Jozef Tiso and Slovakia.(Letters)

SIR: John Russell gives a lengthy description of the slow development for religious freedom in the Catholic Church (July-August 2003), culminating in the Vatican II approval of the Declaration on Religious Freedom and eventual rehabilitation of Jan Hus.

But then he dismisses the long fight of Slovaks for independence in just three sentences:

 
   Some Catholics, particularly in 
   Slovakia, had welcomed the 
   dissolution of the Czechoslovak 
   state. A Catholic priest, 
   Monsignor Jozef Tiso, was 
   happy to act as President of the 
   Nazi puppet state of Slovakia 
   until the Red Army and 
   partisans overthrew him at the 
   end of the war. Tiso was 
   executed as a traitor in 1947. 

He thus disseminates incorrect and misleading images of Slovakia and Jozef Tiso.

No, it was not that "some Catholics, particularly in Slovakia, had welcomed the dissolution of the Czechoslovak state". What a large majority of Slovaks (not just Catholics) desired was some degree of independence, which was denied to them for twenty years of the first Czechoslovak republic. I was just finiishing my secondary schooling when on March 14, 1939, the Slovak Republic came into existence. Who could blame us students and the great majority of the population for welcoming the independence, however imperfect, after years of struggle?

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