Restoration of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia During the Prague Spring

Abstract

The Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia found itself outlawed after its violent liquidation by the brachial communist power in 1950, and the members of this church were forced to convert to the Orthodox faith. This study explains the difficult process of renewal of the Greek Catholic Church and its structures in the context of the Ostpolitik of the Holy See, represented by the Vatican diplomat and later secretary of state Agostino Casaroli, and in the context of the political relaxation in Czechoslovakia in 1968, during the so-called Prague Spring. In addition to the scientific literature, this study is based on historical research carried out in the historical archive of the Secretariat of State in the Vatican within the Agostino Casaroli fund, which has so far been processed little. In the study, the author describes the most significant steps which lead to the official legalization of the Greek Catholic Church on June 13, 1968, as well as the difficult process of negotiating the terms of the restored church with the state-enforced Orthodox Church.

1. Introduction

The new breath of the Holy Spirit and the desire for the renewal of the Church, represented by the Second Vatican Council, intensely affected the local churches in Czechoslovakia, despite the interference of state censorship authorities, which restricted and manipulated numerous reports from the meetings of the council fathers. Such techniques were abused by communist propagandists in an effort to create the impression of religious freedom in the country and to improve the reputation of communist Czechoslovakia abroad and in Vatican circles, where thanks to Slovak and Czech exiles, there was no lack of information about the persecution of the Catholic Church in the country. Enthusiasm for the council was manifested both from a political point of view by the attempts of the government and the Holy See, through Ostpolitik1, to renew negotiations between the Vatican and Czechoslovakia, as well as by the opening of important ecclesiastical problems, among which were, primarily, the question of vacant bishops’ chairs, the implementation of the Work of the Council’s renewal, especially in the liturgy, and also the question of resuming the activities of the Greek Catholic Church.

From the point of view of historical research, this topic—the renewal of the legalization of the activity of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia—is currently under-researched. On the one hand, this is because historical research regarding the minority Greek Catholic Church, which, according to the latest statistics from the population census in 2021, represents only 4% of the population of the Slovak Republic, is dealt with only by a narrow circle of historians working at the only Greek Catholic Faculty of the University of Prešov in Prešov, and, on the other hand, because historical research is focused primarily on more dominant topics such as the liquidation of this church and its persecution during the period of the communist regime. Despite the faculty’s efforts to conduct systematic historical research through the regular publication of the scientific collection, Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia in light of the anniversaries published annually from 2011 (Coranič 2011), to date, neither a special conference nor a special scientific collection (in book form) has been dedicated to the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church, apart from the issue of liquidation, and a spectacular conference which was held in 2010, and an extensive publication on this issue which was published under the title Church in the shackles of a totalitarian regime (Coranič et al. 2010). From the point of view of religious studies, no solid research has been carried out at all. The restoration of the Greek Catholic Church in 1968 and the subsequent—and sometimes violent—takeover of churches from the hands of the Orthodox Church after the fall of the communist regime in 1989 is still a reason for tense relations between the two churches, as many things have not been consulted on to this day. To date, there has not even been solid sociological research that would clarify the consequences of the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia on the composition of religious populations. From an ethnic point of view, the Greek Catholic Church was presented as Ruthenian; however, this does not correspond to reality. The Slovakian people themselves are also an important ethnic component of Greek Catholics in Slovakia. A very interesting phenomenon observed during re-Catholicization was the transfer of the Slovak Protestant population to the Greek Catholic Church (Haraksim 1992, p. 158). This study is a historiographic study which applies the historical method and analysis of published contributions with sociological overlap as a basis for further research in the field of religious studies.

