IN THE MAELSTROM OF SECULARIZATION, COLLABORATION AND PERSECUTION:

ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN MODERN CZECH SOCIETY AND THE STATE

LUBLIN 2014

IN THE MAELSTROM OF SECULARIZATION CO LL A BOR ATI ON AND PERSECUTION

ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN MODERN

CZECH SOCIETY AND THE STATE

TOMÁŠ PETRÁČEK

© Tomáš Petráček, 2014Translation Derek & Marzia Paton, 2014

Published by EL-PRESS: Lublin, 2014

ISBN 978-83-86869-40-4

This book was financed by the European Social Fund and the project, funded by the Czech state, ‘Innovation in the Study of Transcultural Communication and Its Realization in the English Language‚ (CZ 1.07/2.2.00/28.0131).

CONTENTS

Introduction 7

1 Moments of Conflict in the Relations between Church, State, and Society in Medieval and Early Modern Times 9

2 Trends in the Relations between State, Society, and the Church in the Bohemian Lands in the Nineteenth Century 19

3 The Church and Its Clergy in the National Revival and in the Formation of the Modern Czech Nation 32

4 A Model of Extraordinarily Successful Cooperation between Society and the Church in Modern Times 45

5 Critical Reflections on Changes in Religion in the Bohemian Lands from the Beginning of the Czechoslovak Republic 63

6 The Modern History of the Church in the Bohemian Lands as a History of Persecution 75

7 Clerical Collaboration with the Communist Regime 95

8 Relations between the Czechs and the Church after 1989 105

9 Some Conclusory Reflections 114

Bibliography 118

Index of names 127

This book is dedicated to my dear friend and colleague

Monika Ulrichová

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INTRODUCTION

This book offers the reader reflections on the topic of the relations between the State, society, and the Roman Catholic Church in the Bohemian Lands (the historic lands of the Bohemian Crown, that is, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It makes no claim to be exhaustive; we shall probably have to wait some time for a comprehensive synthesis, and it will undoubtedly be the work of a group of scholars in the form of a series of books, each on a single topic. The aim of the present work is to offer several general reflections on the possible roots and causes of secularization in the Bohemian Lands, in particular why there occurred such a mass departure from religious practice in organized churches in this country compared to all its central European neighbours (that is, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Poland, and Slovakia), with the possible exception of the former German Democratic Republic. In addition to these general reflections, the reader will find here more detailed explorations of particular questions related to our topic. The author has therefore endeavoured to bring several little stones to the mosaic of the history of the secularization processes in the Bohemian Lands, which historians from the Czech Republic and elsewhere have been assembling, and to his own views on some aspects of its special character.

As was revealed by debates about the Czech legislation on the partial restitution of Church property and the funding of Churches and religious societies between 2008 and 2013, this is not a purely academic question. The degree of hostility towards religion and its organized traditional institutions in the form of the Christian Churches goes beyond the Czech Republic, with similar manifestations in other European countries, and it also creates a cultural and political problem, which can, in connection with a possible worsening of the economic and social situations, take more dramatic forms. Already at this point, it is worth inquiring into the roots of these attitudes, what nourishes them, and where they are taking their arguments from. According to some sociologists and social anthropologists, extreme anticlericalism and the generally shared conviction about the harmfulness of Christianity – particularly of the Roman Catholic Church – to society and

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about its negative role in society are among the few remaining elements uniting mainstream Czech public opinion and Czech identity.

Though perhaps exaggerated, these attitudes must be taken seriously, and questions must be asked not only about their source but also about their meaning and consequences for Czech society today. One must therefore answer not only the question of how it happened that a nation that so essentially identified with Roman Catholicism, as the Czechs did in the late eighteenth century, could change its attitude towards the Church and religion so radically in the course of only 150 years. But one must also ask whether this change was not necessary and inevitable, whether it was discussed and reflected upon, which forces were behind it, and what the motives were. The question is therefore highly important and currently relevant mainly for the Churches. A whole range of questions are connected with the Czech road from the mass popular Church to today’s acute diaspora; the current publication will, I hope, provide at least some preliminary answers and contribute to thoughtful informed consideration of these processes.

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1. MOMENTS OF CONFLICT

IN THE RELATIONS BETWEEN CHURCH, STATE, AND SOCIETY

IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TIMES

The Czech nation, in its ecclesiastical, spiritual history, has experienced several convulsions. It has had the reputation of having been one of the most Catholic, even most bigoted, nations of Europe (in the fourteenth and, later, in the eighteenth century), and of being a nation of heretics during the Hussite revolution in the fifteenth century. The general opinion today is that it is a country where the processes of secularization and de-Christianization have gone the farthest, so that the country is widely considered the most atheistic in the world. Czech history offers much material for consideration of the role of the inculturation of the Christian mission and the Church in society, as well as consideration of the consequences of the Church hierarchy becoming complacent, seeking only to maintain the status quo, which usually means nostalgia, looking back to an idealized past. These considerations also provide us with a more solid historical framework in which to contemplate the possible deeper roots of Czech atheism, a phenomenon often linked to the question of the violent Counter-Reformation in Bohemia in the seventeenth century, but sometimes even with Hussitism and, on the rare occasion, also with the mission of Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century, or rather with its being stifled.

Cyril and Methodius: Their mission and its failure

One of the most remarkable examples of successful inculturation, and also superb evidence of how difficult it was to achieve, and that it should not be taken for granted, is the mission of the Byzantine Greek brothers from Thessalonica, Cyril and Methodius, to Great Moravia, the centre of power in the area that is now southern Moravia, in the second half of the ninth century. To this day, they are still admired for the brilliant intuition with which they were able to integrate the message of the Gospel into the culture and mentality of the early medieval Slav tribes and how they succeeded in adapting the liturgy and Church institutions to the needs of those tribes without losing any of the essence of the Christian message.

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As is generally known, the mission of the brothers from Thessalonica was hardly the first presence of Christian missionaries in Great Moravia, which by that time was a Christian country because the nobility had already adopted this religion as their own. Duke Rastislav (reg. 846–70) had requested the Byzantine Emperor to send capable missionaries to solve questions of Church organization and the unification of the liturgy and Church orders which individual foreign missionaries had brought from their mother churches; but the main reason was to bring about a more profound and systematic Christianization of the non-elite of Great Moravia. Missionaries from what is today Italy, Austria, and Germany had already learnt the language of the natives, but true inculturation, though not of course called that at the time, required a deeper and truer ‘translation’ of the Christian message if it was to become comprehensible and accessible to the local culture.

The two brothers were exceptionally well suited to the task. Highly educated, thanks to having worked in Church and government administration, they were experienced in missionary activity and were completely devoted to it. A historically unique convergence of a number of factors meant that Christianity was adopted in this part of Europe voluntarily, freely, and, at least in the core of the Great Moravian Empire, relatively deeply.1 The first factor was the Great Moravian elites’ determination to join the Christian states, that is, to become, like them, a Christian country with their own church organization. The disintegration of the pagan cults, together with the social transformation amongst the Slav ethnicities of central Europe, naturally also made this process possible and accelerated it. The first prerequisite of the success of the mission was the attraction and success of Christianity as a force of civilization. In other words, the elites of the still non-Christian ethnicities themselves became convinced that a necessary condition for their future and for the development of the population of their principalities was their adoption of the Christian religion.

The mission had been thoroughly prepared even before Cyril and Methodius left for Great Moravia. Not only did they understand the necessity of creating their own liturgical and theological language, but they were also able to create their own alphabetic writing system, which made it possible to write down the special sounds of Slavic languages.2 They created terms of the religious language of Christianity, which were new to Slavic languages but remarkably comprehensible. A number of these terms are still used today. They translated the basic texts of Christianity and even created their own liturgy in Church Slavonic, thereby making the liturgy accessible to the local populations. This is admirable not merely for their simply

1 See the still valuable works of Francis (František) Dvorník, Byzantine Missions among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, New Brunswick (NJ), 1970.

2 See Josef Vašica, Literární památky epochy velkomoravské 863–885, 2nd edn, (1966) Prague and Rome, 1996.

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having dared to take such steps, but also because of the quality of the execution, their theological, linguistic, and organizational skills, and the competence and ability to innovate which they demonstrated. Furthermore, they created new Church rules and regulations, which brought unity into the existing disciplinary chaos and began to produce a stratum of local clergy, which made it possible to deepen the Christianization of the Great Moravian population. Great Moravia was covered with a network of churches; support for the Church and Christianity became part of the way of life of the nobility; the country became an attractive model, a focal point of Christianization for other countries of central Europe.

One could object that the Great Moravian experiment was short lived and that the countries of central Europe later set out on the path of the classic West Latin rite and language, and that, consequently, the proponents of trilingualism triumphed,3 that even though Cyril and Methodius had at first been victorious over them (the pope had even condemned trilingualism as error), in theory and practice it was the proponents of trilingualism who for centuries came to dominate. It would be wrong, however, to note only the ambitious scale of the attempt; for even in the long-term it had undeniably good results. Among those results was the coming of Christianity to other countries and also the fact that none of the countries Christianized from Great Moravia experienced the ‘pagan reaction’ – namely, that a number of nations of early medieval Europe which had been Christianized by force in the course of about one generation rose up during the chaos over who would rule, and murdered missionaries, plundered churches, and temporarily returned to paganism. Missionaries orientated like Cyril and Methodius had to leave central Europe, and they thus brought Christianity to the Balkans and eastern Europe, where their legacy still lives on and is developing. One successful consequence of the mission was that Duke Wenceslas’s grandfather, Bořivoj (like his wife, Ludmila) was the first Christian ruler of Bohemia, baptized, according to legend, by Methodius. In the first third of the tenth century, Wenceslas, who was also baptized, worked hard to spread the faith. The end of the brothers’ mission, however, meant that a more gradual, more thorough Christianization of the ordinary people of the Slav areas of central Europe would have to wait until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

3 Proponents of the view that the Christian liturgy may be performed only in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, the three sacred languages.

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Was it the flourishing of the Church in the reign of Emperor Charles IV and the zealotry of the Hussites or over-successful inculturation?The reign of the king of Bohemia and then Emperor of the Holy Empire, Charles IV (reg. 1346–78), in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, is generally considered the high point of Bohemian history. The Bohemian Lands, which were still enjoying a boom in silver mining, had become one of the most civilized countries of Europe. The establishment of the University of Prague and a network of schools, a numerous, rich, and demanding stratum of educated lay elites, the arrival of the new urban religious orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans and their development, the founding of new monasteries and chapters, all testified to the thorough, well-executed Christianization of the country and the inculturation of Christianity amongst the peoples of the Bohemian Lands. In the fourteenth century alone, several translations of the Bible were undertaken here, a few of them into Czech, and a few, including the earliest, into German. It is no coincidence that Charles came out in support of the tradition of Cyril and Methodius, renewed the Slav liturgy in the newly established Emmaus Abbey (also called Na Slovanech) and, just as intensely, came out in support of the cult of St Wenceslas, the enduring duke of the Bohemian Lands, and thus his championing the Přemyslid legacy. The building of magnificent new churches in dozens of towns, particularly Prague and Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg), proclaimed the Christian nature of the country.

This dynamic development nevertheless had its dark sides. The rapidity of the process of civilization, perhaps even too rapid, provoked tensions that were intensified by later crises and could be solved only by bloody religious upheaval. If the social order and values had not been weakened by the great plague in the second half of the fourteenth century, which, though coming later to the Bohemian Lands than elsewhere, arrived with particular force and just as a weak monarch, Wenceslas IV, the son of the Emperor Charles, had come to the throne, Bohemian history might have taken other paths. But rather than speculate, let us return to what actually happened.

The new wealth of the burghers of the royal boroughs and vassal towns, together with excellent Church-administered schools (including a university), produced a new stratum of educated laymen.4 Compared to the rural population, these people, who already had at their disposal translations of the Gospel in their national languages, had unrealistically high expectations of the quality of life of the clergy and of the services they were to provide. Fuel was added to the flames by the crowds of unemployed clergy, the so-called ‘clerical proletariat’, who, inspired by the Gospel, were nevertheless able to formulate a radical critique 4 See Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420, Minneapolis, 1998.

