Posted on 03/04/2005 8:54:19 AM PST by NativeNewYorker
Bratislava (dpa) - Seven Christian churches asked the Slovak government Friday to limit public access to communist-era secret police files which have started appearing on a government-sponsored website.
The petition follows the disclosure that names of prominent church leaders, including some who are still serving, are on the government list of people who collaborated with former Czechoslovakia's notorious StB police before the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
The Internet project has created ``a spirit of hostility and suspecting of one another'', said Ondrej Prostrednik, general secretary of the Ecumenical Council of Churches in Slovakia, which represents the churches.
``We were observing a spirit of reconciliation in our society'' in the years since the country's former communist regime was overthrown, Prostrednik told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. The churches contributed to that spirit, he added.
``But now with the publication of the list, with unlimited access and no critical discernment of the names on the Internet, there is a spirit of hostility,'' he said.
The churches have asked the list's manager, Institute of National Memory (UPN), to limit public access to the names, perhaps by allowing only StB victims to search the list rather than opening the files to the world's Internet surfers.
Prostrednik acknowleged that in the petition the churches admit ``mistakes and spiritual weaknesses'' among some leaders during the communist times. ``But the people on this list are the small fish.''
The collaborator list should not ``criminalise the churches'', he said, since ``the main responsibility lies with the communist party''.
Churches that have signed the petition are the Orthodox, Evangelical Methodist, Brethren Union of Baptist, Old Catholic, Apostolic, Seventh Day Adventist and Evangelical Church of Augsburg Confession.
The Roman Catholic Church, the largest in Slovakia, has not joined the appeal but is an observer member of the ecumenical council.
UPN began posting the thousands of StB-linked names in November on the 15th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and planned to continue posting groups of names occasionally through 2005.
The Roman Catholic Church, the largest in Slovakia, has not joined the appeal but is an observer member of the ecumenical council.
Very interesting. Fits right in with other accounts that the communists in general were able to break married clergy routinely by threatening their families, but rarely the celibate Catholic clergy.
Excellent point.
Married priests is all the rage over in the Religion forum...watch out.
Isn't making a clean confession supposed to be the beginning of spiritual recovery? Instead of covering their derrieres, they ought to be calling for full publication and wide dissemination of the informers' lists.
Ping!
Bump!
Enlightening post. You're Slovak or Czech?
Then these lists are to be smuggled out of the country and published ot put on Internet from abroad, out of the reach of the corresponding governments (venerable "tamizdat" tradition, pure and simple).
bump
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