2. The Situation of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia in the Years 1950–1968

The Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia adhered to the Soviet model, similar to the so-called model of the Eastern Bloc, and was forcibly liquidated shortly after the representative of the Vatican at the apostolic internunciature in Prague, Mons. Ottavio de Liva was expelled from the country by the Note of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 19 March 1950, and official diplomatic relations between Czechoslovakia and the Vatican were subsequently severed (De Marchi 2006, p. 84); this was followed by the violent liquidation of men’s orders on the night of 13–14 April 1950 (Dubovský 1998). Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, the orthodoxization of Greek Catholics under the slogan of “the return of the church to the fathers” had already been implemented in October 1943 and, according to this model, was implemented on 10 March 1946 in the Ukrainian region of Halych in Lviv (Horňák 1990, pp. 3–4), in Romania on 1 December 1948, and in Subcarpathian Rus in Ukraine on 28 August 1950 (Seman 1997, p. 12); in Czechoslovakia, it was liquidated in the Black Eagle building in Prešov, which was the only seat of Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia, on 28 April 1950. While only 35,000 members of the Greek Catholic Church lived in Czechoslovakia at that time, the Greek Catholic Church had, prior to its liquidation, 305,000 members, with two bishops and 331 priests (Rusnak 1986, pp. 18–21). Bishop Pavol Gojdič was immediately taken into isolation in the monastery in Nižná Šebastová, but soon after, on 9 June 1950, he was taken into custody in Valdice and in a staged political trial, together with two Roman Catholic bishops, Ján Vojtaššák and Michal Buzalka, he was sentenced to life imprisonment on 15 January 1951, in which he died on 17 July 1960, in the prison in Leopoldov. His body was moved to Prešov only at the time of political relaxation after the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church in 1968 (Šturák 2013, p. 89; Potaš 1999). The auxiliary Greek Catholic bishop in Prešov, Vasiľ Hopko, who was ordained as a bishop in a tense political situation on 11 May 1947, was isolated at the episcopal residence in Prešov immediately after the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church, taken into custody on 18 September 1950, and sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment on 24 October 1951 (Michalík 1996, pp. 6–7; Borza 2001, pp. 61–72), under the pressure of the Holy See, as part of the incipient Ostpolitik of the Holy See under the leadership of the diplomat Agostino Casaroli, who was appointed to this role by Pope John XXIII in March 1961 (Archivio Storico della Segreteria di Stato—Sezione per i Rapporti con gli Stati e le Organizzazioni Internazionali, Fondo Spoglio del cardinale Agostino Casaroli, pos. 1, fasc. 1, ff. 3–4, 47–48)2. He was then released on parole for three years until 12 May 1964. After completing the necessary treatment, he was interned in the convent of religious sisters in Osek near Duchcov. After the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church at the beginning of July, the Supreme Court annulled the judgment of the former State Court in Bratislava on 31 July 1968, which sentenced Bishop Hopko to prison. Subsequently, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Košice stopped the criminal prosecution of this man, who was the only Greek Catholic bishop in the whole of Czechoslovakia, so that he could participate in the restoration of this church (Michalík 1996, pp. 6–7; Borza 2001, pp. 61–72). Both of these bishops were elevated to the altar as blessed martyrs by Pope John Paul II; for bishop Gojdič, this took place on 4th November 2001, then the process was repeated for bishop Hopko on 14th September 2003.

As for Greek Catholic priests, out of 328 priests, only 45 agreed to join the Orthodox Church. Among them were several church dignitaries (Seman 1997, p. 41). Under pressure, another 132 priests eventually joined the Orthodox Church in the same year (Vopatrný 1998, p. 87). The church historian Peter Šturák provides other data reporting that out of 256 clergymen in the public administration, 169 clergymen signed the transfer to the Orthodox Church (Šturák 1999, p. 126). Of these, 105 Greek Catholic priests were deported with their families to southern Bohemia in November 1951, where they worked in local factories. In 1953, another 98 priests and their families were deported to southern Bohemia (Konečný 1996, p. 121).

Only a small part of those who followed the Greek Catholic faith converted to the Orthodox Church. Most attended Roman Catholic services. For a better understanding of this, we can cite the example of the East Slovak region, which was home to the most Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia; according to the report of the Regional National Committee in Košice from 1955, out of 52,000 Greek Catholics, only 15,000 believers accepted Orthodox ceremonies, 25,000 Greek Catholics regularly attended Roman Catholic ceremonies, and 12,000 Greek Catholics prayed the Byzantine liturgy of St. John Chryzostom (Coranič 2014, p. 351).

