ABSTRACT
In autumn 2021, Pope Francis visited Slovakia. One of the themes of his visit was periphery, a theme that is central to his papacy in general. Commentators diverged on whether a small country of five million people in Central Europe (with a Catholic majority, as far as religious affiliation is concerned) counts as a periphery. Sure enough, during the visit Pope Francis focused on several peripheries within Slovakia: both historical and contemporary. Speaking to the Jewish community in downtown Bratislava next to one of the central memorials to the 105,000 Jews from Slovakia who died in the Holocaust, the Pope brought the tragic history from the periphery of contemporary Church historiography and memory into its very center. As he said, “Your history is our history, your sufferings are our sufferings.” 1 Francis also addressed more contemporary peripheries. Speaking to the Roma community in Luník IX, the largest Roma settlement notorious for dire living conditions and generational poverty, he said, “In the Church, you are not on the margins...You are in the heart of the Church.” 2 But alongside being present in these historical, ethnic and ideological peripheries, Pope Francis stepped into an ecclesial periphery, or more precisely a hierarchical periphery, when he met Róbert Bezák, the former Archbishop of the Trnava Diocese dismissed by his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. Bezák’s sudden and unexplained 2012 dismissal sent shock waves through the Catholic Church in Slovakia, and destabilized the authority of the Catholic hierarchy in the country. In this chapter, I understand Bezák’s case as a window into the dynamics of the post-socialist construction of the hierarchy and its identity, especially in terms of its public role.
