One of the most radical interventions of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia against
the Catholic Church was the forcible installation of the administrator Ján Dechet
in the Banská Bystrica diocese after the death of Bishop Andrej Škrábik, and later
his staged election as Vicar Capitular. Its aim was to break the unity of the Church,
to create within its ranks collaborating groups of “patriotic priests” and thus to
dominate the Church not only by external violent means, but also from within. Previous
historical reflection on these events has been limited to the reconstruction of Church-State
relations on the basis of domestic historical sources. The present study, based on
recently released Vatican documents from the pontificate of Pius XII, puts the events
into an international context and analyses for the first time the attitude of the
Holy See towards the draconian intervention of the communist state, which unfolded
in a field of tension between, on the one hand, a resolute rejection of communism
and its encroachments on the freedom of the Church and an international anticommunist
mobilisation, and, on the other hand, an attempt, at least in part, to reorganise
and tolerate the situation, and, through a series of extraordinary measures and faculties,
to allow for the proper administration of the diocese and the running of ecclesiastical
life.