3. Circumstances and First Attempts to Restore the Activities of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia

Apart from the sporadic independent attempts to restore the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, especially by priests who returned to Slovakia from southern Bohemia at the end of the 1950s, an important impulse for its legalization was the resumption of diplomatic negotiations between the Vatican and Czechoslovakia and the change in the papal policy towards the so-called Eastern Bloc through the Ostpolitik. The publication of the encyclical of Pope John XXIII incited a very positive response. Pacem and Terris, published on 11 April 1963, was dominated by the idea of building peace in the world. The rapprochement between the Holy See and Czechoslovakia also took place within the negotiations of the Second Vatican Council, which was also attended by a Czechoslovak delegation, but was used by the communist authorities to spy on the greatest critics of the regime, who were priests and bishops in exile, especially in Rome, as well as to create a positive image of communist Czechoslovakia around the world, which was informed by them about the violation of religious freedom and the persecution of Christians. (Roccucci 2013, pp. 636–7; Dikarev 2017, pp. 543–6; Chenaux 2017, p. 33). Thus, in 1962, within the theology of the dialog of John XXIII, the first negotiations on the restoration of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Czechoslovakia began, in which the Holy See demanded, above all, from the government, the opening of negotiations on the release of bishops from prison or internment, among them the only Greek Catholic bishop in Czechoslovakia, Vasiľ Hopko, religious freedom for Catholics, the filling of vacant episcopal sees, and also the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia (Barberini 2007, p. 103; Archivio Storico della Segreteria di Stato—Sezione per i Rapporti con gli Stati e le Organizzazioni Internazionali (ďalej ASRS), Fondo Spoglio del cardinale Agostino Casaroli, pos. 65, ff. 150–151).3 A great success resulting from papal diplomacy was the visit of the so-called traveling nuncio Agostino Casaroli on 13–14 May 1963 in Prague, where he met with all the oppressed bishops and flew to Rome on 15 May (ASRS, Fondo Spoglio del cardinale Agostino Casaroli, pos. 65, f. 259; ASRS, Fondo Spoglio del cardinale Agostino Casaroli, pos. 7, fasc. Agende: anno 1963, ff. 1261–1262).4 A huge result of this journey was that on 2 October 1963, the Archbishop of Prague, Josef Beran, and the Bishop of Brno, Karel Skoupý, were released from forced isolation, and then on 4 October 1963, the Bishop of Spiš, Ján Vojtaššák, and two Czech auxiliary bishops, Stanislav Zela and Ladislav Hlad, were released from prison (Rebichini 1977, p. 68). However, after a few days, Bishop Vojtaššák was forced to spend the rest of his life in isolation in the Charity Home in Senohraby. However, the fact that the only Greek Catholic bishop, Vasil Hopko, was released from prison only a year later, on 12 May 1964, proves how serious a problem the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church was for the Czechoslovak government (Michalík 1996, pp. 6–7). The possibility of legalizing the Greek Catholic Church was out of the question at that time.

A significant change in political and ecclesiastical issues in Czechoslovakia occurred after the Slovak politician Alexander Dubček became the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on 5 January 1968, and, together with his collaborators, started the political reform of communism with the so-called human face, known as the Prague Spring5 (Judák 2003, p. 257).

