The Archbishop of Bratislava, Jan Sokol is currently refusing to apologise for describing life in Fascist occupied Slovakia as “A time of well-being.”

Poor Jan has obviously not been keeping up with current affairs or he would have noticed that when the Archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw W. Wielgus, admitted to collaborating with another totalitarian regime it didn’t go down too well. In fact it ended up with a resignation after he admitted passing on information to Poland’s communist era secret police. The Slant wouldn’t give you good odds on Jan Sokol staying in office after this PR nightmare.

During WWII, Slovakia was a puppet state overseen by a Catholic Priest, Josef Tiso, of whom Archbishop Sokol said, “I highly esteem President Tiso because I remember him from my childhood. We used to be very poor, and under his rule, the situation greatly improved. We had everything we wanted. Even during a time of war.”

He may have had everything he wanted, but if you were a Gypsy, a communist or a Jew during these times then it wasn’t so much a time of well-being as it was a time of not being at all. Maybe he should have stopped to think where “everything we wanted” was coming from.

This is, of course, the last thing the Catholic Church needed after previous scandals and although Archbishop Sokal has attempted to distance himself from the Human Rights violations he has refused to withdraw his comments.

70,000 Slovak Jews were deported during the war, surely that’s worth a sorry?

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Keywords: Archbishop, Catholocism, Holocaust, Nazis