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of the status quo. With its successful Christianization in the previous decades and even centuries, the Church had thus educated men who provoked a crisis called Hussitism, which historians sometimes call the ‘reformation before the reformation’. Now, for the first time, a large part of one nation and of the territory of one country (the rest of the Czech nation and the land remained true to the Church) defined itself in resistance to the Church and the papacy, resistance that lasted for more than two centuries.

Hussitism5 may have been the result of overly successful Christianization. First of all, Hussitism could never have happened had the Church in Bohemia not created a network of schools, had its preaching, catechism, and religious, intellectual, and spiritual development in general not been so successful that the requirements of the Gospel became the norm, and the Church institutions and their servants had not been able to meet that norm. Thanks to the bequests and gifts made by the pious, the Church institutions became too numerous and, moreover, owned one third of all the land of Bohemia and Moravia. This easily provoked the envy of the nobility, who saw radical Hussitism as a conceptual instrument to be used to seize Church property and thus control the overly self-confident and powerful Church, as it had done in previous centuries, before the struggle for Church emancipation.6 They could not have suspected that they would thus unleash a bloody civil war that would last for fifteen years and cause extreme material and spiritual harm to the country.

The second reason that Hussitism can be called overly successful Christianization is the intertwining of Christianity, Church reform, and the life of one nation. In the Middle Ages, whenever reform was being called for – and it was being called for practically all the time –, it meant reform of society, the Church, and the State all at once. In the history of ideas in Europe, Hussitism is one of the first instances when a messianic complex is applied to a whole nation. The ideologues of the Hussite revolution created the concept of a nation that best understood the Gospel and was therefore called upon by God to lead other nations and the universal Church. The salvation of the whole universal Church depended on the faith of that nation and its pushing for reform (God’s truth). One consequence was their being ruthless in battle, unyielding in negotiation, and unwilling to compromise before fifteen years of devastating war had passed.

Was this overly successful Christianization? Perhaps it would be more useful to talk about a badly managed Christianization, which took an unwanted turn

5 For Hussitism, see Petr Čornej, Světla a stíny husitství: Události – osobnosti – texty – tradice, Prague, 2011; František Šmahel, Husitská revoluce, 4 vols, Prague, 1993; idem, La révolution hussite, une anomalie historique, Paris, 2004; Ferdinand Seibt, Hussitenstudien: Personen, Ereignisse, Ideen einer frühen Revolution, Munch, 1991; idem, Hussitica: Zur Struktur einer Revolution, Cologne and Vienna, 1990.

6 The view that Hussitism was the first European revolution is advanced by Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, New Haven (Conn.), 2006, pp. 37–59.

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and became a militant, intolerant sect that was undeniably skilled at war, and had a certain rousing charisma based on devotion and selflessness, which is typical of such movements and comes at the price of a high degree of fanaticism and a short life. The subsequent decades in the history of the country of ‘two peoples’ (meaning not Czechs and Germans but Catholics and Calixtines) was overshadowed by a long-lasting conflict, in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, over who would gain supremacy in the country. Thanks to the elites, a unique phenomenon appeared after the religious reconciliation of Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora) in 1485: the agreement that both sides would abandon notions of a military or political-power solution to the religious divisions of the country. Consequently, the Bohemian Lands in the sixteenth century enjoyed religious peace and a high degree of toleration amongst the confessions, while elsewhere in Europe wars of religion were raging.

The Counter-Reformation in Bohemia as re-Christianization and re-inculturation

After the first wave of Hussite chiliasm and religious fanaticism had exhausted itself, the overall level of the Christianization of the Bohemian Lands declined profoundly. The Hussite Church, stripped of its property, prestige, autonomy, and strong leadership, was no longer attractive for talented young men, who preferred other forms of employment to being Hussite preachers. The network of parishes was in decay, and the university, limited to a single faculty, declined to a parochial level. The arrival of reform currents from areas of the Lutheran and later Calvinist reformation meant a recovery, but mostly amongst the elites of the bourgeoisie and nobility. Large areas of the countryside found themselves with only the most rudimentary knowledge of Christianity: though the population was baptized, superstitious practices, magic, and strange elements of religiousness returned in full force amongst them.

When the Bohemian Lands were re-integrated into the central European State system under Habsburg rule, systematic efforts began in the mid-sixteenth century to renew the Catholic Church in Bohemia7 and gradually to make the population Catholic again.8 The initial circumstances were hardly the best: only about fifteen per cent of the population of Bohemia and a third of the population of Moravia was Catholic, but restored Tridentine Catholicism was attracting the elites of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, and Jesuit schools were helping to convert the leading

7 For Counter-Reformation trends in Europe, see Guy Bedouelle, La Reforme du Catholicisme, Paris, 2002, and D. J. Weiss, Katholische Reform und Gegenreformation, Darmstadt, 2005.

8 On this point, see Alessandro Catalano, Zápas o svědomí: Kardinál Arnošt Vojtěch z Harrachu a protireformace v Čechách, Prague, 2008, and R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, Oxford, 1979.

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sons of the Bohemian aristocracy. Bohemian Catholicism was thus gradually gaining a firmer footing. Although until 1618 the Bohemian Lands in fact enjoyed an unusual measure of religious freedom and toleration for the basic confessions of the period (but not for the various marginal groups such as Anabaptists), the contemporaneous mentality of confessional intolerance ultimately meant that even the Bohemian elites accepted the idea that the coexistence of Protestants and Catholics was unnatural and harmful, and they tried to eradicate Catholicism and its principal guarantor, the Habsburg dynasty, in the Uprising of the Bohemian Estates in 1618, thus starting the Thirty Years War.

The recklessly begun and inconsistently fought conflict turned against the Bohemian Estates, and paradoxically led to the end of Protestantism in the Bohemian Lands.9 Roman Catholicism became the new State religion of the Bohemian Kingdom, and the whole population was required, as it were, ‘to adopt the faith of the monarch’, in other words to adopt Roman Catholicism. The comparatively few people who were personally free – the nobility and the urban population – were permitted to sell their properties and leave the country; the masses, unfree, were not faced with such a choice. By various paths, after the difficulties of the occupation of Bohemia by Swedish forces, and after the fall of the Bohemian nobleman Waldstein (Wallenstein/Valdštejn) in 1634, and thanks to the heroic deployment of many missionaries, the country, by 1650, was, at least nominally, Catholic again.

Even though it was carried out by force from above, the Counter-Reformation would not have been successful had it not also been an example of successful deep inculturation and Christianization. The Counter-Reformation also meant thorough re-Christianization, more than simply being coerced by the powers-that-be. It was a complex process, which had begun long before 1620. The Catholic historians living in the Renaissance and Baroque periods were able to create a conception of Bohemian history which was interesting and credible for the Bohemian elites. They endeavoured to demonstrate that the heyday of Bohemian history had been during the reign of Charles IV, when the Bohemian Lands were not divided by religion, but were, instead, fully integrated into Catholic Europe. They devoted themselves intensely to the development of literature written in Czech. They skilfully made use of the cult of the especially attractive Bohemian saints, which, though few in number, are firmly rooted in the history of the Czech nation and land. The beatification of St John Nepomucene (b. between 1340 and 1350, d. 1393) in 1723, and his canonization in 1729 were followed by triumphal mass celebrations, demonstrating the successful reintegration of the Czech nation into the community of Catholic nations and the inculturation of Catholicism into the Czech national culture and mentality.9 For more on this, see Olivier Chaline, La Bataille de la Montagne Blanche, Paris, 1999.

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In the countryside, thanks to the work of Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries as well as the systematic care of the emerging clergy of the newly established dioceses, a large proportion of the population, whose knowledge of religion was scanty, was catechized and converted to Catholicism. After the missionaries had overcome the anti-Catholic attitudes of the peasants, who had often known only that they were not ‘Roman or Papist’, it was easy for a missionary to find his way to the heart of the rural population, who appreciated the interest, care, and presence of the priest in their parish. It was then easy to present the previous two centuries as an error that had now finally been corrected. The missionaries skilfully took over the treasure-trove of Czech hymns. The return of the solemn church service, organ, statues, and paintings to churches was also more attractive for the simple, illiterate population.10 Only some of the peripheral regions continued to put up resistance.

In the eighteenth century, foreign observers considered the population of the Bohemian Lands to be amongst the most Catholic nations of Europe. The number of priests, monasteries, and, for example, Jesuit missionaries on overseas missions was amongst the highest in Europe. Its thorough, though sometimes difficult, inculturation into the national culture meant that Catholicism became a more attractive confession than Protestantism, even though this competition for the souls of the nation was facilitated by the fact that the rival had been pushed out of the game by the powers of State and its natural development was thus thwarted. Catholicism was helped here by the cultural allure of Italy and France, which were admired by the contemporary Bohemian elites, who longed to be part of the same community. One need not look too hard at the Bohemian countryside and towns to see how profoundly the whole country was influenced by Baroque Catholicism.

Does secularization have historical roots?

In conclusion, I would point to one instance of failed inculturation, which led to the fact that, unlike other European countries with a similar historical development and in comparison with the central European neighbours of the Czechs, the Bohemian Lands, according to all research and empirical observations, are the most atheist country in the world. In the Bohemian Lands, most of the reasons for the population turning away from the great traditional Churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are the same as those in the rest of Europe, and need not be enumerated here. Nevertheless, many of the motives for this turning away

10 For a recent account, see Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation, New York, 2009.

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from the Church and religion are connected to the inability of the Churches to react adequately to new impetuses and radical change in Europe at that time.

Why have the Czechs taken such a reserved and critical stance towards religion and its organized forms, which, for the Czechs, are embodied in the Catholic faith and the Church? By the mid-nineteenth century, the situation in the Bohemian Lands was no different from that in the traditional union of the nation, society, and the Church such as amongst the Poles and Slovaks. What happened? I shall attempt to answer this question in the following chapters. At the moment, however, I would point out only that we have no evidence of the causes in the years of Hussitism or the Counter-Reformation. If there was a serious breakdown in relations between the Czech population and the Church, the damages were smoothed over in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, creating a synthesis of Czech and Catholic identity, expressed not only in the fruits of high culture but also in testimony such as the memoirs of František Jan Vavák (1741–1816), a magistrate from the village of Milčice, near Nymburk, central Bohemia. Indisputable evidence of this is the fact that in the period when the Emperor Joseph II announced the Edict of Toleration (1782) less than two per cent of the population seized the opportunity to convert to a non-Catholic confession, and only in some regions. The causes of modern Czech secularism must therefore be sought some place other than in the dramatic past of Czech Christianity.

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2. TRENDS IN THE RELATIONS

BETWEEN STATE, SOCIETY, AND THE CHURCH IN THE BOHEMIAN LANDS

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Czech society is generally considered the most atheistic in Europe and probably the world. This has been documented by international research. This view has been doubted in a variety of ways, for example, by explaining it as a specifically Czech timid or lay piety or Czech ‘somethingism’, or by arguing that the criteria of religiousness or of determining the number of faithful are unreliable.11 Though all of that must be taken into consideration, what cannot be denied in considering these excuses or corrections is the mass turning away from traditional Christian Churches, which in the Czech case is probably the most striking in Europe, including the Churches and their spokesmen which were squeezed out of the main social discourse, even if it sometimes appears otherwise from the outside.12 The strength of religious feeling and expressions of religious behaviour have shifted elsewhere. One example is the enthusiasm throughout the country for the Ice Hockey World Championships with its religious elements; another example is the cult of wellbeing, which can reasonably be seen as a lay substitute for religious efforts to achieve peace of mind and clarity.