This situation was used by some Greek Catholic priests in exile, among them Michal Lacko, a professor of church history at the Eastern Pontifical Institute in Rome, who had already published various articles in the exile magazine Mária since the abolition of the Greek Catholic Church in 1950, in which he pointed out the course of the abolition and the severe persecution of Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia. He was among the first (Babjak 1997, pp. 84–91; Chalupecký 2006, p. 412) to write a letter to Alexander Dubček in January 1968 to request the rehabilitation of the Greek Catholic Church, clergy and believers and the restoration of the Eparchy of Prešov (Lacko 1968, p. 21). Despite the difficult situation, the auxiliary bishop of Prešov, Vasiľ Hopko, from exile, addressed a letter dated March 19, 1968, to the leadership of the Communist Party in Prague, Alexander Dubček, and to Bratislava, Vasiľ Biľak, in which he demanded the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church (Šturák 1999, pp. 180–3; Chalupecký 2006, p. 412). This letter was published in full by the Catholic Newspaper (Anonymous 1968, p. 3), which caused a great response not only among Greek Catholics, but also among Roman Catholic priests, who at their priestly meetings supported this demand as key to resolving the religious situation in the country, and even Evangelical priests joined this initiative. On 9 March 1968, the Ukrainian radio broadcast in Prešov also raised the issue of the rehabilitation of the Greek Catholic Church and listed the injustices caused by the Orthodoxy of Greek Catholics, as was the case in the Ukrainian periodicals Nove žyťa and Družno vpered, which, from mid-March 1968, published several articles demanding the same goal (Coranič 2014, p. 359). On 11 March 1968, the presidency of the Cultural Association of Ukrainian Workers pointed out the unjust solution of the religious question through orthodoxization in an appeal to the Ruthenians, whom the state considered to be Ukrainians under the influence of Soviet policy (Barnovský 1999, p. 448). Of particular importance was the appeal of the Prague Apostolic Administrator František Tomášek of 25 March 1968, addressed to the Czechoslovak government, in which he presented the demands of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, in which in the fifth point he demanded the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church and all its rights, which had been abolished by the unjust intervention of the communist regime. These activities were also joined by Greek Catholic priests, who published in the East Slovak Newspaper on 29 March 1968, common demands for the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church and the repair of damage caused by the regime, summarized in five points. In the first point, they demanded acknowledgement of the state’s intervention in the Orthodoxy of Greek Catholics in 1950 and a description of the measures that led to the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia. The second demand was to occupy the episcopal see in Prešov and to verify the legality of the political trials with the Greek Catholic bishops Pavol Gojdič and Vasiľ Hopko. The third demand was to leave freedom to Greek Catholics to choose their religious beliefs and to eliminate all coercive practices of State Security. The fourth demand was the rehabilitation of Greek Catholic priests and their families deported to Bohemia and their moral and material compensation (Coranič 2014, p. 359). In addition to this initiative, the Greek Catholic priest Dr. Ján Murín sought out Ladislav Holdoš, who at the time of the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in 1950 was the chairman of the Slovak Office for Ecclesiastical Affairs and directly participated in the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church, in order to explain the true historical background of the liquidation of the church after he was paradoxically expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1951. In his letter, he described the unconstitutionality of the abolition of the Greek Catholic Church on the basis of Moscow’s political order (Sirochman 2003, p. 69). He expressed the need to correct the injustices he caused to the Greek Catholic Church by his actions and published several articles on this matter (Holdoš 1968b, p. 1, 3; Holdoš 1968a, p. 2; Kapitolky z najnovších cirkevných dejín 1968, p. 3).

Through these activities, two centers were created around the two most prominent personalities of the Greek Catholic Church, Bishop Vasiľ Hopko and his closest collaborator in Prague, the Greek Catholic priest Ivan Ljavinec and Dr. Ján Murín in Bratislava, naturally and independently of each other, two centers striving for the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia. The link between the two groups was the Greek Catholic Redemptorist Štefan Lazor. They considered the approaching Easter holidays to be a suitable opportunity for the resumption of the activities of the Greek Catholic Church, when Štefan Lazor, together with another Greek Catholic priest, Ivan Ljavinec, asked to be received by the head of the Secretariat for Ecclesiastical Affairs under the Prime Minister’s Presidency, Dr. Erika Kadlecová, and officially asked for permission to hold Greek Catholic services during Easter, which, in 1968, fell on 14 April. This initiative was supported by a petition of believers, organized in eastern Slovakia under the leadership of Ivan Ljavinec (Coranič 2014, p. 362), which was signed by 40,000 people (Chalupecký 2006, p. 412). Despite the opposition from the Orthodox Bishop of Prešov, Nikolaj, this petition played an important role in putting pressure on the government to seriously deal with the issue of legalization of the Greek Catholic Church. Indeed, on 5 April 1968, a meeting of representatives of the Orthodox Church led by the Orthodox Bishop of Prešov, Nikolaj, and the Greek Catholic Church, led by the Greek Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Prešov, Vasiľ Hopko, was held at the Ministry of Culture and Information in Prague, at which a representative of the Czechoslovak government proposed the creation of a mixed commission that was to offer a solution to the arrangement of relations between the two churches in the country. Both delegations agreed with the proposal. However, the Orthodox, state-supported Church made it a condition of negotiation to maintain the status quo of 1 January 1968, a proposal with which the Greek Catholic group did not agree (Vnuk 2001, p. 184). Therefore, after the meeting of the delegations, the representatives of the Greek Catholic Church agreed to create their own representative committee to present the demands of the Greek Catholic Church to the government. Eighteen years after the abolition of the Greek Catholic Church, the Committee convened the first meeting of Greek Catholic priests, which took place on 10 April 1968 in the premises of the Roman Catholic Bishop’s Office in Košice. The conference was attended by as many as 134 Greek Catholic priests out of a total of 172, and 68 laymen also attended (Lacko 1971, p. 162). The so-called Preparatory Action Committee was headed by Bishop Vasil Hopko, together with 16 other priests and 2 laypeople. Dr. Ján Murín, Štefan Ujhely and Andrej Zima became the executive representative of the Greek Catholic priests. Among the members of the committee was Ján Hirka, who later became an ordinary of the Greek Catholic Church. This committee became the official representative of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia in negotiations with the Czechoslovak government on the resumption of the activities of the Greek Catholic Church and the proclamation of the so-called Declaration of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia of the Prešov Council of 28 April 1950 as an invalid and state-imposed act (Šturák 1999, p. 146). At the same time, the Action Committee decided not to continue talks with representatives of the Orthodox Church, to which the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia responded by appointing a member of the party’s Central Committee, Dr. Štefan Brenčič, whose task was to restore dialog between the two sides. He convened a meeting on 18 April in Košice; however, this did not lead to any significant concessions, which the Orthodox delegation was striving for (Letz 2001, p. 276). For this reason, on the same day, Brenčič met with the Action Committee of the Greek Catholic Church; the meeting took place in Košice, and was the first ever official meeting of the state with representatives of the Greek Catholic Church. At the meeting, the Greek Catholics’ unyielding demands for the resumption of the church’s activities were again voiced, not according to the status quo of 1 January 1968, as demanded by the Orthodox side, but according to the status quo from before 28 April 1950, i.e., to the state before the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church. Negotiations between the Greek Catholic Church and the state continued on 22 April 1968, and on that date, an agreement was reached to accelerate the rehabilitation of Bishop Vasiľ Hopko due to the restoration of the Greek Catholic bishopric in Prešov, and the Action Committee was tasked with developing a project for the renewal of the Greek Catholic Church, which it did very promptly a week later, 29 April 1968, in the form of the so-called Constitution Memorandum, which was presented to the state authorities. In it, the demand for the preservation of the status quo from before 28 April 1950, was presented (Coranič 2014, p. 365).

