Word: czechs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shortly before Pope Pius XII published the decree, Czech Communists had taken another step in their assault on Prague's Archbishop Beran and his hierarchy. In a memorandum signed by Party Secretary Rudolf Slansky, plans were made to build up a government-controlled national church. Another circular detailed punishments for priests who had read Beran's pastoral letters denouncing Communist persecution of the church. "Finally," said the circular, "we shall accuse [the Catholic hierarchy] directly of high treason...
...excommunication order forced Czech Communists to hurl accusations of treason faster than they intended. Minister of Justice Alexej Cepicka blared that Beran had maintained "treacherous connections with foreign enemies" and plotted "treacherous anti-state riots." "Let no one doubt," the minister went on, "that today anyone who . . . tries in any way to carry out the Vatican's orders commits treason against the vital principles of his own state and people." Cepicka lists himself officially as a Catholic. He is a son-in-law of Communist Boss Klement Gottwald...
...Vatican called the Czech threat of prosecution for treason "laughable nonsense." A Vatican spokesman asserted: "Excommunication has no need of a material executor who can be traced and punished. Excommunication acts upon the guilty in the secret of the conscience." On the other hand, Eastern Catholics who were terrorized into lip service to Communism would not incur the penalties of the papal edict. Priests, he added, were expected to do their duty regardless of personal consequences...
...Czech's powerful service worked like a charm. After that it began to sputter; Drobny's weakness has always been inconsistency, a failing which prompts Prague's Communist-controlled press to call him a bourgeois when he loses, praise him as the standard-bearer of "our people's democratic republic" when he wins. Schroeder swept easily through the second and third sets, misfired in the fourth. But he never seemed in serious danger, and ran out the final game of the fifth set at love to win his first Wimbledon title...
...anyone still in doubt as to the real status of Tass, a London court made a clarifying decision last week. Vladimir Krajina, a refugee Czech now living in London, had filed a libel suit against Tass for charging in a news bulletin distributed to London newspapers that he had betrayed British paratroopers to the Gestapo. The Court of Appeal dismissed Krajina's complaint. Reason: on the testimony of the Russian ambassador himself, Tass was an official organ of the Soviet state; as such, it was entitled to full diplomatic immunity, even when it published a libel...