A Cultural History of Catholic Nationalism in Slovakia, 1985-1993

A Cultural History of Catholic Nationalism in Slovakia, 1985-1993 Submitted by Agáta Drelová to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, September 2015 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature) ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 ABSTRACT This thesis is about the construction of a nationalised public Catholic culture in Slovakia from 1985 to 1993. At the core of this culture was the assumption that the Catholic Church had always been an integral part of the Slovak nation, her past, her present and her future. The thesis seeks to answer the question of who created this culture during the 1980s and 1990s and how and why they did so. To answer these questions this thesis adopts a cultural approach and explores how this culture was created utilising the concepts of collective memory, symbols and events as its main analytical tools. The data for this analysis include, but are not restricted to, materials produced in relation to various commemorative events and pilgrimages, especially those related to the leading national Catholic symbols: the National Patroness Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows and Saints Cyril and Methodius. The thesis argues that this culture was deliberately constructed from the point of view of many actors. Before 1989 these included the official Catholic hierarchy, underground Catholic Church communities, the pope and nationalist Communists. After 1989 these actors continued to construct this culture even as their positions of power changed. Most notably, underground Catholics became part of current ecclesiastical and political elite, and communist nationalists dissociated themselves from the Communist Party but retained their position within the cultural and political elite. The thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter looks at how the nationalised public Catholic culture started in the mid-1980s with underground Catholic communities that focused on culture and grassroots mobilisation. The second chapter looks at how the nationalist Communists and the official church hierarchy became involved in construction of parts of this culture and how their involvement resonated with the underground Catholic communities. Chapter Three examines how this culture continued to develop in the early 1990s in a new political context, and how it contributed to a broader cultural legitimisation of Slovak independence. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 Chapter One, The Re-making of a 'Marian nation‘ 72 Chapter Two, A Divided 'Marian nation‘ 148 Chapter Three, The 'Return' to Nitra 203 Conclusion 259 Bibliography 269 3 INTRODUCTION 5 July 1991: Thousands of people gather in a city in southern Slovakia for a ‘national’ pilgrimage. The occasion is the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The location was Nitra, the site of the oldest diocese on Slovak lands.1 The pilgrimage was the first of its kind since 1948, when the ruling Communist Party launched a campaign to dismantle the nationalised public Catholic culture; pilgrimages were just one victim of a broader effort to selectively de-nationalise and privatise religion.2 Before the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia gained a monopoly on power in 1948, Cyril and Methodius—the 9th-century Christian missionaries and linguists who became national saints—figured at the centre of nationalised official culture, which celebrated the Slovak nation as a historical nation with a distinctive culture, and therefore entitled to cultural and political autonomy. Nitra itself was placed at the centre of a distinctly Slovak nationalist and Slovak Catholic interpretation of national history. According to such narratives, it was Nitra which first saw Christianity introduced on Slovak soil, and it was there that the first state to formally preside over Slovak territory, the chiefdom of Prince Pribina, was established.3 These nationalists also believed that Nitra was the centre of Great Moravia and that Slovaks were the first Slavic nation to be Christianised (the faith brought by Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century). According to the Slovak nationalists from the pre-Communist era, this reading of Slovak history entitled Slovaks to political and cultural autonomy. In 1991, the Catholic Church hierarchy seemed to be returning to these narratives. During the first post-Socialist ‘national pilgrimage’ to Nitra, Ján Chryzostom Korec, Cardinal of Nitra diocese and the leading figure of the post- Socialist Church in Slovakia, announced that Slovakia had a ‘right to a life on its own.’4 This statement came as Czech and Slovak representatives had, for over a year, been in discussions concerning the proposed reform of the federal constitution, 1 ‘Ako Solúnski bratia,’ Katolícke Noviny, 21 July 1991, 3. 2 Juraj Zajonc, ‘Prečo je Nitra staroslávne mesto,’ in E Krekovič, E Krekovičová, E Mannová (eds.), Mýty naše Slovenské, (Bratislava, 2005), pp. 139-50. 3 Imrich Kružliak, Cyrilometodský Kult u Slovákov, Dlhá cesta k slovenskej cirkevnej provincii (Prešov, 2003); Martin Hetényi, Peter Ivanič, 'Poznámky k šíreniu kultu sv. Cyrila a Metoda v rokoch 1939-1945 na príklade mesta Nitra', in P. Sokolovič (ed.), Život v Slovenskej republike, Slovenská Republika 1939-1945 Očami mladých historikov IX, (Bratislava, 2010), pp. 336-344; Zajonc, ‘Prečo je Nitra’, pp. 139-50. 4 ‘Ako Solunski bratia,’ 3. 4 with the aim of making the federation functional in its new democratic context. Cardinal Korec, however, was clearly not interested in supporting the federative arrangement. His words anticipated growing support on the part of the Slovak hierarchy for the break-up of the Czechoslovak common state. During the three years between the fall of state socialism in 1989 and the eventual break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, Cardinal Korec and other leading members of the Slovak episcopate increasingly warmed to those nationalists who saw Czecho-Slovak negotiations as useless or even illegitimate, and who wanted to determine Slovakia’s future unilaterally. The Slovak episcopate, then, began to shift focus: turning away from discussions of the Czechoslovak or Slovak constitution. Instead, they utilised nationalised Catholic culture in support of this nationalist cause. Such repertoires of nationalised public Catholic culture would in turn come to play a major role for Slovak nationalists in their campaign for independence. When the Slovak National Assembly declared independence and enacted a Slovak constitution on 1 January 1993, the hierarchy of the Slovak Church as well as Catholic elites, heralded in the new state. Segments of this nationalised public Catholic culture would then continue to play an important role in maintaining national autonomy, national unity, and national identity in Slovakia, a process in which a variety of nationalist forces, within as well as outside the Church, had since come to be involved. For scholars who study the role of the Catholic Church in post-Socialist Slovak society and specifically in post-Soviet renditions of nationalism, this behaviour of the Catholic Church hierarchy during the break-up of Czechoslovakia signified that the Catholic Church in Slovakia had emerged after 1989 as the de-facto ‘national Church.’ It had, they contend, after over forty years of societal marginalisation, finally regained its status as a church dominant not only numerically, but also as one of the leading symbols of national autonomy, national unity, and national identity. Some scholars saw this mobilisation of Catholic culture as the revival of Catholicism as the nationalist and political force it had been throughout the pre- Communist era in the country. Assuming that the Catholic Church in Slovakia has been ‘tied to the nation historically…the leadership of the Church grants rhetorical and institutional support to political and cultural institutions dedicated to the national inspirations,’ political scientists describe the various ways in which the Catholic 5 Church had played this role of a ‘national Church’ in post-Socialist Slovakia.5 According to Slovak sociologist Miroslav Tížik, after the establishment of the independent Slovakia, ‘Christianisation of the state’ began, manifest in the change of public symbols and public collective memory of the state from ‘ideologically neutral’ to closely associated with Christianity.6 In a study on Church-state relations in Slovakia, political scientists Lavinia Stan and Lucian Tursescu observe that ‘the dominant Roman Catholic Church behaves and is treated as de-facto national Church.’7 Indeed, some scholars go as far as calling Slovakia a ‘Roman Catholic state.’8 In understanding the historical roots of the post-Communist position of the Church in this way, these scholars in fact follow a Catholic nationalist narrative which has been created in the process of the nationalisation of the Catholic Church and in an effort to establish the Church as a legitimate part of the Slovak nation.9 These narratives portray those Catholics who supported national emancipation as representative of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church itself as an institution which offered unwavering support for Slovak national emancipatory struggles and vitally supported preservation

Load more