4. Legalization of the Greek Catholic Church by the State

The initial symptom of successful negotiations in the changed ecclesiastical and political conditions in Czechoslovakia was the granting of state approval for public pastoral activity to the auxiliary bishop of Prešov, Vasiľ Hopko, on 11 May 1968. This allowed him to participate in the meeting of the Ordinaries of Czechoslovakia, who, on 14–15 May 1968, held a constituent congress of the Work of Catholic Renewal in Velehrad in the spirit of the instructions of the Second Vatican Council. In the final statement of the Ordinaries, there was a demand that all the rights of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia be restored (Vnuk 2001, p. 194). Meanwhile, several Greek Catholic activists founded local and district committees that organized a petition for the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church and took over a total of more than sixty churches from the hands of the Orthodox without an official decision of the state authorities, which created unrest between Greek Catholics and Orthodox in eastern Slovakia, where most of the Greek Catholic and Orthodox believers were concentrated. Therefore, on 29 May 1968, the Eparchial Council of the Orthodox Church wrote a protest to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, in which it demanded that the activities of these Greek Catholic priests be banned. However, they were already serving the Greek Catholic liturgy in the churches without state approval, and the state began to pay salaries to many priests even before the official legalization of the Greek Catholic Church (Pešek and Barnovský 1999, pp. 196–7; Coranič 2014, p. 367).

