BRATISLAVA -- After 40 years of communist persecution the Roman Catholic Church holds more sway than ever in Slovakia where its influence pervades all sectors of society.

As Pope John Paul II prepares to visit the country for the third time from Thursday, he can be satisfied that the Slovakian Church he supported in the dark years has since become a popular, thriving institution.

Since the fall of communism in 1989, churches in Slovakia are crowded, more are being built, more and more parents send their children to catechism classes, the number of young candidates for priesthood has kept growing and religious literature flourishes, AFP reported.

The latest, 2001 population census showed that 84 percent of Slovakia's 5.4 million population claim to believe in God. A large majority of 69 percent are Catholics. To this must be added another four percent who belong to the unitarian Greek church, which recognizes the Roman pope's authority but worships in the Byzantine rite.

With such massive backup Slovakia's Catholic authorities openly seek to impose their views, especially with regard to ethics and lifestyle.

The Church has been engaged in an active campaign against unhindered rights to abortion, one of the few legacies of communism. In this undertaking it can rely on support from no less than two Christian democrat parties, which are both members of the country's ruling coalition. Slovakia's religious devotion stands in sharp contrast to a more secular Czech Republic, from which it quietly split 10 years ago.

The current revival vindicates four decades of systematic efforts from the Czechoslovak communists to suppress or paralyze the Slovakian Catholic Church.

"The process can break down into two distinct stages," said Frantisek Miklosko, an historian and (Christian democrat) member of Parliament.

"There was the first wave of persecution, between 1948 and 1968, whose distinctive feature was its brutal handling of Catholic officials," Miklosko said.

During those two decades the communists closed down convents and monasteries, and substituted the Russian orthodoxy for Greek unitarianism. They kept bishops and priests in jail for many years.

The pressure abated in 1968 with the rise to power of communist reformer Alexander Dubcek, the promoter of "communism with a human face". But with the Soviet invasion in August 1968 this was the briefest of respites.

"The next two decades were characterized by a much more refined form of persecution," added Miklosko, who wrote several books about the communist regime.

"The communists sought to instill Marxist and communist ideas into the Catholic Church," he claimed.

All along those four decades the Slovakian Church never really tried to fight off the relentless pressure from communism. It stuck to a passive sort of resistance.

"The situation of the Catholic Church was a very delicate one," said Miklosko in a reference to the Slovakian Church's controversial behavior during World War II.

A number of Catholic officials took over when Nazi Germany set up a puppet fascist government in Slovakia in a bid to dismantle Czchoslovakia. At their head was a priest, Josef Tiso, under whose ruthless dictatorship between 1939 and 1945 some 60,000 Slovakian Jews were deported.

After the war the Vatican failed to offer much support to the Slovakian Church and was content with guarded criticism of the communist regime.

But then everything changed with the current pope, of neighboring Poland.

"The start of the pontificate of John Paul II in 1978 came as an epochal turnaround for the Catholic Church in Slovakia," said Miklosko. "As a Pole, the pope felt very close to the Slovaks, and he galvanized Slovakia's Catholics."

From then on the pontiff provided constant support, including through personal correspondence.

"The pope took to openly discuss harassment of Catholics in communist countries. He is one of the key figures in the fall of communism," Miklosko concluded.