It is generally assumed that the experience of the modern Catholic diaspora amongst the Czechs is somehow truly unique because it is a multiple or double diaspora. Catholics have a sense of alienation in the modern age, which they share with all Catholics in Europe. The decrease in the number of the faithful, the decline in the Church’s influence on society, the erosion of originally Christian norms in modern society often evokes a sense of alienation and nostalgia, at least in the area of faith and belonging to a Church. Most of society continues to be alienated from religious faith, which itself becomes an alternative, whereas the dominant, innovative, norm-setting current of society is heading elsewhere. In modern society, Christianity is only one of the alternative minority currents,

11 Ivan O. Štampach, Tušili světelné záplavy, Prague, 2001; see also some of the many works by Tomáš Halík, for example, Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us, New York and London, 2009; Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, New York and London, 2012.

12 One need only recall the public interest in the question of who would be the next Archbishop of Prague in 2008–10 and the interest of the mass media in Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the Czech Republic in 2009.

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and one that is, moreover, sometimes burdened with a problematic tradition and prejudices.

In addition, Czech Catholics are foreigners in their own nation, in the national tradition. The formative and normative current of the national tradition runs separately from Catholicism, and to some extent even clearly defines itself against Catholicism. Here, too, one would find parallels elsewhere, particularly in France, but the Czech experience is in several respects unique, which I shall try to explain in what follows. It is therefore reasonable to propose, as an initial thesis, the idea that the Catholic diaspora is more intense amongst the Czechs than other Catholic nations and communities in Europe and the standing of the Church amongst Czechs has been chronically weakened.

Such a standing, however, has advantages as well. Czech Catholicism can openly admit its intensified diaspora. Few people today still pretend that a traditional church of the masses (a Volkskirche) exists as it used to in the nineteenth century, though it sometimes still remains an unadmitted ideal. The Church has lost its authority and influence; it is therefore no rival to the State or modern society. Consequently, not even radically laicist currents feel a need to deal it the coup de grâce, limit it, supervise it, or control it. The Church is magnanimously or, rather, disdainfully tolerated; nevertheless, the mass media react irritably when the Church attempts to enter the social discourse. The Church is so weak that it is unable to defend itself effectively against attack.13 All Europe is threatened by the danger that Muslim immigration and fear of Muslims will intensify attempts to limit religious expression, which will adversely affect Christian Churches as well, for example, by banning the ringing of bells and the wearing of Christian symbols, or by being forced to bless same-sex marriages.

The Church of the Czechs in the second half of the nineteenth century

Even after the death of the Emperor Joseph II, in 1790, the main elements of Enlightenment Church policy were preserved. The Church continued to be under the strict supervision of the Austrian State, which appointed bishops throughout the Monarchy and influenced papal elections. In the revolutionary years of 1848–49, the Austrian hierarchy at first took a wait-and-see position towards possible

13 That was convincingly demonstrated by the billboards commissioned by the Czech Social Democratic Party as part of their election campaign in summer 2012. Although the billboards used Nazi-style and Communist-style propaganda against the Churches, and even against the Jews, and clearly incited hatred of the Churches, which they presented as greedy and selfish communities linked with an unpopular government, the Churches, despite using a variety of means, failed to have the billboards taken down.

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changes in State policy, and tried to suppress moods for reform in the clergy.14 Representatives of the Church sought not a separation of Church and State but greater autonomy and influence in the Austrian State. The Church would, as before, fulfil religious, cultural, and educational functions in exchange for total control over these spheres of life. An assembly of Austrian bishops, from 29 April to 20 June 1849, prepared seven documents that put in order the relations between Church and State.15 At the conclusion of the talks, the bishops issued a pastoral letter in which they condemned atheism, democracy, republicanism, and all pernicious modern ideas.

The complicated negotiations, including important concessions by the State in April 1850,16 led to the signing of a concordat in 1855.17 The 36 articles of this agreement between several States buttressed the autonomy of the Church in internal matters, and its influence was strengthened in matters of education and marriage. The concordat was welcomed, for example, by the bishops of the Bohemian Lands with enthusiastic words like ‘liberation’ and the ‘beginning of a new era of harmonic relations between the Church and the State’. In fact, the concordat, from the start, concealed within itself the germ of future conflicts, and was on the whole accepted only tentatively. Liberals considered it an inappropriate and unacceptable concession by the State to the Church; the monopoly of the Church in questions of upbringing, education, and marriage law was, on the other hand, unacceptable to proponents of a strong State. The concordat thus strengthened anticlerical moods in part of society. Many bishops, by contrast, believed that the interpretation of several articles remained unclear.18 Lastly, the liberal-minded priests and laymen did not want the Church to allow itself to be bound unnecessarily by the State.

The powers that the Church actively exacted (obligatory participation in the Mass for officers and rank and file, for teachers and children, and general supervision over their morality and way of life) often led to mere formalism and inward alienation. An unhealthy devotion to the State and the Habsburg

14 Otto Urban, Česká společnost 1848–1918, Prague, 1983, pp. 113–15.15 The permanent committee of five bishops, which existed until March 1865, was meant to lead further talks with

the State authorities.16 The State gave up monitoring the contacts between Rome and the bishops, as well as interfering in the rules of

how the services of the Church are to be recited, and also returned the bishops their authority over the lower clergy. On the development of the relations between Church and State, see Jiří Georgiev, ‘Mezi svéprávností a poručnictvím: K postavení církví v habsburské monarchii druhé poloviny 19. století’, in Zdeněk Hojda and Roman Prahl (eds), Bůh a bohové: Církev, náboženství a spiritualita v českém 19. Století, Prague, 2003, pp. 169–85.

17 Efforts to conclude these international agreements, which were intended to guarantee the partner States’ relations with the Roman Catholic Church, were made throughout the nineteenth century. The Church sought to achieve these agreements often at the price of bitter compromises, though the agreements were from the start only laxly adhered to by the individual States of Bavaria and Napoleonic France.

18 The subsequent negotiations amongst the Austrian bishops, from April to June 1856, served to strengthen the Church over the Catholic societies and the amendment of Emperor Joseph II’s Marriage Patent (8 October 1856).

22

dynasty was the price that the Church representatives had to pay for their privileged position. Although Austria did not experience an open Kulturkampf of the Prussian or even French kind, there was an internal, civil, concealed, and State-led struggle to limit Church influence. The first expression of this was the Edict on Protestantism (Protestantpatent) of 8 April 1861, which, after Joseph II had granted equal civil rights, brought religious equality, and thus further symbolic erosion of the hegemony of the Catholic Church. In May 1868, another liberal government passed the so-called May Laws, de facto strongly limiting the concordat and reserving mostly to the State the right to regulate matrimonial matters and interconfessional relations. In principle, all Austrian governments endeavoured to subordinate the Church and turn it into their instrument; liberal governments then sought to limit its overall influence on society.

A year later, a law on compulsory education renewed State control over the school system,19 and after the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility, in 1870, the Austrian State completely left the concordat. The second set of May Laws, passed in 1874, brought increased State supervision from the Ministry of Culture and local State authorities. The State regulated confessional matters and oversaw Church property. Despite the resistance of some bishops, the Austrian Church hierarchy as a whole reconciled themselves to these laws. By contrast, the new government, under Prime Minister Eduard Taaffe (1879–1893) was for the most part favourably disposed to the Church. Its 1883 amendment to the law on schools required that school teachers be Church members and demonstrate their moral integrity. The contradiction between the external appearance of the Church and the reality of a developing society grew, and in response the Church representatives clung increasingly to the State. When Pius X (1835–1914) became pope, in 1903, cooperation improved between the Vatican and the Austrian State, whose ruling elites shared the same view of how the relations between Church and State and Europe and society should be. Austria became essentially the only and therefore the first Catholic great power.

The Vatican continued to strengthen its influence over the individual local Churches. The dogmas about papal pre-eminence (the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome) and papal infallibility were expressions of this; another expression was the pressure on the religious orders and congregations to have their central bodies in Rome. The Eternal City was meant to be the model in the liturgy, architecture, and the education of the clergy. Another part of this framework was the establishment of papal colleges in Rome for the training of priests. These seminaries (for example, the Collegium Bohemicum, which was founded by Leo XIII in 1883) were supposed to turn out the future elite priests of the local Churches, who would be absolutely devoted to Rome. Most of the Bohemian/19 Georgiev, ‘Mezi svéprávností a poručnictvím’, pp. 179–81.

23

Czech clergy, who were trained in seminaries in the individual dioceses, were also educated in the spirit of the growing Ultramontanism. Since, for the most part, enough young men applied to become members of the clergy in the second half of the nineteenth century,20 external formal criteria, such as good marks in school, were usually what determined whether they would be accepted. The others found employment in other dioceses or in religious orders. Instruction in the seminaries was in Latin, using the theology manuals of the scholastics. The seminaries were important local centres of cultural and educational activity. More demanding academic training was provided by the faculties of theology at Prague and Olomouc.21 Leading scholars did not appear until the end of this period.

The roots of the dynamic mass secularization of Czech society: An analysis

Why did Catholicism in the Bohemian Lands so quickly – in the course of a century, roughly from 1850 to 1950 – find itself in such a disadvantageous position? There are several historical reasons, and a confluence of various currents contributed to this, most of which the local Church did not have under its control, and it failed to react adequately and promptly to a number of them. As elsewhere in Europe, a sizeable part of the educated elite in the Bohemian Lands left the Church as early as the nineteenth century. The Church was unable to provide them with satisfactory answers to the discoveries being made in the natural and social sciences, which cast doubt both on traditional Church interpretations of the Bible and on historical traditions of the Church. Although long into the twentieth century baptism continued to be a matter of course, the decline in the number of the faithful was continuous and striking, just as the decline in Church influence on what was happening in society. Here, Czech developments generally ran in parallel with those elsewhere in Europe, and perhaps even a bit quicker because of the rivalries between the clergy and teachers, the latter of whom had fostered anticlerical and antireligious attitudes. In what respects, then, was the Czech situation special?

The first important question concerns the rhythm of the development of society. There was a certain phase shift in the dynamic of Czech social development compared to the central regions of European civilization. Nevertheless, compared to other areas, the Bohemian Lands have generally been among the more progressive semi-peripheral countries. To put it more precisely: in the nineteenth

20 This is true of most of the period and most of the dioceses; only lands with German-speaking populations suffered because divinity students were leaving for better-paid jobs in pastoral care in Austria. Their places were taken by Czech clergy, most of whom spoke both Czech and German.

21 The last to divide on linguistic lines (German and Czech) was the Faculty of Theology at Prague, in 1891.

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century two processes were underway which radically changed the appearance of society, the State, and mentality in Europe. Both the process of industrialization and the process of urbanization connected with it took place in the Bohemian Lands relatively early and vigorously. As part of these processes the new social stratum of the factory workers defected from the Church en masse. The processes also led to the emergence of new suburbs and even whole new towns without churches and parishes, in which one or two generations of people grew up without any Church influence.22 That wave arrived later in other Catholic countries (for example, Slovakia, Poland, Ireland, and Spain), at a time when the Church elite already knew what to do and were able to react more quickly. In this respect, the Catholic Church in the Bohemian Lands had to pay the price for a social development which was more dynamic than that taking place in the rest of central Europe or in the Churches on the European periphery. Under further unfavourable influences, this disadvantage increased.

Among those influences was the fact that unlike other local Churches the Catholic Church in the Bohemian Lands was part of the establishment. To be sure, until 1848, Catholic priests were the main proponents of the National Revival and the movement for national emancipation, but the general perception of the Church as such was that it was part of the ruling institutions of the Austrian Monarchy. Though by the second half of the nineteenth century Catholicism was already a minority current and a clandestine civil Kulturkampf led by the governing elite was underway (squeezing the Church out of the school system and other sectors it had previously administered), the Church formally and symbolically was still part of the governing hierarchy, a pillar of Habsburg rule.23 Consequently, Catholics could not use the advantages of a closed and clearly declared minority that formed its own counterculture, unlike in Germany and France, where Catholics defined themselves against the State and its elite. In the Bohemian Lands, it was if the Catholics were sitting on the fence; their position was fundamentally ambiguous.

