OCR
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. i SZ, |