Those factors clearly showed the irreversibility of the process of the official restoration of the Greek Catholic Church, which took place shortly afterwards by Government Decision No 205/1968 of 13 June 1968 and Government Decision No 70/1968 of the same day on the economic security of the Greek Catholic Church (Chalupecký 2006, p. 412; Coranič 2014, pp. 367–8). The representative of the state, Dr. Štefan Brenčič, issued directives determining the takeover of individual parishes and churches under the administration of the Greek Catholic Church. At the same time, the Czechoslovak government allocated funds intended for the activities of the Greek Catholic Church, while still requiring the necessary state approval from priests to carry out pastoral activities. He published these guidelines on 19 June 1968 (Lacko 1973, p. 48). After difficult negotiations, the cathedral was restored on 5 July 1968, although the bishop’s residence and seminary remained in the hands of the Orthodox Church. On 7 July, Bishop Hopko celebrated the first divine liturgy in the cathedral since the legalization of the church, and the Prešov dean Leontij Lizák transferred to the Greek Catholic Church, which was considered a great success. Gradually, by the end of July 1968, 111 priests signed up for pastoral care within the Greek Catholic Church. As of 30 November 1968, there were 180 Greek Catholic priests in the Greek Catholic Bishopric in Prešov (Coranič 2014, pp. 369–70). The clergy of the diocese consisted of four groups. The strongest group were priests who had not signed the entry into the Orthodox Church in 1950 and could not work pastorally until the restoration of the church. The second group were theologians who, due to the events of 1950, could not complete their theological studies. Eight such seminarians were ordained priests by Bishop Hopko on 11 May 1969. The third group consisted of 36 Greek Catholic priests who converted to the Orthodox Church in 1950 and returned to the Greek Catholic Church in 1968. The fourth group consisted of 42 theologians from Greek Catholic families who continued their studies after 1950 and were ordained by Orthodox bishops (Lacko 1971, pp. 174–5; Pešek and Barnovský 1999, pp. 204–5).

From the administrative point of view, the Greek Catholic Bishop’s Office in Košice was established on 17 July 1968, as the seat of the Orthodox Church remained in Prešov. Andrej Zima, a member of the committee, is the director of the office, and Dr. Ján Murín is the secretary. The question of filling the episcopal vacant see and appointing a coadjutor bishop was raised. The candidate for the position of bishop was Vasil Hopko, who had to be rehabilitated by the courts, and Ján Hirka, Ivan Ljavinec and Juraj Bumbera were proposed as the coadjutor bishops (Babjak 1997, p. 92). For this purpose, Bishop Hopko traveled to Rome at the beginning of December and, together with two Greek Catholic American bishops of Slovak origin—Stephen John Kocisko from Pittsburgh and Michael Joseph Dudick from Passaics—participated in an audience with Pope Paul VI, at which the question of occupying the episcopal see in Prešov was raised. There was a change in personnel policy on the part of the Holy See and Hopko’s candidacy became more and more problematic. The reason given was the poor health of the bishop as well as the national question (Coranič 2014, p. 372), within which efforts were made to demythologize the centuries-old ideas that the Greek Catholic Church is exclusively a question of the Rusyn ethnicity, which of course did not correspond to the real situation, because there was a relatively strong representation of Slovakian people among Greek Catholics in Slovakia.6 However, it is not impossible that such an attitude occurred on the basis of the intervention of the communist government in connection with the onset of normalization7 in the country and the associated reduction in freedom for churches. The path of Vasiľ Hopko to the episcopal see in Prešov proved to be less and less likely, and the possibility of appointing a new apostolic administrator of the Eparchy of Prešov instead of appointing a coadjutor bishop was considered. During Hopko’s stay in Rome in December 1968, a decision was made to appoint Ján Hirka, a member of the Action Committee, as the Ordinary of the Greek Catholic Bishopric in Prešov, i.e., the only Ordinary of Greek Catholics in the whole of Czechoslovakia. The decree of appointment as Apostolic Administrator with the rights of Bishop Resident was issued on 20 December 1968, and signed by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, Cardinal Maximilian Fuerstenberger. At the same time, Bishop Vasil Hopko was confirmed as an auxiliary bishop of the eparchy. However, the circumstances of his appointment are interesting, creating assumptions as to whether this act was a matter of diplomacy of the Holy See or an act of the Congregation itself, since, as the historian Michal Barnovský pointed out, at the beginning of January 1969, the main protagonist of the Ostpolitik of the Holy See, the secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Affairs, assured the representatives of Czechoslovakia that Ján Hirka had not been appointed as Ordinary. By doing so, he created doubts as to whether the appointment of Ján Hirka could have taken place without the knowledge of the Vatican Secretariat of State (Barnovský 2004, p. 43). This assumption is unlikely; even impossible. Rather, the leadership of the communist state wanted to have a guarantee that Ján Hirka was not appointed bishop. It is not possible for a prefect to appoint an apostolic administrator without the knowledge of the Secretariat of State. Barnovský probably considered the words “Ordinary” and “bishop” to be synonymous. Indeed, in the decree of appointment of Ján Hirku, it is stated that the Pope considered it right to select and send him as an ordinary “ad interim” without an episcopal character with a seat in Prešov (Hirka 2013, p. 43).