What symbolically caused great damage to the position of the Catholic Church in Czech society was the division of the national historical tradition (as I shall soon consider below). To be sure, one may object that the French, for example, have experienced the same thing. But French Catholics created their own strong alternative historical story. Their situation was undoubtedly made more complicated in the long term; their development was blocked by their excessively clinging to the monarchical principle – that is, their identifying the cause of Catholicism with the restoration of the Monarchy – by an overall rejection of the modern and the republic. At the same time, however, it was made easier

22 Pavel Marek, ‘Katolíci a problém sekularizace dělnického prostředí’, Církevní dějiny 5, 2010, pp. 26–38.23 This follows on from the well-known description of the three pillars of the Habsburg Monarchy: the standing, the

sitting, and the kneeling, that is, the armed forces, the civil service, and the Church.

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by a general, nationwide acceptance of the tradition of the great kings and the tradition of the French saints, which united the nation, despite their differences. To that one must add, for example, the great potential of the Catholic intellectuals and the catalyst of reconciliation between the majority national current and Catholicism, that is, the First World War, which was symbolically expressed by the canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920. Furthermore, one must not forget the ethos of the Church martyrs of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, innocent victims of attempts to create a new society, whose only fault was their faith. This ethos strengthened the self-confidence and the identity of French Catholicism.

Catholicism and the construction of a national tradition

As we have seen, by the mid-nineteenth century the identification of the Czech national cause with Catholicism was just as harmonious and obvious as in local Churches in Slovenia, Ireland, Poland, and Slovakia. Most of the priests and laymen continued to see their work for the nation as an integral part of the experience of their Catholic faith and membership of the Catholic Church.24 Even in the revolution of 1848 one finds Catholic priests on the national committee that formulated Czech state-rights and national demands, and discussed changes in the Church, including the introduction of Czech into the liturgy, and thousands of people were attending Mass at the Horse Market (today’s Wenceslas Square), in Prague, on Whit Monday, 12 June 1848.25 How did the split occur between the sense of belonging to the Czech nation and belonging to the Catholic Church? When did it happen that Catholics remained on the margins of the nation as a tolerated, peripheral, but basically unwanted part? What changed in the mid-nineteenth century?26

The question is complicated. Some potential answers can probably be excluded. It cannot have been because of the alleged betrayal of national interests by the senior Church hierarchy. True, the bishops from the ranks of the German-speaking aristocracy were probably unable to attract the faithful and to arouse interest in the Church, and the Catholic Church at the official level generally did not support the national movement in the Austrian Monarchy. The Vatican continuously sought to keep Austria intact as the only Catholic great power still on the side of the Church.

24 See Jiří Štaif, Obezřetná elita: Česká společnost mezi tradicí a revolucí 1830–1851, Prague, 2005, pp. 83–93.25 For the revolution, see Arnošt Klíma, Češi a Němci v revoluci 1848–1849, Prague, 1994; Josef Kolejka, Národy

habsburské monarchie v revoluci 1848–1849, Prague, 1989; Nancy M. Wingfield (ed.), Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, New York and Oxford, 1993.

26 Rak sees the split between the Churches and the national movement also as taking place in this period. Jiří Rak, ‘Dělníci na vinici Páně nebo na roli národní?’, Hojda and Prahl (eds), Bůh a bohové, pp. 136–37.

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Except that, apart from the prelates who were alien to the nation, one also finds in this period many Church prelates who, by contrast, greatly supported the national cause. To name just a few of them: the Bishop of Budweis (České Budějovice), Jan Valerián Jirsík (1798–1883), who, by founding a gymnasium, helped to make Budweis Czech,27 the Bishop of Hradec Králové, Edvard Brynych (1846–1902), a Canon of Vyšehrad, Antonín Lenz (1829–1901),28 and the Suffragan Bishop of Prague, Antonín Podlaha (1865–1932).

Similarly, one can exclude the Counter-Reformation influence after the Battle of the White Mountain (1620). With the exception of some peripheral and border regions, the core of the population of the Bohemian Lands truly did identify with the Catholic faith and Church. While one should be cautious not to exaggerate the influence of historiography, it is fair to see in this matter the huge influence of František Palacký’s (1798–1876)29 conception of Czech history, which was formulated and published in German and then in Czech in the mid-nineteenth century. This essentially liberal Protestant interpretation reduces Czech history, or at least its high point, to the 200-year period from John Huss (c.1370–1415) to the Battle of the White Mountain.30 Despite his appreciative words about some aspects of it, the overall picture Palacký presents of Church involvement in history is highly negative. He portrays the Roman Catholic Church as a vehicle of undemocratic, unpatriotic principles, which, at key points in Czech history, stood against the nation and its best representatives, from Huss to Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský, 1592–1670), a leader of the pro-Reformation Moravian Brethren.31

In the writings of Palacký’s continuators and followers, these motifs are further accentuated, presenting membership of the nation and the Church as something like schizophrenia. The fully ‘Catholic’ phases of the history of the Czech nation are presented as periods of preparation for Hussitism (hence the term ‘pre-Hussite Bohemia’) or as subsequent decline in the period of the Baroque Counter-Reformation, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was stopped only by the National Revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

27 See Jaroslav Kadlec, Jan Valerián Jirsík, České Budějovice, 1993.28 Tomáš Veber, Teolog – polemik Antonín Lenz (1829–1901), České Budějovice, 2008.29 For more on Palacký the man, see Jiří Štaif, František Palacký: Život, dílo, mýtus, Prague, 2009, esp. pp. 74–102,

123–29, and 296–341.30 For a reinterpretation of the myth of the Battle of the White Mountain, see Josef Petráň, ‘Na téma mýtu Bílá

hora’, in Zdeňka Hledíková (ed.), Traditio et Cultus: Miscellanea historica bohemica Miloslao Vlk archiepiscopo Pragensi, Prague, 1993, pp. 141–62; R. J. W. Evans, ‘The Significance of the White Mountain for the Culture of the Czech Lands’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 44, 1971, pp. 34–35.

31 For the nature of Palacký’s understanding of the historical sciences, see Jiří Štaif, Historici, dějiny a společnost: Historiografie v českých zemích od Palackého a jeho předchůdců po Gollovu školu 1790–1900, vol. 1, Prague, 1997, which, on p. 146, states: ‘The scholar’s truth [on the question of the authenticity of the manuscripts] was fully subordinated to Palacký’s idea about the social function of Czech National Revival historiography, which was conceived as distinctively defensive wherever its foundations were attacked. In Palacký, these foundations comprised notions of an original Slav democracy and of Hussitism playing an active role when the modern age was asserting itself in European civilization.’

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centuries, which followed on from the traditions of the Reformation and the Hussites, that is, allegedly, the authentically Czech national tradition. There is no place in this conception for a positive perception of Catholicism, and in the works of Palacký’s followers, such as Jan Herben (1857–1936)32 and Alois Jirásek (1851–1930),33 the parting of the ways between authentic Czechness and Catholicism was dogmatized. And this remains deeply rooted right up to present day, because this interpretation was accentuated by schools in the First Republic (1918–38) and markedly intensified by the Communist educational system (1948–89). Eventually, the Communists presented themselves as the ‘heirs of the progressive traditions’ of the Czech nation.

It was a tragedy of Czech Catholicism that in a period when the reading and writing of history met with such a great response in society and provided the political struggles with arguments it failed to find a Catholic historian who could do for it what Palacký had done for the non-Catholic tradition of Czech history. One finds brilliant Catholic historians such as Wácslaw Wladiwoj Tomek (1818–1905), whose writings remain valuable to this day, but none of them was able to write the gripping story of Czech history with Palacký’s literary skill, while being truer to the sources than he was when providing an interpretation of Czech history which would be favourable to Catholicism or at least fairer, yet without being naively and uncritically loyal to Austria and the Habsburgs.34 Palacký was successful not because he was the first to write a history of the Czechs, but because he created a story that superbly suited the up-and-coming Czech national elite in their struggle for a greater share in the administration of the Bohemian Lands. Czech Catholic historians, unfortunately, developed only a Baroque conception of history, based on the cult of the Czech saints and on unconditional loyalty to the Austrian dynasty as an expression of thanks for their having saved the Catholic faith.

The orientation of linguistically Czech Catholicism and the interests of the Roman Curia intersected in the developing cult of Cyril and Methodius, which was given a great stimulus by the coming millennium anniversaries of their arrival in Moravia in 863 and the deaths of the two saints in 869 and 885. The cult, originally restricted to one region, quickly crystallized linguistically and nationally as a Slav and Czech cult. The Grande Munus encyclical of Leo XIII, published in 1880, spread the cult to the whole Church and made the saints an integrating element of the Catholic Slav nations of the Monarchy. In gratitude, these nations organized a large pilgrimage to Rome in the following year. Antonín Cyril Stojan (1851–1923), who had become the head of the movement in the

32 See Jan Herben, Jan Nepomucký: Spor dějin českých s církví římskou, Prague, 1893.33 The title of Alois Jirásek’s novel Temno (Darkness, 1915), which is concerned with the Counter-Reformation in

the early eighteenth century, became emblematic of this.34 See also Martin Nodl, Dějepisectví mezi vědou a politikou: Úvahy o historiografii 19. a 20. století, Brno, 2007, pp. 11–34.

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1870s, and led it to three Unionistic Congresses in Velehrad, Moravia, in 1907, 1909, 1911.35 But even the cult of SS Cyril and Methodius was unable to provide a counterweight to the influence of Palacký’s conception, and tended to remain a Moravian matter.

The two traditions of the Czech nation

The two rival traditions, the earlier Catholic and the quickly developing non-Catholic (‘authentically national and progressive Czech’) tradition that was derived from Palacký’s conception of Czech history, long existed side by side. The Huss celebrations in 1868 were, to be sure, dignified, but the translation of St John Nepomucene’s relics from Salzburg back home to Prague in 1866, was, for a change, a great demonstration of Catholicism. Grand celebrations were held in May 1879 to mark the 150th anniversary of John Nepomucene’s canonization. Celebrations had been held in 1873 to mark the 900th anniversary of the founding of the bishopric of Prague, which were, however, met with the Radical Progressive Party’s anticlerical criticism. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the feast day of St John Nepomucene drew thousands of pilgrims to the Prague metropolitan cathedral. In recognition of the importance of this day, great social events, such as the Universal Bohemian Exhibition of 1891 and the Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895, were henceforth always opened on 15 May, the eve of St John Nepomucene’s feast day.36 Czech Catholics did eventually find two historians in particular who were able to formulate a conception as brilliant in form and content as Palacký’s, but truer to the sources and fairer to Catholicism than he had been – namely, the lukewarm Catholics, or rather agnostics, Josef Pekař (1870–1937), and Ferdinand Peroutka (1895–1978), a journalist.

Pekař and Peroutka were the ones who began to remedy the failure of the Catholic intellectual elites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who had been unable to create a conception of national history which would have integrated Catholicism truthfully and organically. Most of the nation and society thus, paradoxically, continued, until 1918, to appear in Catholic parish registers, at least in the baptism column, and continued to have their children educated in Catholic religion at schools, while they, as adults, attended Huss celebrations and revered the work of the Unity of the Brethren (also called the Bohemian Brethren) and Comenius at political-cultural

35 For more on this great Archbishop of Olomouc, see Bohumil Zlámal, Antonín Cyril Stojan, Rome, 1973.36 See Stanislav Brouček, Jan Pargač, Ludmila Sochorová, and Irena Štěpánová, Mýtus českého národa: Aneb

Národopisná výstava českoslovanská 1895, Prague, 1996, pp. 54–56.

