c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ In 1995, Slovak Roman Catholic Bishop Rudolf Balaz put up for sale a 15th century painting called the”Adoration of the Three Kings,”a triptych that had long stood in the reception room of the bishop’s palace.

Balaz _ bishop of Banska Bystrica in central Slovakia and head of the Slovak Bishops Conference _ was trying to raise money for a new seminary, but for months he could not find a buyer willing to pay the appraised value of between $25,000 and $35,000.

Today, the painting is probably the best-known work of art in Slovakia. The picture became the unlikely epicenter of a battle between church and state that has now, four years later, led to criminal charges against the former chief of the country’s secret police (SIS).

And the battle has prompted the new liberal, Western-oriented government of Slovakia to apologize to Balaz for the actions of the previous one headed by the eccentric autocrat Vladimir Meciar, who tried to use both gifts and harassment to gain church support in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation.”It’s not that I personally needed an apology, it’s the church that needs an apology,”Balaz said.

In the summer of 1995, Balaz received an astounding offer from a man identifying himself as a Swiss businessman named Thomas Graebner. Perhaps Balaz should have known better: a friendly judge had warned him that the secret police wanted to wiretap his phones, said Jozef Hrtus, director of the bishop’s office. But Balaz agreed to the sale.

On an August night of that year, while Balaz was away on vacation, police conducted a four-hour search of the palace, claiming they were looking for evidence Balaz was illegally selling off Slovakia’s cultural heritage.

Police also said they arrested Graebner at a gas station and seized the money and the painting.

A few days later, Prime Minister Meciar asked a political rally what to do”when someone in a cassock goes after property.”The crowd replied:”Put him away!” In fact, the case quickly fell apart: the painting was made by a Dutch, not Slovak, artist, and Balaz had every right to sell it. Moreover, some of the odd circumstances _ the staggering price, the capture of Graebner at a gas station _ prompted suspicions, since confirmed by a government report, that the secret police tried to frame the bishop as part of a systematic effort to discredit Meciar’s opponents.”Only after the change of government did we discover that there was no Graebner, that he was actually an agent of the SIS,”said Jaroslav Ivor, director of the investigative section of the Slovak Ministry of Interior.

The Catholic church was hardly the only target of the SIS. The former director of the agency, Ivan Lexa, is also accused of conspiring to kidnap the son of former Slovak President Michal Kovac, Meciar’s political archrival; trying to discredit journalists and academics opposed to the Meciar regime; planting an explosive at an opposition party’s meeting; and illegally bugging phones. At least five other former SIS employees also face charges.

Meciar’s battle with the church stems from Balaz’s support for Kovac in some political disputes and the bishop’s criticism of Meciar’s anti-democratic practices.

Meciar himself has not yet been accused of involvement in any crimes, though the targets were all his political foes. A mercurial former boxer who rose to power by engineering Slovakia’s independence from the former Czechoslovakia in 1993, Meciar was voted out of office last September as the economy soured and his anti-democratic practices prompted censure from the West.

After his defeat, the nation witnessed the bizarre spectacle of a tearful Meciar singing a maudlin farewell tune on television. Mixed with a disco track, the song immediately became a nightclub dance hit in Bratislava, the capital.

But Meciar’s retirement was short-lived. He took second place May 15 in the first round of elections for president _ a largely ceremonial but influential position. While he seems unlikely to defeat coalition candidate Rudolf Schuster in the May 29 run-off, Meciar and his nationalist party are still considered a potent force in a nation now ruled by an uneasy coalition of Christian Democrats, reconstructed Communists and Hungarian minority parties.

With two-thirds of Slovak citizens being Catholic, Meciar tried carrots as well as sticks to win the church as an ally.

In the town of Trnava, Meciar built the state-funded University of Saints Cyril and Methodius, named for the missionaries who brought Christianity to the region a millennium ago. Meciar intended to give the school wholesale to the Catholic church, in itself noncontroversial in a nation without strict separation of church and state.

But the bishops rejected it as a gift horse, so the school opened anyway in 1997 with a generic mission to support”national and Christian ideals.” Similarly, Meciar tried to negotiate a concordat _ a wide-ranging treaty _ with the Vatican, similar to what its Catholic neighbor Poland has. But negotiations stalled because Meciar demanded the right to approve the church’s selections of all bishops.

Today, the church has a strong political position. The new government is”very cooperative,”said Hrtus.”It seems really sincere and not a pretext only to gain the support of Catholics.” In fact, the government of Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda is also trying to complete a concordat with the Vatican and to build a state-funded Catholic school. The only difference is that no strings would be attached.

As for Lexa, the former secret police chief accuses Dzurinda of doing precisely what he is accused of:”criminalizing political opponents.” But Parliament voted in April to strip Lexa of his immunity from prosecution, which he held as a member. Hrtus, though, said the episode of the painting proves that every wrong is punished sooner or later.”We have a saying in Slovakia: `God’s wheels turn slowly but surely,'”he said.

DEA END RNS