Evangelisation and the “conscience concordat”

The Vatican tried to push through a new kind of concordat in this small, newly-independent and Church-controlled country. This plan was so audacious that it led to protests both inside and outside Slovakia, and on 6 February 2006 caused the fall of the Government.

According to Slovak mythology this small mountainous country is finally free. However, is rightwing Slovak nationalism being encouraged by the Church for its own ends? The Vatican recently attempted to push through and unprecedented "conscience concordat" and has even drawn up an audacious five-year plan for "evangelising" the whole country. This is hardly the freedom that some Slovaks had hoped for.

It was a moonlight flit. The self-appointed delegates sneaked out of their villages in Eastern Europe by night and wandered through half of Europe, often by foot and sometimes retracing their steps to avoid detection. The papal nuncio advised them to give up, but they pressed on. For many years this expedition looked like a lost cause, yet after more than 70 years their goal of an independent and very Catholic Slovakia was finally attained on a durable basis.

In 2003 Pope John Paul II visited Eastern Europe for the last time. His aim was to discourage any liberalisation of Slovakia’s abortion laws, for that would have made it harder to push through the upcoming concordat on “freedom of conscience”. This papal visit, his third to Slovakian territory, was planned as an anti-abortion campaign.

The refusal of the Slovak Foreign Minister to sign the controversial "conscience concordat" prompted the Christian Democrats to pull out of the coalition and this led to the fall of the government. This article, which was posted for only a short time after the event, is one of the few accounts not stemming from Church news agencies, to be made available in English.