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meetings.37 Great cultures stand out also by being able to integrate several national traditions into a synthesis, but Czech society stands out by a certain Manichaeism, an either-or way of thinking, so that a large part of the population, despite formally belonging to the Catholic Church, inwardly parted with Catholicism. This was manifested during the ‘apostate movement’ of the early years of the Czechoslovak Republic,38 when hundreds of thousands of people formally defected from the Catholic Church because of the social activities of the new Czechoslovak Church, the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, and the atheist Freethought movement. From the standpoint of the general development of mankind and considering, in particular, the ‘meaning’ of Czech history, it seemed to this heterogeneous alliance that anything would be better than remaining Catholic.

Already by that time, the intellectual elite of the First Republic were exposing religious and intellectual shallowness, for example, that of the Czechoslovak Church, which aspired to the role of a new national church for the majority of Czechs.39 To the great disappointment of the Churches that had participated in the apostate movement, Freethought was the true victor. Even though, for example, 1,500,000 Czech Catholics gradually went over to the Czechoslovak Church,40 their religious life declined, mostly even by the first or second generation, and they joined the crowd of the non-practising, the agnostics, or the atheists. Similarly, the marked lack of interest the defecting to Protestant Churches again revealed the falseness of the claim that the Czech nation was latently Protestant in character.

The dogmatized interpretation of Czech history, generally disseminated by the school system, literature, and the fine arts, moved along the Huss-Comenius-Palacký axis. It was also expressed by the introduction in 1925, of a national holiday commemorating the burning of Huss at the stake in Constance in 1415.41 The promising starts to reconciliation of the national tradition at the millennium anniversary, in 1929, of the presumed date of the death of St Wenceslas (c.907–929 or 935),42 while the country and nation were under threat from Germany before the Munich Agreement (1938) and then during the Nazi terror in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939–45) – which cost the lives also of many Czech

37 For the new ‘mythology’ of the Czech nation, see Jiří Rak, Bývali Čechové: České historické mýty a stereotypy, Prague, 1994, and Zdeněk Hojda and Jiří Pokorný, Pomníky a zapomníky, Prague and Litomyšl, 1996, esp. pp. 21–126 and 150–63.

38 The strongly anti-Catholic mood at the beginning of the first Czechoslovak Republic is described in F. X. Halas, Fenomén Vatikán: Idea, dějiny a současnost papežství, diplomacie Svatého stolce, České země a Vatikán, Brno, 2004, pp. 527–49.

39 See Chapter 5, ‘Critical Reflections on Changes in Religion in the Bohemian Lands from the Beginning of the Czechoslovak Republic onward’.

40 See Pavel Marek, České schisma: Příspěvek k dějinám reformního hnutí katolického duchovenstva v letech 1917–1924, Olomouc, 2000, pp. 7–91.

41 See Halas, Fenomén Vatikán, pp. 549–54.42 See Petr Placák, Svatováclavské milenium: Češi, Němci a Slováci v roce 1929, Prague, 2002.

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Catholics, including clergy –, were brutally cut short by the establishment of the Communist regime. This second totalitarian regime also ruthlessly persecuted Catholics and other believers, while developing a special Communist-Radical-Progressive conception of Czech history. Among the contributions to this conception are the depiction of the Church in Otakar Vávra’s Hussite film trilogy in the 1950s, and the portrayal of the priest in Zdeněk Troška’s ‘comic’ film trilogy in the 1980s. The Catholic Church, and religion in general, was, according to them, an unpatriotic element, which, in the Vávra films, had to be rejected, expelled from the body of the nation, or, in the Troška films, is depicted as an odd survival of the old days, which no one takes seriously, a kind of humorous accessory to the local colour of the countryside.

Attempts to develop a new conception of Czech history

Not until the beginning of the First Republic were Czech Catholic impulses of self-preservation awakened by pressure from outside and also when faced with a Kulturkampf inside the country. One needs to recall only the symbolically rich moments of the early months of the Czechoslovak Republic, such as the tearing down of the Marian column on the Old Town Square, Prague, on 3 November 1918, or the popular slogan ‘After Vienna, Rome should be tried and sentenced!’. At the time, it was generally necessary to re-think Czech history and grasp it creatively, as the Catholic Baroque historians had done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the cult of national saints and an emphasis on the reign of Charles IV as the great efflorescence of the Czech nation, which originated in religious unity and the union between monarch and Church.43 Those ideas, however, were insufficient for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it was necessary to think about things differently.

The first attempts to rectify the situation were in the 1920s and continued into the 1940s. The historian Pekař,44 the well-read journalist Peroutka,45 and the primarily literary historians Zdeněk Kalista (1900–1982)46 and Josef Vašica (1884–1968)47 discovered and demonstrated the profound union between Catholicism and the nation, and argued that the nation could not understand itself as long as

43 See František Kutnar, Obrozenské vlastenectví a nacionalismus: Příspěvek k národnímu a společenskému obsahu češství doby obrozenecké, Prague, 2003, pp. 28–51.

44 The most important works on the topic are Josef Pekař, Bílá Hora, Prague, 1921, and idem, Tři kapitoly z boje o svatého Jana Nepomuckého, Prague, 1921. For Pekař the man, see Josef Hanzal, Josef Pekař: Život a dílo, Prague, 2002.

45 See Ferdinand Peroutka, Jací jsme, Prague, 1924. For Peroutka the man, see Pavel Kosatík, Ferdinand Peroutka: Pozdější život 1938–1978, Prague, 2000.

46 See Zdeněk Kalista, České baroko, Prague, 1941. For the whole movement, see Jaroslav Med, Literární život ve stínu Mnichova, Prague, 2010.

47 See Josef Vašica, České literární baroko, Prague, 1938.

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it continued to ignore or deny its Catholic identity. The main feature of these attempts is the rediscovery of Czech Baroque culture, its artistic qualities and its contribution to the development and maintenance of the Czech nation and language. Not as an apologist for the Church, but as a scholar who wrote history without sparing anyone, Pekař, the best Czech historian of his time, demolished the individual theses of Palacký’s and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s (1850–1937) conceptions of Czech history, and re-established, for example, the canonization of St John Nepomucene as the most important element of Czech national life in the eighteenth century and as confirmation of the reintegration of the Bohemian Lands into the Catholic world. Pekař believed that this is what had saved the Czech nation from being dispersed amongst German-speaking Protestants.

Pekař’s books and articles started the famous struggle over the meaning of Czech history, in which the Czech intellectual elite argued about the nature of the main line followed by Czech national history.48 Although within this debate an expressly Catholic standpoint, however unclear, was occasionally heard, the debate was mainly about correcting the greatest excesses and achieving a more comprehensive view of Czech history which would not a priori write off the ‘Catholic periods’ as being merely preliminary to what followed, decadent, or inferior. To this day, what an authentically Catholic conception of Czech history should and could be continues to be debated. The question has, however, lost much of its urgency since history has long ceased to be the driving force of events which it had been in nineteenth-century society, yet the picture of the past in textbooks, novels, and films has continued to play an important role in creating perceptions of the Church and tradition. Perhaps now is the time for an honest and truthful conception that would, without confessional or ideological bias, be able to assess the contributions that the individual traditions have made to the development the Czech nation. But the fact is that the absence of an obvious link between Czechness and Catholicism remains dominant.

48 The most important works by Pekař, Masaryk, and many others, are reprinted in Miloš Havelka (ed.), Spor o smysl českých dějin 1895–1938, Prague, 1997. See also Jaroslav Werstadt, Odkaz dějin a dějepisců, Prague, 1948.

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3. THE CHURCH

AND ITS CLERGY IN THE NATIONAL REVIVAL AND IN THE FORMATION

OF THE MODERN CZECH NATION

In this chapter I shall consider more deeply the ideas discussed in the previous chapter regarding the special Czech situation. I shall look at the role of the Catholic Church and its clergy in a process that has traditionally been called the National Revival. I will not, however, consider the role of the Protestant Churches, which were only just forming their first congregations in this period, having just been established thanks to the Patent of Toleration, and they remained relatively weak in number, limited to several regions of Bohemia and Moravia for most of the nineteenth century. Until the watershed years 1918 and 1920, more than 90 per cent of the Czech population remained registered Catholics. When talking about the Church, I shall therefore focus on the Catholic Church and its clergy.

Under the term National Revival (národní obrození) today the older generation in particular imagines the struggle for the very existence of the Czech language and national consciousness and the efforts to strengthen the special nature of Czech statehood. For a long time, the Revival included stories about the National Awakeners, who were born in humble Czech cottages and went from town to town and village to village, teaching the Germanized nation the Czech language.49 Modern historians, mainly after research on the nations of central Europe, consider this conception to be a historical, and history-making, myth. The Czech language, even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was not threatened with extinction: two thirds of the population of the Bohemian Lands spoke some dialect of Czech, and in this period a number of Czech textbooks and grammars were published. All the justified critical observations about the mythical conception of the National Revivalists should not prevent us, however, from seeing that something fundamental had nevertheless happened in the creation of Czech national identity in the Bohemian Lands and amongst the people from the middle of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Nationalism and an extreme modern national consciousness are to a great extent products of the French Revolution. This consciousness helped revolutionary and, later, imperial France to mobilize the forces of society, and it was from there, by 49 For some of the historical myths, see Rak, Bývali Čechové.

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way of the German lands, that it came to Bohemia. After the fall of the French monarchy, after the king and queen had been put to death, and after the attacks on the Church, nationalism had a state-forming and mobilizing aspect.50 France, la grande nation, was called upon by Fate to bring reason to the whole world and create a new Europe freed of tyranny and obscurantism. In central Europe, however, this conception of the nation-state tied together by the State, language, tradition, and history, caused tremendous problems.

It was impossible to create a linguistically and ethnically homogeneous State here.51 Soon, because of a lack of other possibilities, the nation came to be defined linguistically. That was a marked shift from the originally local patriotism of the Baroque period, which was tied to the cult of local, national saints and local places of pilgrimage, but also a shift from the concepts of a single nation-state. Such a State, perhaps regrettably, was not established in central Europe. The Romantic interest in historical and local traditions led to a renewed interest in the spoken language, oral literature, and folk traditions. The national movement had a great potential to mobilize and it also functioned as a substitute for religion.52 Similarly to the Church, the nation was now conceived as a mystical body to which all members of the linguistic family belonged, joining together all generations down through history. It was therefore eternal, giving man life, and able to demand sacrifice from the individual, including laying down one’s life for the nation.

Modern historians today tend to talk about the process of forming, even constructing, modern nations53 and their linguistic, economic, and social, educational, and even political emancipation. This process was underway in various European nations at various times. It always depended on many factors, which need to be taken into account. Among them is doubtless the numerical strength of the ethnos, the existence or nonexistence of an urban centre, the presence of influential, rich, ethnically conscious elites, a distinctive constitutional and historical tradition, and resistance from the majority ethnos or the State. The Czech emancipation efforts had in most respects a relatively good starting position. The main weakness was at first the absence of a Czech-speaking nobility and bourgeoisie. Both have their historical roots; the official State language was

50 For the origin of nationalism and its historic role, see the now classic works Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca NY, 1983, Miroslav Hroch, Evropská národní hnutí v 19. století. Společenské předpoklady vzniku novodobých národů, Prague, 1986 (published in English as Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations, Cambridge, 1985), idem, Na prahu národní existence. Touha a skutečnost, Prague, 1999, and Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, (1990) Cambridge, 1992.

51 France, Italy, and other states that were ethnically and linguistically far more homogeneous than the Austrian Monarchy in that era also had problems with this.

52 A concise overview of the other literature is provided by Miloš Řezník, Formování moderního národa (Evropské ‘dlouhé’ 19. století), Prague, 2003.

53 See the now classic Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1983.

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German, and German was also the language of communication in commerce, industry, and, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onward, at universities. For that reason, as in other European nations in similar circumstances, the first National Revivalists were the Catholic clergy.

