Andrej Hlinka

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andrej Hlinka
Andrej Hlinka

Andrej Hlinka (September 27, 1864 - August 16, 1938) was a Slovak politician and Catholic priest, one of the most important Slovak public activists in the pre-WWII Czechoslovakia, leader of the Slovak People's Party (until his death), papal chamberlain (since 1924), infulled papal protonotary (since 1927), member of the National Assembly of Czechoslovakia (the parliament) and chairman of the St. Vojtech Group (organization publishing religious books).

Contents

[edit] Austria-Hungary

He graduated from theology in Spišská Kapitula (Szepeskáptalan) and was ordained a priest in 1889. In his political views he was a strong defendant of Catholic ethics against all secularizing tendencies connected with economic and political liberalism of the Kingdom of Hungary in the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. This was also the opinion of the Hungarian Katolikus Néppárt (Catholic People's Party), led by Count Zichy, so Hlinka became activist of this party. Later, when he saw that the party was paying no attention to nationality requests, he founded the Slovak People's Party along with František Skyčák in 1913. His support of Slovak requests collided with the negative opinions of the church hierarchy as well as with the Hungarian regime, which attempted to magyarize non-Magyar ethnic groups (force them to consider themselves Magyars), so Hlinka was persecuted by both the government (by imprisonment) and by the church (by suspending him from his office). Hlinka accepted the opinion that the Slovaks should split from the Kingdom of Hungary and became member of the Slovak National Council. He also signed the Martin declaration in 1918, in which the will of Slovak politicians to politically join with the Czech nation was expressed.

[edit] Czechoslovakia

Notepad
 To comply with Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may need to be rewritten.
Please help improve this article. The discussion page may contain suggestions.

In the first Czechoslovak republic, Hlinka was the chairman of the Slovak People's Party, since 1925 called Hlinka's Slovak People's Party. Its main political program was to achieve autonomy of Slovakia within Czechoslovakia on the basis of the Pittsburgh Agreement (1918) between American Czechs and Slovaks and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. At the Nuremberg trials, a US prosecutor described the party as "the semi-fascist Catholic Peoples Party of Monsignor Andrew Hlinka."

His leadership was to prove fateful. Hlinka's lack of respect for democracy and his antipathy to "the irreligious free-thinking Czechs" made him invaluable to Hitler who was intent on dismembering Czechoslovakia in order to absorb the fragments quietly. As the Nuremberg prosecutor showed, "the higher staff of Father Hlinka's party" were in the pay of the Nazis. Hlinka died in 1938, before he could see that his co-operation with Hitler had helped to launch the war.

Masaryk, who became President of Czechoslovakia, claimed during his presidency that the treaty was a falsificate. Slovakia was granted autonomy on October 6, 1938, that is only when frontier regions of Bohemia and Moravia were occupied by Germany. That was less than two months after Hlinka's death and 20 years after the establishment of Czechoslovakia.

[edit] Opinions on Hlinka after his death

During the first Slovak Republic (1939-1945), Hlinka was considered by the regime as a national hero. In Communist Czechoslovakia he was portrayed as a "clerofascist". After the fall of the regime, Hlinka became again a respected person, mostly to members and sympatisants of nationalist and Christian democratic organisations/parties, while the rest of the Slovak society seems mostly indifferent to Hlinka. Hlinka's image can be found on the Slovak 1000 crowns bill.

There is currently a bill passing through the Slovakian parliament to enshrine Hlinka as "father of the nation."

[edit] See also

[edit] References

 This article does not cite any references or sources. (February 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

[edit] Links