say that traffic has increased, that they are worried about crime Charlie is still there, though Checkpoint Charlie itself is long and drugs and their children, and that a woman can't go out alone since gone...
...According to dissident priest Anton Shrolec, they are "under close obSlovakia servation, controlled by each other, just as they were under the Communists...
...16: 24 September 1993 Commonweal...
...She shortly after the revolution...
...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...
...As a result, there STEPHEN BROCKMANN is assistant professor of German studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh...
...pause...
...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...
...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...
...Commonweal 24 September 1993: 15 the Czech Republic, 40 percent...
...After Catholics of all their churches awarded to the Orthodox forty years of Communist indoctrination, the perception by the Communists in 1950...
...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...
...gregations in almost totally Orthodox villages have had to instead it is now being reinforced...
...From my apartment Wall on November 9, 1989, marked both building, you can now walk out the door and across the park, the culmination and the end of a powerful and in thirty seconds you have traveled from East to West Berlin...
...Berlin was for four decades the front line Now, with the Wall gone, there is a grassy but unkempt park of the cold war...
...and seem to want to recreate his theocracy in a materialScared by the inrush of Western materialism, Western ist, socially disoriented...
...But it's not the same any more...
...What to do in Berlin without the Wall...
...Yet even time...
...normality, that it is now possible to do such things...
...The church in Slovakia Many now believe that the Czech revolution has not really has even tried to resurrect the Nazi collaborator Monsignor happened, and that when the real one does come it will be Jozef Tiso as some sort of Slovak national hero...
...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...
Vol. 120 • September 1993 • No. 16