In the circle of one of the men who defined the nation by language, Josef Jungmann (1773–1847), one finds many Catholic priests. Among them were Antonín Marek (1785–1887), a priest in Libuň near Jičín, who created Czech philosophical terminology, Antonín Jaroslav Puchmajer (1769–1820), and Josef Vlastimil Kamarýt (1797–1833), both of whom devoted themselves to translations of world literature into Czech and sang the praises of the Czech past. Practically every Czech town and larger village had some priest-awakener who deserves the credit for awakening Czech national consciousness in his community. Such men understood service to the nation as an integral part of their struggle for the spiritual, social, and material improvement of the Czech common people, and saw no contradiction between service to the Church and service to the nation. In fact, later, the nineteenth-century liberal journalist and politician, Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821–1856), upon reaching adulthood, entered a seminary because he considered the vocation of a Catholic priest the best life devoted to service to the nation.

Historical and organizational preconditions

It may seem surprising, but the basic precondition for the important awakener role of the clergy in the Czech National Revival was the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in two senses. In the negative sense, the reforms emphasized uniformity and the cutting of State expenditures, carried out by establishing a single official language. This in turn led to an interest in everything particular, local, and unique, including national language, folk culture, and traditions, even before the birth of modern nationalism. A lack of sensitivity towards the linguistic, historical, and constitutional differences of the Bohemian Lands helped to awaken interest in regional and national traditions and in renewed and persistent study of the history of the nation, to which mainly Catholic priests were devoting themselves at the time.

Even more important was the reform of parish administration, specifically the well-known measures to ensure pastoral care of the faithful where they lived and worked. Despite popular notions about the omnipotent Baroque Church and the image of the post-White Mountain bishops as rich and profligate magnates, on closer examination of the sources their circumstances look completely different. The Czech bishops of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to make do

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with chronically insufficient incomes, their dioceses had just barely enough to get by financially, and they repeatedly had problems with the authorities of the towns where they had their residences; for example, the palace of the bishop of Hradec Králové was not built until half a century after the founding of the bishopric.54

This material shortcoming had extremely serious consequences also for parish administration. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Church suffered from a shortage of occupied parish offices and the inability of the bishops to establish new posts for clergy, simply because they lacked the funds.55 The establishment of a parish was an act not only of the Church administration; it also required at least a minimum of funds to build the parish office (or the church), but also, indeed mainly, a fund from which the regular income of a priest could be drawn, not to mention other expenses such as compensation for the loss of incomes to those parishes whose villages and churches formed a newly staffed parish. But the means for that were lacking, and not even the nobility was particularly enthusiastic about paying them from their own pockets. Thus the network of parishes was completed only very gradually, until a timely, indeed providential, breakthrough.

Joseph II, who was largely rejected by Catholics and even detested by them, on the one hand closed a number of monasteries and convents, and did so with great insensitivity towards historical traditions (for example, the closing of the Benedictine Convent of St George at Prague Castle) and cultural values (including the devastation of the libraries of monasteries and convents). But the Emperor transferred part of the property that he had acquired to a fund for a Church foundation, which used the income from that property to create new parishes, applying the well-known principle that no parish church should be more than an hour’s walk from anyone. The reasons were again pragmatic, in the spirit of the Enlightenment – namely, to spare the labour of the Emperor’s subjects so that they were not exhausted by a long walk to church on Sunday, the day of rest, and could return to work properly on Monday. Even more important than that, the State in the Enlightenment understood the Catholic clergy as a firm and reliable part of the State administration and needed the priests, as State representatives (the terms ‘spiritual management’ and ‘parish office’ faithfully reflect this conception), firmly rooted in one place.

These measures had at least two positive effects. Thanks to systematic catechization, pastoral care, and the continuous presence of priests amongst rural

54 Concerning the disputes of the bishops of Hradec Králové with the city over the use of their own cathedral, see Tomáš Petráček, ‘Hradečtí biskupové a jejich katedrála Sv. Ducha v relacích ad limina v letech 1675–1923’, in Jiří Štěpán (ed.), Chrám svatého Ducha a královna Eliška Rejčka v Hradci Králové 1308–2008, Ústí nad Orlicí, 2009, pp. 41–52.

55 See Eduard Maur, ‘Problémy farní organizace pobělohorských Čech’, in Hledíková (ed.), Traditio et Cultus, pp. 163–74.

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folk, a rural Catholic Bohemia permeated with profound inward piety was born at this time. Though the priests also served as State officials and representatives of State and Church power, they informed the common people about decrees and laws, while providing spiritual and material assistance and consolation; in many respects they shared the lives of their communities, sometimes accompanying several generations of the population. They were well acquainted with the local circumstances and social standing of both rural and urban people. The reforms of Joseph II prepared the Church for the demographic revolution of the nineteenth century, during which the population of the Bohemian Lands gradually doubled. Consequently, the parish offices were now distributed much more densely and were increasing in number. Czech peasants were brought up thoroughly in the Christian spirit. This was in marked contrast to the new urban centres, for example, Žižkov and Smíchov (at the time, two suburbs of Prague), where the Church reacted slowly and established new parishes only thirty years after those in the countryside. This meant that a whole generation grew up there without direct Church influence.

The Catholic clergy was well equipped for its role as a renewer of the Czech language and national traditions. Although a universal church, in which the language of the liturgy and, for a long time, also official business was Latin, the Catholic Church continuously cultivated and taught Czech. For pastoral reasons, the priests, naturally and necessarily, had to know Czech well, because at least two thirds of the population of the Bohemian Lands never spoke any language other than some dialect of Czech. Consequently, the priests had to speak fluent Czech for, among other things, their sermons, catechism, celebrations, daily encounters, and confession. By its very nature, therefore, the Church could not be an instrument of Germanization.

Another special feature merits our attention. Though on the whole linguistically and ethnically mixed, the population of most of the dioceses of Bohemia and Moravia were predominantly Czech. Statistics show the strengthening of the Czech element, which was, it seems, demographically more successful. Whereas at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, one quarter of the population of the Hradec Králové diocese was German-speaking, by the end of the century only one fifth was. That meant that to serve in German-speaking and Czech-speaking parishes every divinity student had to develop fluency in both German and Czech while in the seminary. In reality, however, priests whose mother tongue was Czech often ended up working in German-speaking parishes, where they frequently defended and supported the local Czech minority and propagators of Revivalist ideals. The reasons were that German-speaking candidates for the priesthood tended to leave for financially more secure jobs in parishes in the

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Austrian lands and that it was easier for Czech divinity students to learn German than it was for Germans to learn Czech.

The Czech Catholic clergy and the National Revival

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic awakener-clerics constituted the majority of all Revivalists. It was mainly they who were the subscribers to, and authors of, the Revivalist periodicals and other publications. It was mainly they who translated the great works of Western literature into Czech and collected oral literature and disseminated it. Although a social group of teachers had existed since the time of the educational reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, they lacked the social prestige and economic weight of the priests, who were absolutely indispensible at this stage of the National Revival. Thanks to their vows of celibacy, they did not have to support families and could devote all their energies and material means to the service of God and the nation. Unlike teachers, they had some prestige and enjoyed considerable respect in local communities.

The priests had a higher standing for a variety of reasons. Mainly, they occupied important posts as State and Church officials. The parish office was an inseparable part of everyday life, literally from the cradle, that is, from baptism, whereby an individual was accepted into the local society, to the grave, that is, a Church burial, whereby the community parted with him or her. Compared to the local population, the priests excelled also in education, and in that respect surpassed teachers, merchants, even bureaucrats. Like physicians, they were often the only people in the community with post-secondary education. Thanks to their standing they could also develop the charisma of leaders, which they were brought up to be and could succeed at especially if a priest’s character was well suited to the role and particularly if he could work in one place for a long time, which in this period was usual. Much also depended on the priest’s energy and selfless work for his parishioners.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the priesthood also served as a means of upward mobility. Most of the Czech priests came from small towns or the countryside, and were able to receive higher education thanks only to the support of a local parish priest or the local nobility. Though these priests were upwardly mobile, they were connected with the common folk by origin and family roots, and most of them spent their lives helping their families and new candidates for the priesthood. In this period, priests often performed the role of protectors in society or of helpers of the poor or of people otherwise in need of assistance. Because they themselves had been able to study only with the help of others,

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they felt a sense of gratitude and also a commitment to help and thereby pay their debt to the Church and the nation.

The Church was one of the few institutions that offered education and a career to boys from poor families, even if candidates’ did not always share the religious conviction that the priesthood was their vocation. Some of them were mainly looking to move up in society and to be materially comfortable. The salaries and especially the overall incomes of the priests were markedly different from region to region, from parish to parish; much depended also on the post that a particular priest held. Nevertheless, their work provided them with decent means, though sometimes quite modest, enabling them to participate actively in the Revivalist efforts, for which they were, of course, not paid. The parish office thus often served as a focal point of social life; it was always a canonical house, but at this time it had many inhabitants: here, in addition to the priest, lived a curate or curates, catechists, a housekeeper, and various helpers. Patriotic meetings were also held at the parish house, and, particularly during holidays, the circle of Revivalist-clergymen and their friends liked to gather there.

Priests were involved in society far more than merely seeing to the pastoral care of their parishioners. The catechists, who taught religion in school, for example, often taught other subjects as well, and not just in Church-run schools. Catholic priests brought up children in noble and bourgeois families and worked as chaplains at manor houses. Such posts provided them with greater opportunities to do patriotic work, and they could thus effectively influence the upbringing of new members of the elite. The manor houses of patriotic nobles also provided bases for the revival of Czech society, which could thus carry on its activities.56

For a rather long time, the Czech dioceses had enough clergy. Thanks to the reforms of Joseph II, the creation of new posts in the parish administration, the movement of monks to these vacancies, and the founding or renewal of seminaries in the individual dioceses in the early nineteenth century, the clergy grew in number – the diocese of Hradec Králové, for example, had almost a thousand clergymen. The dynamic changes during the nineteenth century made new demands on the priesthood, but the relatively sufficient number of priests, their being assured a decent livelihood, and their often extraordinary industry enabled them to take part in patriotic activities in all spheres of life. They were involved in studying and writing history, the preservation of historical monuments, archaeology, art history, fine art, and literature.

The priests often began to develop their patriotic interests in seminaries, which used to have, for pastoral reasons, decent libraries including many Czech books.

56 For a brief account of the close link between the priest Filip Čermák and the patriots’ patron Antonín Veith at Liběchov manor, see Jitka Lněničková, České země v době předbřeznové, Prague, 1999, pp. 148–49. For a detailed account, see Miroslav J. Šantin, ‘Historie farnosti Liběchov 1890–1935’, Diss., Charles University, Prague, 2009.

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The priests of the Czech dioceses had to learn a cultivated, developed language, to be able to pass on the truth of the Christian faith properly in their sermons and catechesis. The seminary libraries were therefore provided not only with theological textbooks in Latin and collections of sermons and State decrees in German, but also clerical and Church literature in Czech translation and belles-lettres written in Czech. The seminary library in Hradec Králové, for example, had a particularly interesting collection of books; it was also the first publicly accessible library in the town.57 The priests’ Czech was in general so good that even ‘ordinary’ priests and curates made excellent translations of difficult works of theology and belles-lettres.58

The other fundamental factor in the alienation of the Church from the Czech nation, in addition to the new conception of Czech history which made Catholicism into an alien body in the national tradition, lies in the Church’s uncritical adherence to the Austrian State and regime. In the second half of the nineteenth century, secularization and an internal rift with the faith as practised in the Catholic Church began, particularly in the towns. By the Concordat of 1855, the Church was firmly tied to the State, but by the 1870s the content of its agreements had ceased to correspond to the new circumstances.59 Paradoxically, at the time when the Austrian State was leading its covert Kulturkampf against the Church and was trying to limit the Church’s powers over the school system and the institution of marriage and to squeeze the Church out of the public space, the bishops of the Bohemian Lands and other members of the local Church elite were clinging even more to the Austrian State as their only earthly salvation. It was the duty of the State, hand in hand with the Church, to bring up its citizens as obedient and pious subjects of the Austrian Emperor and to see to it that bureaucrats and army officers performed their religious duties well.

