Texts of Slovak concordats and other Church-state documents

This agreement, made ten years after Czechoslovakia was founded, was a diplomatic note needing no approval by the new country's democratic parliament. The Vatican was obliged to give the government a veto over the appointment of bishops (Article 4) in return for state subsidies for the Church (Article 1) and an end to state administration of Church property (Article 2).

The Slovak Fascists eagerly handed over Slovak Jews, and even paid the Germans 500 Reichmark apiece for each one they took away on cattle cars. Little did these Slovaks realise that if their “ardent prayers” for the Führer's victory were successful, as Slavic “Untermenschen”, they’d have been the next to go under Hitler’s secret Generalplan Ost.

This Declaration was made in 1940 when Hitler’s puppet regime in Slovakia was led by a Catholic priest, Father Tiso, who headed the Fascist party founded by Father Hlinka. This document argues for still more clerical influence by reminding the government who helped the Fascists to power: “The Slovak Catholic priests were the first who waged war against Judeo-Marxism”. Also included are excerpts from the 1942 Declaration of the Slovak bishops vilifying the Jews.

This irrevocable agreement was ratified sixteen working days after it was tabled. Two of the sections of the original draft, the ones on the financing of the Church and conscientious objection, provoked so much opposition that they were to be turned into later separate treaties. Thus the Basic Treaty provides the framework for four more concordats to follow. It was kept general to get it ratified by the wide-spectrum ruling coalition at the time. The Vatican waited a couple of years until two of the four parties in the new cabinet had the word “Christian” in their names before spelling out the details in later concordats.

This law attempts set concordats with the Vatican above domestic legislation by claiming that they are "international treaties on human rights"[!]

The military is a closed society with an authoritarian structure, a good setting for proselytising, as the Evangelicals have also found in the US Air Force. Military chaplains, originally employed to pray for victory, are regarded by the Church as important enough to be the subject of whole concordats. On the basis of this treaty, an ordinariate of the military and police was created on the level of a diocese, and an ordinary on the level of a bishop was appointed.

This concordat secures full state funding for Church-controlled schools and Catholic religious education, even in state schools is to begin at the pre-school level. The Vatican treaty also allows Church schools, which receive the same funding as state ones, to edit out course material that conflicts with Catholic doctrine.

The "conscience concordat" was called by the liberal ANO party the "discrimination treaty". It would commit the Slovak government to protect only the strict scruples held by a small minority of the most conservative Catholic, and to let these override any other type of conscience, including that of liberal Catholics. In fact, EU lawyers warned that the claims of "Catholic conscience" as put forth here could even take precedence over certain human rights.