The current mood within the Slovak Church is one of quiet depression. This has some immediate causes, but is largely a corrective to the mood in which it began 1990. Then it was boundlessly optimistic. The Communists were newly overthrown. The Church could resume its place at the head of what had long been, Ireland aside, Europe's most clerical nation.

This status is a thousand years old. Following the Hungarian conquest in 906, the Church was the only institution to which Slovaks could give their willing, unambiguous loyalty: to the secular authorities they were always to some extent indifferent, where not actually hostile. Indeed, during the long battle between Habsburg and Ottoman, fought often on Slovak soil, it became at times the main preserver of communal life. From the end of the eighteenth century, its clergy played a leading role in the revival of the nation.

This status continued after the birth of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The Czech ascendancy before 1938 preserved the old sense of Slovak alienation. It continued also after the long Communist night descended in 1948. Despite all the usual efforts, the Church was too strongly rooted to be destroyed. Persecuted, religious life went underground and flourished unbroken.

During the next four decades, Slovak dissidence was to have a mainly religious basis. In private, there was the rejection of Marxist-Leninism. In public, there were the annual pilgrimages. Even during the grim tyranny of the 1950s, the authorities could not interfere. During the slightly less savage seventies and eighties, attendances grew, often to hundreds of thousands. Such occasions were an opportunity for passive resistance. In 1986, for example, a police patrol tried to harass a group of pilgrims at Sastin in western Slovakia. A few young people were selected at random and asked for their identity cards. At once, the patrol was surrounded by hundreds of other young people, all offering their cards for checking. Fearing Western censure, the police withdrew.

Yet the 1989 revolution was for many Catholics a disappointment. Within months, the Church was fully legalised, its property restored. The vacant sees were filled. Religious education was permitted in the schools. Visiting in April 1990, the Pope received a rapturous welcome. Federal President Vaclav Havel spoke about the moral utility of religion for the State, and proposed "mutual independence" rather than the more usual separation of Church and State. In Slovakia, the Christian Democratic Movement was founded by Jan Carnogursky, a human rights lawyer whose tough defence of Charter 77 dissidents had ensured years of persecution by the old regime. In June 1990, his Movement gained more than 20 per cent of votes to the Slovak Parliament, ensuring its strong representation in the coalition government. The following April, he became Prime Minister.

All this was accompanied by a progressive decline in the Church's secular status. Under the old regime, the one focal point of resistance, it was now one among many free institutions. It was found that many of the pilgrims and those who had cheered on the dissidents in the Underground Church were more political than religious. As soon as they were able, they set up or joined political parties.

Added to this loss of intellectual support was the increasing indifference of young people. The Revolution brought not only full freedom of worship, but also full freedom to join the youth culture of the West. Whether in the restaurants or shops or busses, it is now impossible to avoid the sound of Western rock music. Walkmans, jeans, trainers, American slang - these are what young people most desire, and are proudest to display when they have them. Compared with these, church is boring: church is for old people.

Neither the Church nor the Christian Democratic Movement was able to come fully to terms with these tendencies. The CDM especially failed to adapt. From the start of 1991, Czechoslovakia began the most ambitious scheme of economic reform ever attempted. The result was price increases and - especially in Slovakia - a sharp rise in unemployment. The Carnogursky government carried out the programme with all good faith. But his Movement was never able, or perhaps willing, to justify it to the people. The Movement was perceived by many as less interested in how to make the shops better than in changes to the abortion law and questions of religious education.

The result was a poor showing in the June 1992 general election. The CDM saw its share of the vote more than halved. The winner of the election, Vladimir Meciar, for all his denials, is believed to be indifferent to religion. He will probably oppose any attempt by the Bishops to reassert their old primacy in Slovak political life. Certainly, he will ignore their advice unless he thinks it good on other grounds.

And so, the Church must adapt. As in other countries, it must learn to accept a less directly important role in everyday affairs. This will be a painful adaptation, bearing in mind a thousand years of tradition. Even so, it surely will be made. The Slovak Church is currently depressed. This will not last.