A certain application of force by the State, the Church’s strained defence of its own power position, together with an inability to explain Catholic teaching convincingly, to win over the up-and-coming elite for the Church, and to argue other than from a position of authority, helped to form a determined anticlerical opposition. Moreover, in return for State help, the Church had to make many concessions and demonstrate its absolute devotion to Austrian rule in the Bohemian Lands. A great blow was dealt to relations between Catholics and the Czech national movement by the Pastoral Letter of 17 June 1849, in which the bishops expressed their negative views of the ideas of the modern age, including

57 For a brief account of the history of the seminary library, see Petr Adam, Biskupská knihovna biskupství královéhradeckého 1812–2002, Hradec Králové, 2002, pp. 75–88.

58 For example, Josef Hajislav Vindyš (Windyš) (1782–1857), a priest from Nechanice (near Hradec Králové) who translated the theologically demanding Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1566, from Latin to Czech.

59 For some of the negative consequences of the idea of the unity of altar and throne, see Urban, Česká společnost 1848–1918, pp. 113–19.

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democracy, republicanism, and modern nationalism, without differentiating between, on the one hand, an ideology that was destructive for central Europe, which modern nationalism truly was, and, on the other, the justified demands of the nations in the Monarchy. In the light of these statements, the Catholic Church, despite the former and current involvement of Catholic priests, appeared to be a supporter and ally of the Austrian State, and therefore an enemy of legitimate Czech interests.

Probably the first mass wave of anticlerical thinking in the Bohemian Lands appeared in the 1850s and became particularly evident in the 1860s. It was connected with the question of the return of the Jesuits, particularly to Prague. Among the participants in the campaign against the Jesuit Order, which made full use of all the stereotypes and myths of anti-Jesuit propaganda and Palacký’s conception of Czech history, were many nationalistic Catholics who opposed the return of the Jesuits, whom they saw as the hereditary malefactors of the Czech nation.60 The authorities did not respond positively to the campaign, and the Jesuits returned, but they had to wait until the rediscovery of Czech Baroque culture in the 1930s before they and their contribution to the Czech nation met with fairer judgement.

Apart from this imbalance between the power position of the Catholic Church, its devotion to the Austrian State, and a certain inability to react to the changing social circumstances and adequately to address modern man, another important factor needs to be discussed here. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Hradec Králové diocese had just over a thousand priests, slightly more than at the beginning of the century, but the total population of the diocese had more than doubled. This factor contributed to the natural decrease in the importance of the priests in society. Moreover, the priests had to devote themselves more to the demanding ‘priestly toil’ in catechization, the celebration of the sacraments, and preparation for their reception. Even in the countryside, the priests were now losing their monopoly on education and being the source of information. A social group of primary-school and secondary-school teachers, often extremely anticlerical, was quickly forming, particularly in Bohemia. Now on the French model, it represented something like a ‘norm-setting’ substitute clergy of the new society.

Although the proportion of priests in society was declining and the Church was losing its position particularly amongst the rich and educated urban strata, amongst teachers and workers priests continued to constitute a very important part of the nation as supporters and initiators of a number of projects for the benefit of the Czechs. Nevertheless, it is clear that the initial phase of national

60 See the tendentious anti-Jesuit writings of Tomáš Václav Bílek, Dějiny řádu Tovaryšstva Ježíšova a působení jeho vůbec a v zemích království Českého zvláště, Prague, 1897.

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emancipation ended towards the middle of the nineteenth century; the nation had its own commercial and financial elite, university-educated men, and other important segments of social life, which no longer had to be completely substituted for by the Catholic clergy.

Priests as initiators of modernization

The process of the split between the nation and the Church, as we have seen, took a relatively long time. Until the 1920s, it is fair to say, Catholic priests played the role of initiators of the modernization of Czech society. They were the ones who sat on the honorary committees of joint-stock companies when establishing new breweries and sugar refineries. They were the ones who were present at the founding of hospitals, municipal schools, and business schools, girls’ schools, and local singing, music, and theatre societies. The priests were among the first members of the community to have driving licences, telephones, and electrical appliances. They also continued to provide financial support to talented youth from poor families. The priests also added to the contribution (still under-appreciated to this day) made by the religious communities of women, which in the nineteenth century started work in social charities and schools to a hitherto unseen extent.

And that is by no means all. It was the priests who criticized the unbearable conditions of the fourteen-hour workday in the unheated halls of textile mills without Saturdays off and without social insurance. It was the priests who entered the struggle against the rampant alcoholism and the new spiritualist movements that offered people a form of escape from the almost incessant grind with its short breaks and no hope of better times ahead. The priest was a strong, respected, local figure, but in this period he was sometimes in conflict with the local elite, who could not bear to see the Church ‘giving orders’. Influenced by the anticlerical propaganda, the local elite perceived the Church as an age-old opponent of progress, liberty, and reason. By a number of its ill-planned approaches, which it defended all the more vehemently and intransigently, the Church seemed to provide the elite with evidence to support their views.61

Beginning in the 1890s, Pope Leo XIII supported the establishment of Christian political parties that were supposed to defend the interests of the Catholic Church in parliamentary regimes. Most of them were Christian Social parties. They had a relatively strong electoral base, and became an integral part of the Czech

61 The 1870 declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility met with great antipathy, for in the atmosphere of the growing Progressive movement it seemed to be pure provocation, and it served as a pretext for a number of European governments to restrict the Church’s role in society. One should also recall the long, hard struggle against cremation, which was led by the Catholic Church in the Austrian Monarchy by blocking the establishment and operation of crematoria.

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political scene.62 They even, unintentionally, contributed to the postponement of women’s suffrage, because the liberal parties were worried that women were too influenced by the Catholic clergy and would vote as the clergy told them. Other parties that presented themselves as opponents of the Catholics, however, played the dominant role in places where Czech was spoken.63

The Catholic clergy continued to be very active in education and the arts, and the well-known Časopis katolického duchovenstva (Journal of the Catholic clergy) continued to be among the high-quality specialized periodicals. Many priests were involved in the research and writing of Czech history, and amongst the clergy were many novelists and poets. Some clerics initiated great projects such as the completion of St Vitus’ Cathedral, in Prague, or the writing up of inventories of historical monuments. Unfortunately, however, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were clear signs that an intellectual rift had already irreversibly developed. The term ‘patriotic priest’ had ceased to be credible; no longer a simple reflection of reality, it was, instead, merely used as an apology for otherwise unacceptable behaviour: ‘Yes, he was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, that age-old enemy of the Czech nation, but he was patriotic.’ In some circles, for instance amongst the workers or Radical Progressive teachers, priests were verbally and occasionally even physically attacked. The times when society, the Church, and the State constituted the same group of people, and everyone naturally belonged to the Church and identified with it, were gone for ever. The fact that most of the nation were still baptized Catholic, as is evident from the Catholic parish registries, could do nothing to change that.

The standing of the clergy in the new State

Considering the indisputable contribution of the Catholic clergy to Czech national strivings, it is a sad paradox that what was somehow the symbolic culmination of Czech efforts to emancipate themselves from Austrian rule in an independent Czechoslovakia in late 1918 was accompanied by many anti-Catholic brawls and attacks against priests and Catholic symbols. The new State, under the leadership of President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, formulated its ideology with the anti-Catholic conception of Czech history and the president let it be known that the Catholics would have only as many rights as they were capable of winning for themselves. The land reform that was carried out had a considerable negative effect

62 For a general picture, see Pavel Marek, Český katolicismus 1890–1914, Olomouc, 2003.63 The reasons are discussed in Pavel Marek, ‘Náboženství v období politické diferenciace české společnosti v druhé

polovině 19. století’, in Hojda and Prahl (eds), Bůh a bohové, pp. 192–202.

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also on Church property; on the whole, the Catholic Church in the Bohemian Lands paid a high price for its uncritical loyalty, or even adherence, to the Monarchy.

After losing its power base in the Austrian State, and after surviving the early years of the republic, the Church in Bohemia quickly recovered. It found intellectual inspiration in France and Italy, and a stratum of Catholic priests and laymen soon began to form, and presented Catholicism as an equal partner of mainstream Czech society. The situation gradually began to calm down: the dispute over the churches that the new Czechoslovak Church had taken over was resolved, the question of priests’ salaries was resolved, relations between the Vatican were normalized, and members of the Czechoslovak People’s Party were repeatedly ministers in governments of the First Republic. This process of reconciliation was symbolically demonstrated, for example, in the celebrations to mark the millennium of the martyrdom of St Wenceslas in 1929, including the completion of St Vitus’ Cathedral, in Prague. Another important event was the holding of the Catholic Congress in Prague, in 1935, attended by thousands of the faithful, who showed themselves to be an integral part of the nation when Czechoslovakia was increasingly under threat by Nazi Germany. The process of the re-integration of the Catholic tradition into the core of Czech national identity continued strongly during the German occupation, from March 1939 to May 1945,64 of which many Catholic priests and laymen were victims. After the war, the re-established unity of the Czech nation and the Church was expressed and strengthened by making two former concentration-camp prisoners, Josef Beran (1888–1969) and Štěpán Trochta (1905–1974), bishops.

All the promise of the search for a new harmony between Catholicism and the nation was, however, cut short by the Communist dictatorship. At that time it was perhaps an anachronism to talk about reconciliation with the ‘nation’, because the nation itself was divided into various ideological and political factions. The most ruthless and least civilized faction seized control the country with the help of a foreign power, the Soviet Union, and started what was in fact a covert civil war against all democratic, Christian, and humanist – that is, non-Communist – traditions. The Communist regime perceived the Catholic Church as the arch-enemy, and aimed ultimately to obliterate it.

Not until the collapse of the totalitarian regime in late 1989, and the start of the democratic changes that followed, was a new opportunity offered for a fairer assessment of the history of the relations between the Czech nation and the Catholic Church and for a search for a new equilibrium. It is to be hoped that no one need be excluded from national history today, particularly now that the very concept of ‘nation’ is a matter of hot dispute.

64 See Med, Literární život ve stínu Mnichova.

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4. A MODEL OF EXTRAORDINARILY

SUCCESSFUL COOPERATION BETWEEN SOCIETY AND THE CHURCH

IN MODERN TIMES

The study of the history of the religious orders of women, including their influence on cultural and religious life,65 is enjoying increasing attention,66 even though Czech historians have a tendency, at the very least, to underestimate this phenomenon, which was so important for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.67 I will not discuss here the heroic beginnings of the individual orders and congregations in the Bohemian Lands or the great work that the nuns performed in the fields of religion, the Church, education, and society. I will instead attempt to show the contribution that women’s congregations made during the dynamic development of the Czech nation, using the superb example of Hradec Králové, a large, populous, predominantly Catholic, and well-administered diocese.68

The emergence and development of women’s religious orders and congregations, 1850–1950

In the whole diocese of Hradec Králové before 1784 there was not a single convent. The establishment of one had been considered by Hradec Králové bishops and the local nobility, but because of insufficient funds the idea was not made a reality for a long time.69 The basic problem for the establishment of any convent was a lack of Church funds and the local nobility’s lack of willingness to participate. It was hardly just a matter of donating land and building a convent.

65 See Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith (eds), Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920, Chapel Hill, NC, 1999.

66 For an overview of the research, see Joachim Schmiedl, ‘Die Säkularization war ein neuer Anfang. Religiöse Gemeinschaften des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Zum Stand der internationalen Forschung’, Historisches Jahrbuch 126, 2006, pp. 327–58; for congregations of women, see pp. 340–43.

67 See Marcela C. Efmertová, České země v letech 1848–1918, Prague, 1998, as well as Hojda and Prahl (eds), Bůh a bohové.

68 . It was a model diocese, with many Catholics, socially and ethnically diverse, and also motivated by the presence of a Protestant minority and Socialist currents to promote pastoral care.

