The Apostolic Nuncio to Czechoslovakia was an ecclesiastical office of the Roman Catholic Church, established in 1920 and lasting, with significant interruptions, until 1993. It was a diplomatic post of the Holy See, whose representative is called the Apostolic Nuncio with the rank of an ambassador. The office of the nunciature was located in Prague.
History The relationship between the Holy See and the government of Czechoslovakia was strained more often than not.
The new Czechoslovak government demanded that the majority of incumbent bishops be replaced and systematically implemented a persecutory anti-church policy. Due to this imposition, Pavel Huyn, Primate and Archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Lev Skrbenský z Hříště, Archbishop of Olomouc, and at least other six bishops had been replaced or forced out to resign. After 1921 only two pre-war bishops were allowed to remain.Luboslav Hromjak, Pietro Gasparri, il governo cecoslovacco e la Slovacchia in Laura Pettinaroli e Massimiliano Valente, Il cardinale Pietro Gasparri, segretario di Stato (1914-1930), Heidelberg University Publishing, 2020, pp. 185-206. The essay explicitly discusses the government's "persecutory policy against the Church" (politica ecclesiastica di carattere persecutorio, p. 189).The Dioceses of Košice and Rožňava remained vacant for several decades, occasionally being governed by an apostolic administrator (Košice from 1925 to 1939, and from 1948 to 1990, Rožňava from 1920 to 1939, and from 1945 to 1990). The appointment of the Bishops of Košice and Rožňava in 1939 was possible only during the short period (1938-1945) of the return of these territories under Hungarian rule after the First Vienna Award.Bratislava remained from 1922 to 1977 in a "legal limbo" (a territory under its own apostolic administrator seated in Trnava but formally belonging to the Hungarian Archdiocese of Esztergom) because the government hindered the erection of any new religious structure.The first Archbishop of Trnava, later of Bratislava-Trnava, did not take office until 1989 due to the opposition of the Czechoslovak communist government.
In the 1920s, Apostolic Nuncio Francesco Marmaggi left Prague to protest public celebrations of the Czech national hero Jan Hus, a heretic in the eyes of the Church, but the underlying problem was that hundreds of Catholic places of worship had been seized by the government and assigned to the new Czechoslovak Hussite Church with an openly anti-Catholic purpose. Years of negotiations established a new working relationship, but the Vatican failed to persuade the Czechs to allow Marmaggi to return as nuncio, not even a face-saving few weeks. The Slovak independence and the creation in March 1939 of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a few months before the outbreak of World War II, ended normal relations, and the Holy See sought a diplomatic middle ground by granting recognition to the Slovak Republic, a Nazi client state, but sent a chargé d'affaires, Giuseppe Burzio, rather than a nuncio.
Relations were restored only briefly after the war before the new Czechoslovak Communist government expelled the nuncio and terminated diplomatic relations. Finally, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the parties renewed their old ties, but in less than three years Czechoslovakia divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the Apostolic Nuncio to Czechoslovakia became nuncio to both of those new nations for a short period before the creation of an apostolic nunciature in Bratislava in 1994.
List of papal representatives to Czechoslovakia Apostolic nuncios Clemente Micara (15 May 1920 - 30 May 1923) Francesco Marmaggi (30 May 1923 - 13 February 1928) Pietro Ciriaci (15 February 1928 - 9 January 1934) Saverio Ritter (5 August 1935 - 1939; 11 May 1946 - March 1949) Giovanni Coppa (30 June 1990 – 1 January 1993)
See also Ottavio De Liva, nunciature secretary expelled in 1950 Apostolic Nunciature to the Czech Republic Apostolic Nunciature to Slovakia List of diplomatic missions of the Holy See Foreign relations of the Holy See
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