Stranica 2 [2]
hugh Mel bet Bye Ke
- page two ¬
Military camps
In the coal mining district of Z Karvinna, all previous
collicries were joined into one large mine and this - with lacking
manpowor - placed under military command. Soldiers are simply ordered
into mining worke
However only few.of these soldiers are regularly and activély
in military service. The majority are untrustworthy elements and
sons of families not in sympathy with the regime. They are simply
drafted into service and then commanded into the Karvinna minese
Now working at full capacity, the mines are constantly being expanded.
Priests' and religious’ campse :
Concentration camps play an important instrumental role
in the persecution of religion. It was the hope of Soviet leaders
to force the Churchein XKX Capho-Slovakia into submission to Fratriarch
Alexei of Moscow. They succeeded as far as the Czech National Catholic
Church and the so-called Old Catholic Church were concerned. Both
were dissident. from the Roman Catholic Church. The first had becn
founded in 1919, had become the official Czech national Church and
e unted 800 thdousand memberse the second one, created in the lat
century, was a small unit of a few thousand faithful. both are now
absorbed in the of ficial Orthodoxy and hve become a branch of the
Moscow Church,
The Roman Catholic Church however resisted; especially in
Slovakia, where the reaction was hspoic and unanimouse Five Slovak
bishops are in prison; wsfxikak only the Apostolic Administrator of
Trnava is still in fre-dom.
Catholic Church was to be beheaded and left without leaders. Since 1950
members of the hierarchy are imprisoned, expelled from thoir dioceses
or confined into forced residence; "11 religious communities are
liquidated and their members held in special camps; all resastant
priests and seminariams are cither in forced labor or in special
military traininge
3Simultancously ghes a “four year plan" for the formation of “patriotic
pricsts" in State seminaries. /f Two State Theological Faculties have
been opened in the summer of 1950 in Prague and Bratislava. they havé
to form the priests and leaders of a new Catholic Church, that
eventually will agree to transfer its loyaity away from Rome and to the
moscow Patriarchate.
in order to take care of non-conformist priests and of
religious communities, the govemment has thus created a number of
special labor campse Friests and nuns disappear from the public
scene where their presence is undesirable for the regime; they
increase at the same time the army of cheap labor forcese
we have reports on two camps in Northern Bohemia: Kraliky
where 200 priests work in the voods; end hejnice near Liberec, where
a number that could not be exactly established of priests ana nuns
are detained.
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