Bratislave, Slovakia - The Roman Catholic Church in Slovakia said Tuesday that it would create a council to review its history over the last 50 years, including the period of fascist state rule during World War II and the subsequent Communist era.
“The council should clarify our country’s as well as our church’s history, since that history has intentionally been misinterpreted here for the past 50 years,” said Marian Chovanec, the head of a Slovakian bishop’s conference being held in the eastern town of Presov.
The announcement came just days after news organizations here reported that the archbishop of Bratislava, Jan Sokol, had worked for the Czech secret police, the STB, during the Communist era.
Archbishop Sokol, 73, denies ever cooperating with the secret police, but his name figures in a 1972 STB file as a “candidate for secret cooperation,” and in a file dated April 1989, he is listed as an “agent.”
On Tuesday, the local newspaper Sme also reported that Archbishop Sokol passed on confidential information about the Catholic Church.
Basing its report on documents found in the Interior Ministry archives, the paper said Archbishop Sokol gave the police a list of priests destined to become bishops.
It said he also informed the police following a visit to the Vatican in November 1988 about a meeting with his former chaplain, Milan Bubak, who had emigrated to Italy.