“…This could be seen in many Czech nationalists' anticlericalism, notions of scientific, political and social progress, theoretical feminism, and relatively liberal attitudes towards marriage, sex and , contraception, and even abortion. 69 Church-State tensions, which were acute enough in the 1920s for relations with the Vatican to be broken off entirely, were further complicated, from the late 1930s and throughout the Second World War, by the rise to power in Slovakia of a clercial-fascist régimethe only fascist regime in Europe to be led by a Catholic priest -which was closely allied to Hitler's 71 As James Felak has recently noted, the democratizing and liberalising aims of both the papacy during the Second Vatican Council and the Czecholsovak Communist leadership during the Prague Spring gave the two 1960s reform movements, which roughly coincided, a good deal in common. 72 Although opinion polls and surveys undertaken by the Communist régime need to be treated with caution, the pattern of contrasting attitudes to religion between the Czech and Slovak republics, which continues to the present day, emerge clearly from all the available evidence.…”