Slovakia is among the more observant countries in central Europe, and the composition is unusual in the region: a Roman Catholic majority, a Greek Catholic minority in the east following the Byzantine rite in communion with Rome, a smaller Orthodox population, and Lutheran communities that carry a share of the national story out of proportion to their numbers.
The Lutheran contribution is linguistic and political. Slovak Protestant intellectuals were central to the nineteenth century national revival, and the codification of literary Slovak involved both confessions in a long argument about which dialect and which orthography would serve as the standard. Lutheran figures were prominent among the leaders of the 1848 movement and in the founding generation of Czechoslovakia.
The eastern Greek Catholics have their own hard history. Following the Soviet model, the Czechoslovak state abolished the Greek Catholic Church in 1950 and transferred its parishes and buildings to the Orthodox Church, imprisoning clergy who refused. It was restored during the Prague Spring in 1968, and the property questions that reopened then took decades to work through.
Pilgrimage is a substantial part of Slovak Catholic life. The Marian shrine at Sastin, a national basilica, and the pilgrimage to Levoca draw very large crowds each year, and Levoca's church of St James holds the tallest late Gothic wooden altarpiece in the world, carved by the workshop of Master Pavol in the early sixteenth century.
Church and state relations rest on a treaty with the Holy See concluded in 2000, supplemented by agreements with the registered non Catholic churches.