Czechoslovak Bishops' Conference, known in recent years as the Bishops' Conference of Czechoslovakia, brought together Catholic Bishops operating in the territory of former Czechoslovakia.
As an informal body with no strictly defined powers, the Conference met until 1950, when its activities were paralyzed by internment of most bishops. The State Agency for Religious Affairs started to organize conferences of capitular vicars-general, the first of which was convened on the 15 February 1951. The policy was released in March 1968, and efforts were undertaken to resume the Episcopal Conference, but because of the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia during August 1968, the Conference failed to resume its activities. As the role of bishops increased due to returning of some interrnees to their ordinaries of dioceses in this period , one of important steps of the communist régime aimed at "normalization" in the 70ties was avoiding a functional episcopal conference that would mean a closer collaboration of the bishops.
As a legal person within the meaning of the Code of Canon Law of 1983, the body was established under the name of Bishops' Conference of Czechoslovakia only in the spring of 1990 (according to some sources, on April 17, others May 14). Its first chairman was elected Cardinal František Tomášek. It consisted of two independently acting parts - the Czech-Moravian (Chairman Francis Radkovský ) and the Slovak Bishops College (Chairman Eduard Kojnok). The Bishops 'Conference of Czechoslovakia has also become an associate member of the Ecumenical Council of Churches in Czechoslovakia, where the bishops' conference at the discretion of Cardinal Tomasek was represented primarily by the former Vicar General of Archdiocese of Prague Antonín Liška. After the disintegration of Czechoslovakia in 1993, in the two newly independent States two Bishops' Conferences were established - the Czech Bishops' Conference and the Conference of Slovak Bishops.