Court trial of Catholic bishops

The church remained the last serious opponent of the Communist Party’s objective to establish a totalitarian dictatorship in the Czechoslovak Republic. Show trials of church dignitaries aimed to ‘reveal’ the church as a state enemy and the Vatican as a tool of ‘American imperialism.’ Such trials in Slovakia had a specific nature – to give evidence of the unreliability and futility of Slovakia resisting a centralistic state. Additional steps against the church followed the show trials.