Slovakia embraces the past.

The Catholic church in what is now Slovakia has historically been associated with the suppression of liberty. Monsignor Jozef Tiso's attempt to create a theocratic Nazi puppet state in 1939 ultimately failed and the church fell easy prey to the Communist revolution in 1948. After forty years of Communist indoctrination, the perception of the church as reactionary would have been hard to erase; instead it is now being reinforced.

The majority of Catholics who clung to their religion in postwar Czechoslovakia regarded their church primarily as a refuge and remained psychologically in a pre-Vatican II time warp. Most priests were selected by state officials for their mediocrity and were trained by theological nonentities; the best theologians, after years in prison, were restricted to the underground. Now in the post-Communist society it is essentially the same mediocrities running the church. They are proving incapable of responding to the challenges of a pluralist society or delegating to the laity.

Scared by the inrush of Western materialism, Western sects, and Western theology, today the Slovak church appears to be trying to turn the clock back and insulate Catholics from what it regards as contamination. "We must bar our doors to the West"--Slovak archbishop, Cardinal Jan Sokol's dictum--is supported by many Catholics genuinely distressed by the corruption of values in the West. Catholic seminaries in Slovakia, long starved of theology, have rejected gifts of libraries from German Catholic faculties for fear of heresy. But most Slovaks I met, including people who are not radicals, rate the church's attitude as mistaken if not disastrous.

In Slovakia, where the hierarchy is particularly conservative, I heard disturbing reports about the toll regimentation and suppression of intellectual freedom are having on the mental health of seminarians. According to dissident priest Anton Shrolec, they are "under close observation, controlled by each other, just as they were under the Communists."

Prolonged wrangling over property, in both Slovakia and the Czech Republic, has soured relations between government and church, and has lowered the perception of the church in public opinion. In Slovakia, the church was also party to an ill-judged law ordering the return to the Greek Catholics of all their churches awarded to the Orthodox by the Communists in 1950. As a result, Orthodox congregations in almost totally Orthodox villages have had to surrender their churches.

In overemphasizing Slovak national identity, the hierarchy shares responsibility with Vladimir Meciar's government for the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The Slovak underground church was 10,000 strong but because of its lack of participation in political dissidence--Charter 77 was mainly Czech--it produced what Shrolec terms "young semi-theologians, incredibly naive, unable to distinguish between religion and politics." The Slovak hierarchy and Christian political parties look back to Tiso as a role model and seem to want to recreate his theocracy in a materialist, socially disoriented, post-Communist society. Thus, the Catholic church in Slovakia, despite its high profile and the enthusiasm on which it can still draw, is now the least trusted institution in the country.

In the Czech Republic even a vibrant, renewed church, would find the gulf between the average Czech and the 40 percent who belong to the church hard to bridge. In Slovakia, where less than half a century ago most people were still peasants and 60 percent are still nominally Catholic, the extent of the church's marginalization and identification with nationalism should give the hierarchy pause.