The pope visits Slovakia

Trip honors Communist-era sacrifices of Slovak Catholics; Pope's frail health obvious

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Bratislava/Trnava, Slovakia

While John Paul II’s frail health has dominated early headlines from Slovakia, it’s another kind of suffering that forms the deep logic of his third trip to this central European nation.

On Sunday, Sept. 14, the pope will beatify a Greek Catholic bishop and a nun who died as victims of Slovakia’s Communist regime. They are symbols of an entire generation of Slovaks who paid a steep personal price, often in blood, to preserve the Catholic faith. Yet interviews here suggest the memory of those sacrifices is fading, and hence the pope’s presence amounts to a last-ditch effort to remind Slovak Catholics of their own past.

 It was an obviously weakened John Paul who arrived in Bratislava, the capital of this nation of 5.4 million, on Thursday Sept. 11. At a welcoming ceremony at the airport, the pope succeeded only in finishing the first paragraph of his brief address. His personal secretary, Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, twice suggested that he stop, and on the second occasion he agreed. Fr. Robert Urland, an official of the Secretariat of State, read the remainder of the speech, except for the last paragraph, which John Paul pronounced.

The pope’s condition prompted concern, but Vatican officials insisted that the rest of the trip would go ahead as planned. That afternoon, a visit to Trnava, a city of 70,000 known as the “Slovak Rome” because of its status as the historical heart of the church, the pope appeared as scheduled, but the program was condensed.

Despite these struggles, Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls said it was premature to declare the pope’s traveling days over.

“I do not see any real obstacle” to future trips, Navarro-Valls told reporters in Trnava.

Perhaps John Paul’s determination here reflects the memory of the comparatively heavier burdens Bishop Vasil Hopko and Sacred Heart Sr. Zdenka Cecilia Schelingova endured in their day. The pope will beatify the two Sunday, and their stories make harrowing reading indeed.

Hopko, one of two Eastern-rite Greek Catholic bishops in Slovakia at the time of the Communist rise to power in 1948, spent 13 and a half years in prison for refusing to accept the forced dissolution of the Greek Catholic church. During those years he was beaten during interrogations, not allowed to sleep for long periods, forced to walk continually for hours, and put on limited rations of food and water. The experience took its toll, and when Hopko was released in 1964 he suffered deep psychological trauma. He died in 1976, after seeing the Greek Catholic church restored to legal status during the “Prague Spring” of 1968. An autopsy revealed that Hopko had been slowly poisoned in prison; his body had a level of Arsenic 1,000 times above normal tolerance levels for a human being.

Schelingova’s story is similarly dramatic. While working as a nurse, she attempted to help six priests escape from a hospital where they were sent to recover from interrogations before being shipped off to jail. The plot was discovered, and Schelingova was arrested on Feb. 29, 1952. Her captors believed she had an accomplice and were determined to beat the name out of her. They began by kicking her. Then they threw her into a vat of freezing water. As she was on the point of drowning, they removed her, then threw her back. Two men then dragged her by the hair to another room, where they stripped her, bound her arms, and put her on a pulley that lifted her off the floor. They beat her savagely with clubs until she lost consciousness. The process repeated itself several times until the officials were satisfied that Schelingova had no accomplice to name. She was released on April 7, 1955, and died on July 31 at the age of 38.

Even though Hopko and Schelingova died outside prison, in keeping with the Communist desire to release injured prisoners before death so as not to make martyrs of them, both are nevertheless considered martyrs by the Church.

If one asks why a weakened John Paul would make a third trip to a small nation, at a cost of some $2.1 million and despite the security risks of travelling on the anniversary of Sept. 11, the answer is doubtless to honor such sacrifice.

Yet popular awareness of that sacrifice, to judge from several conversations here, is increasingly tenuous.

Jesuit Fr. Rajmund Ondrus, 74, is representative of the generation that experienced the worst of the Communist oppression. In an exclusive Sept. 11 interview, he told NCR that like most other male religious in Slovakia, he was sent in 1950 for 40 months in a forced labor camp — called, in the euphemistic fashion of the Soviet system, an “auxiliary technical batallion.” In May 1960, he was sentenced to three years in prison for taking part in clandestine theological studies, and was forced to work in a factory. He said that while he was not physically mistreated, they were stringent quotas at the factory, and if he failed to meet them he was punished with measures such as a ban on writing letters, loss of free time, being forced to stay awake for extended periods, and double shifts.

Given that context, one might imagine that Ondrus is thrilled to see the memory of his suffering given patrons in Hopko and Schelingova. In fact, however, part of him would just as soon forget.

“It’s better not to think too much of these things,” Ondrus said. “Otherwise what you get is the desire for vendetta.”

Ondrus told NCR that when he was released, he was forced to sign a pledge never to talk about what had happened to him in prison. After the fall of Communism, he said, his generation largely decided to “draw a line” after their experiences and not dwell on them, in order to avoid a cycle of reprisals and revenge.

“You can’t do justice for the dead,” Ondrus said. “What are you going to do? Find all those who put us in prison and kill them?”

Part of this consensual silence is also psychological,

“If I feel this too much, it becomes too strong,” Ondrus said.

However one explains it, the reluctance of witnesses such as Ondrus to relive their experiences means their stories are often little known to younger Slovaks.

Veronica Skodova, 23, who belongs to the Jesuit parish in Trnava where Ondrus lives, told NCR that her generation “does carry these memories around.”

“We are forgetting these things,” she said. “We may hear a little bit about it, but it’s not touching us.”

Skodova and three of her peers in Trnava spoke to NCR after the pope’s visit Sept. 11. All sang in the choir for the visit, and all are members of the nearby Jesuit parish.

Anezka Domorakova, 20, said that to some extent historical memory depends on one’s family experiences. Her father was imprisoned by the Communists, she said, so she was more sensitive to this history.

All the young people agreed, however, that under the weight of recent political strife focusing on the nationalist movement of ex-prime minister Vladamir Meciar, as well as an unemployment rate that hovers at 14.5 percent, most Slovak youth are not especially interested in what they already see as “ancient history.”

Against that backdrop, John Paul’s four-day visit could be seen as an exercise in keeping memory alive of what he called on Sept. 12 the “bleak regime of not so many years ago.”

John L. Allen Jr. is NCR’s Vatican correspondent. His e-mail address is jallen@natcath.org.