The appointment of Ján Hirka as apostolic administrator in Prešov met with resistance from the Czechoslovak government, which made the assumption of office conditional on the granting of state approval, which the Holy See did not ask for before his appointment. In order to meet the government’s needs, the Holy See commissioned the Trnava Apostolic Administrator Ambroz Lazík to lead negotiations with the government on this matter. In a letter dated 27 February 1969, he addressed the Minister of Culture of the Slovak Socialist Republic, Miroslav Válek, in which he asked for state approval for the appointment of Ján Hirka as the Ordinary of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia with the seat in Prešov with the rights of a resident bishop (Barnovský 1999, p. 458; Štefanský 1992, pp. 457–60). On 1 April 1969, Minister Válek convened a meeting of representatives of the Greek Catholic Church Vasiľ Hopko, Ján Hirka and Trnava administrator Lazík at the Ministry in Bratislava, at which he gave nulla to obtain state approval for Ján Hirka. On the very next day, 2 April, Ján Hirka obtained the necessary state approval, and this was also granted for Vasiľ Hopko as an auxiliary bishop of Prešov. The apostolic administrator Hirka took up his office on 23 April 1969, in Prešov, where the seat was also moved from Košice. It was not moved to the original premises of the bishop’s office, as the Orthodox bishop Nikolaj refused to leave the residence, but in the premises of the Greek Catholic parish office in Prešov. Subsequently, with the appointment of a board of consultors, the process of legalization and consolidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia was completed (Šturák 1999, p. 158).

5. Conclusions

When the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia was abolished on 28 April 1950, it seemed that the end had come. None of the leading state representatives would have thought that in 18 years, there would be a renewal of its activity; moreover, no one, not even the leading representatives of the Greek Catholic Church, would have thought that a few years later, not only would the church be legalized, but also that the episcopal seat in Prešov would be elevated to the metropolitan seat. The sacrifice and suffering of the now blessed bishops Peter Pavol Gojdič and Vasiľ Hopko, as well as many priests with their families, as well as the Greek Catholic faithful, resulted in a rich harvest and flourishing of the Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia, which has not been seen in its entire history. The Ordinary of the Greek Catholic Church, Ján Hirka, appointed in the context of the political thaw of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, took over the epochal role of the rebirth of Greek Catholics in the country from the underground to its public activities, and after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, he became the first free Greek Catholic bishop, which was the time of a new spring of this minority church in Slovakia, which is still experiencing growth despite the growing liberalism and atheism in the area. From the administrative and legal point of view, it has achieved its independent position of the Church sui iuris and a developed structure, associated with an active and creative approach of Greek Catholic bishops, priests and believers. While in 1968, he was the only Greek Catholic bishop in the whole of Czechoslovakia in the country, at present, in addition to the previously mentioned position of the metropolitan character of the bishopric in Prešov, he has three archbishops (one of whom is emeritus) and four bishops. Even more valuable are the three blessed martyrs of the Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia: Bishops Gojdič and Hopko, as well as the Redemptorist Metod Trčka.

From the point of view of religious research, it would be interesting to analyze and evaluate the consequences of the abolition of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia in 1950 and its subsequent legalization in 1968. The abolition of this church by the communist state resulted in the outflow of some Greek Catholics to the Orthodox Church, in which, due to the fact that they continued to attend the same church that fell to the Orthodox Church after 1950, they remained part of the Orthodox Church even after the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church in 1968. Orthodoxy, supported by the communist state power on the model of Moscow, had permanent consequences for the relations between the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches in Slovakia. Likewise, the original Greek Catholics, who converted to the Orthodox Church after 1950, after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, when most of the churches were returned to the Greek Catholics, paradoxically stood in the fight to preserve these churches in the hands of the Orthodox Church. Another part of the Greek Catholics, who, in terms of loyalty to the Pope, chose the Roman Catholic Church instead of the Orthodox Church, gradually integrated into the structures of the Roman Catholic Church, and after the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church, they did not return to the original Church and raised their offspring within the tradition of the Western Roman Catholic Church. The Greek Catholic Church’s emphasis on and legal arguments for those who identify themselves as Roman Catholics and who should follow the Byzantine rite according to the rite often encounter resistance due to the fact that this practice has become alien to them over the decades.