Slovakia tilts towards the Vatican
By Muriel Fraser
Recent moves in Slovakia this year are increasing Catholic influence in this small EU country in terms of media, legislation and national symbols.
● Early this year Slovaks who turned on their radios for the BBC found instead a Catholic station. The BBC had been broadcasting in Slovakia for 60 years and was valued for its news, programmes and help in learning English. However, in January its bandwidth was re-assigned to Radio Lumen, described by the US Catholic Bishops Conference as "one of the great Catholic Radio success stories in Eastern Europe".
● Last week another move brought Slovakia closer to the Catholic Church. In 2005 human rights lawyers from the European Union had warned about the proposed "Conscience concordat" with the Vatican. EU medical professionals, they said, should not have an unlimited right to impose their beliefs on others by refusing to provide contraceptives, perform abortions, and other health care services that were legal in Slovakia. The concordat was then put on ice, and it was planned to cancel the right of doctors to refuse to provide services which contravened Church teaching. However, last week the Health Ministry announced that this would remain. The Slovak Bishops Conference greeted this decision and are pressing again for the right of (Catholic) “conscientious objection” to be enshrined in a concordat where it would be permanently removed from legislative control.
● Last Monday came a move to entrench Catholic identity in Slovakia. A bill to honour Andrej Hlinka as “Father of the Nation” passed its second parliamentary reading. This is the Catholic priest who during the 1930s led the Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, described by a US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials as “the semi-fascist Catholic Peoples Party of Monsignor Andrew Hlinka”. His leadership was to prove fateful. Hlinka’s lack of respect for democracy and his antipathy to “the irreligious free-thinking Czechs” made him invaluable to Hitler who was intent on dismembering Czechoslovakia in order to absorb the fragments quietly. As the Nuremberg prosecutor showed, “the higher staff of Father Hlinka's party” were in the pay of the Nazis. Hlinka died in 1938, before he could see that his co-operation with Hitler had helped to launch the war. However, today this is widely known and the Slovaks can expect approval only from the Vatican if they enshrine Hlinka as “Father of the Nation”.