Archbishop Ján Orosch, walking in front of Bratislava Archbishop Stanislav Zvolenský. (source: TASR)
Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. The Catholic Church has a coming out to make. It’s too easy to switch parliament off for two weeks. Reports suggest military material may have been exported from Slovakia to Russia.
The church is experiencing the aftershocks of Tepláreň
The attack on the Tepláreň gay bar in Bratislava that resulted in the murders of Juraj Vankulič and Matej Horváth marked a dark moment, one filled with the horror of witnessing a violent loss of human life and the despair that comes with the realisation that the very foundations that the state is supposed to be built on – freedom, security, democracy – are at stake.
Slovak society has recent experience of turning a moment of despair into a constructive force, when the murders of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová in 2018 led to some degree of political and societal reckoning. Now, given that the victims of this latest attack were LGBT+ people, there are hints that something may be happening in perhaps the country’s most rigid organisation: the Roman Catholic Church.