69 See Bishop Talmberg’s report on the state of the diocese in 1683: ‘Monasteria Monialium in hac Dioecesi R. Hradecensi nulla sunt, adeoque de his nullam Relationem facere possum, expedire quidem ut essent, sed defunt media pro fundatione ex exstructione eorumdem.’ Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV), fondo Sacra Congregatio Concilii. Relationes Reginae Gradecii. N. 681a.

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A lasting, sufficient income of its own, ensuring a living for the future nuns, their assistants, and, for example, the parish priest, was indispensible for any convent. None of the local bishops was able to provide such funding. In this same period, however, a total of fifteen religious houses were in operation here.

Not until 1784, during the expansion of the diocese by the addition of the two large and populous districts of Chrudim and Čáslav, did a convent of Ursuline sisters in Kutná Hora become part of the Hradec Králové diocese. It was a relatively small, exclusive convent of between twelve and fourteen nuns, who devoted themselves to the upbringing and education of girls from noble and rich patrician families.70 Any increase in the number of nuns had first to be discussed at length.71 Consequently, until 1856 there was only one small convent in the large and populous Hradec Králové diocese. Although the Church reforms of Joseph II meant the closing down of several monasteries, the addition of two new districts to this diocese compensated for these losses. Thanks mainly to two large monasteries – Broumov Abbey, with between 40 and 45 monks, and Želiv Abbey, which, together with Německý Brod, had between twenty and thirty monks – the number of monks in the Hradec Králové diocese from the 1830s to 1950 varied between 100 and 140 members. In this context, the small number of between twelve and fourteen Ursuline nuns is but a ‘supplement and adornment’.

As in other areas of life, the development of congregations of nuns in the Bohemian Lands compared to the countries of western Europe occurred late; in western Europe it had already begun in the 1820s.72 In 1850, the Hradec Králové diocese73 had only one convent, and it had only nineteen Ursuline nuns. A hint of the future development appears in the fact that it had five novices in 1856.74 The first big change took place between 1856 and 1860; the number of Ursuline nuns in Kutná Hora increased to 22, but mainly a new convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame was established in Hradec Králové, with twelve sisters, and another in Žleby, with three sisters, and the populous convent of the Sisters of Mercy

70 Report of Bishop Alois Josef Krakowský z Kolowrat of 1819: ‘Kuttenbergense Monialium Societatis S. Ursulae, cui 14 moniales adscriptae sunt. Instruuntur in hac domo Religiosa complures puellae nobiles mansionariae ad veram pietatem at utiles sexui notiones, etiam aliis civium filialibus in eodem monasterium quatuor classes scholae normalis patent, in quibus scientia salutis ac illa, quae ad utilitatem societatis facit, a virginibus professoribus apprime excoluntur.’ ASV, fondo S. C. Concilii. N. 681a.

71 See the demand of Bishop Karel Boromejský Hanl in a report of 1847. ASV, fondo S. C. Concilii. N. 681b.72 See Wilhelm Damberg, Moderne und Milieu 1802–1998: Geschichte des Bistums Münster, Münster, 1998, pp. 97–101.73 The first religious congregations of women in the Bohemian Lands were established in 1837. Representatives

of the Austrian Monarchy initially looked upon the new phenomenon warily. Francis I, Emperor of Austria (reg. 1804–1835), allowed the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul to settle in Vienna on the condition that they would not expect any material support, and would observe the State regulations on health and hygiene and the laws on religious orders. See Illuminata Hart, ‘Deutsche Ordensfrauen in den böhmischen Ländern’, Archiv für Kirchengeschichte von Böhmen-Mähren-Schlesien, vol. 2, Königstein im Taunus, 1973, p. 92.

74 Catalogus venerabilis cleri saecularis et regularis dioecesis Reginae-Gradecensis pro anno 1850, Hradec Králové, 1850, p. 61. Catalogus venerabilis cleri saecularis et regularis dioecesis Reginae-Gradecensis pro anno 1856, Hradec Králové, 1856, p. 67.

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of St Borromeo75 in Valdice, with nineteen members.76 The future development is reflected in the age of the sisters, most of whom were born in the 1840s. In the course of only twenty years after 1850, the situation changed radically. The number of convents grew dynamically, as did the kinds of order and the number of nuns. Thus, by 1879, with a total of 129 sisters,77 they were numerically larger than the monasteries. In 1889, the bishop of Hradec Králové, Josef Jan Hais (1829–1892),78 announced that there were 179 sisters in all, including one new congregation. This was highly dynamic growth in the course of only ten years, which, in the following decades, only accelerated.

By 1906, the congregations had their houses in every town, large and small, and even in villages, which in those days had large populations. In a number of relatively small towns, of 10,000 people or less, it was not unusual to have more than one congregation. I will offer a brief summary here. In 1906, the diocese had a total of ten congregations, which all together comprised 443 nuns, considerably more than twice the number it had in 1889. In the period between 1896 and 1906 alone, 54 new houses were established. The Church could thus not only staff the existing charity, social, and school facilities, but could also set about establishing new ones. The town authorities in that period of Czech national, political, and civil emancipation were building up networks of schools, hospitals, and similar institutions. The demand for sisters as nurses and school teachers was therefore huge.

In his second report, of 1913, Bishop Josef Doubrava (1852–1921) assessed the contribution of women’s congregations. He stated that the diocese had no convent of a contemplative order; all the nuns were actively involved in the upbringing and education of youth or in charitable activities – hospitals, orphanages, and refuges, with great benefit to society and the Church.79 Despite the growth in numbers in the last fifty years before 1913, the period of flourishing was hardly over. Every year, at least one new such facility was established, or even two; the stage of dynamic expansion continued. The sisters increasingly added to the network of social services, looking after new groups whose basic needs had hitherto been ensured by the community or the family, but had no one to provide

75 Most of the new congregations came from Germany or Austria and were therefore of a German character (but the sisters of the Third Order of Saint Francis in Slatiňany, for example, were Czech from the start). By contrast, in the Bohemian Lands, with the arrival of Czech-speaking novices, they quickly became Czech. See Hart, ‘Deutsche Ordensfrauen in den böhmichen Ländern’, pp. 96–98. In the Hradec Králové diocese, the houses of the religious orders were separated by a linguistic boundary; more than three quarters were therefore Czech in character practically from the start.

76 Catalogus venerabilis cleri saecularis et regularis dioecesis Reginae-Gradecensis pro anno 1860, Hradec Králové, 1860, pp. 68–69.

77 ASV, fondo S. C. Concilii. N. 681b.78 Ibid.79 ‘Religiosae ordinum mere contemplativorum in dioecesi non sunt; omnes vitae activae addictae partim educationi

vel doctrinae iuventutis, partim curae in nosocomiis, orphanotrophiis, corodochiis dant magna cum populi utilitate et Ecclesiae aedificatione indefessam operam.’ ASV, fondo S. C. Concilii. N. 681b.

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them with specialist care. In the report, Doubrava emphasizes the contribution of the nuns’ activities in bringing up the youth. The sisters founded and ran many schools, and were employed as teachers or social workers in most of them. He also emphasizes that school education was hardly the only area in which they worked; they were also active in Catholic youth associations and generally made important contributions to the life of Church clubs and societies.

In 1913, the number of nuns came to a peak at 503, and there was a considerable drop in their number after the First World War. The 1923 report of Bishop Karel Kašpar (1870–1941) mentions 429 nuns and nineteen novices, a decline of about ten per cent. That was almost made up for by 1928, when the number of nuns who had taken vows increased to 484 with only an additional eight novices. This relative decrease may have been caused by several factors, but the four years of war and the change of regime in late 1918 were definitely among the important ones. Instead of the Monarchy, which had, to be sure, used the Church for its own ends, but had also showed it favour, there came a radically lay republic that merely tolerated the Catholic Church. In reality, no one could substitute for the nuns in hospitals and asylums. But already in the 1923 report, Bishop Kašpar mentions attempts by the regime to squeeze the nuns out of State schools and out of education in general. Nuns now had to look for new fields to work in, for example, as priests’ housekeepers and as teachers of religion. The new laws of the republic also lifted restrictions, for example, the requirement that women teachers should remain celibate, and they generally provided women with much broader access to education, employment, and involvement in civil and political life than they had hitherto enjoyed. Clearly, no growth in the life of the religious orders could continue for ever; it was bound to reach a demographic and socially determined peak. Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s the number of nuns remained close to the pre-war maximum.

In the 1930s, in connection with the Great Depression and the growing political tensions, the number of nuns again increased. By 1935, the number was thus a third higher than before, reaching 750.80 The renewed growth in numbers was due in part to the continuing growth of the population of the country, the improved standing of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, and some existential uncertainty, which may have turned the attention of many women to congregations as places to find the spiritually elevated, materially secure, and socially acceptable and appreciated fulfilment of their own lives. In the 1930s and 1940s, large convents were built, which provided homes to dozens of nuns and hundreds of their wards. In 1942, in the Czech parts of the Hradec Králové diocese there were 640 nuns, and in the parts of the diocese which were

80 Catalogus venerabilis cleri saecularis et regularis dioecesis Reginae-Gradecensis pro anno 1935, Hradec Králové, 1935, pp. 291–322.

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considered part of the Sudetenland and were ceded to the Reich in the Munich Agreement of 1938, there were 141 nuns,81 almost 800 nuns in all. Among the local Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after the war there were also some nuns.82 Since, however, only one fifth of the population of the Hradec Králové diocese was German, the expulsion did not affect it has much as it did the diocese of Litoměřice or what is now the diocese of Pilsen.

At the end of the 1940s, despite the Communists’ coming to power in early 1948, the number of religious houses of women and the size of the membership seems to have stabilized and even to have recovered. In 1947, the number of nuns in the Hradec Králové diocese was 730, and in 1949 it was 729.83 One cannot tell whether that figure was a potential maximum (the 1930s saw the greatest growth in the membership of women’s congregations in western Europe, after which a decline set in)84 or only a lull, because, in any event, there was soon a sudden and violent rupture in development. Even though the Nazis had limited the activities of the nuns and confiscated some of their buildings and other property, those actions cannot be compared with the systematic brutal destruction of convent life by the Czechoslovak Communists, which was launched after they seized power in 1948.85 We shall now leave the history of religious orders of women and turn our attention to the causes of the dynamic development in the years from 1850 to 1950. We observed that the process of their growth was practically continuous, except for a few failed foundations and some differences in the success of the individual congregations from one region to another. In essence, however, the individual congregations, their religious houses, and the overall number of nuns continued to grow. This growth stands out especially in comparison to the consistently unchanging number of monasteries in the dioceses, as well as in the number of monks in them. One notes no dramatic increase in the number of members; monasteries with a larger membership generally tend to be an exception in Bohemia, and new congregations, such as the Petrines (the Friars of the Blessed Sacrament, founded in 1888, in České Budějovice), attracted few men.

81 Catalogus venerabilis cleri saecularis et regularis dioecesis Reginae-Gradecensis pro anno 1942, Hradec Králové, 1942, pp. 193–98 and 253–56.

82 According to the available statistics, a total of 2,854 nuns were expelled from Czechoslovakia; only 704 were left since they were considered indispensable to the performance of certain kinds of work. See Hart, ‘Deutsche Ordensfrauen in den böhmichen Ländern’, pp. 107–08 and 117.

83 Schematismus duchovenstva diecéze Královéhradecké na rok 1947, Hradec Králové, 1947, p. 348. Schematismus duchovenstva diecéze Královéhradecké na rok 1949, Hradec Králové, 1949, p. 312.

84 See Damberg, Moderne und Milieu, p. 101.85 The limitations on the activity of the women’s congregations and the confiscation of their property had actually

begun already in 1946. Of the literature on the persecution of the religious orders of women, see Vojtěch Vlček (ed.), Ženské řehole za komunismu (1948–1989): Sborník příspěvků z konference pořádané dne 1. října 2003 v kostele sv. Voršily v Praze, Olomouc, 2005.

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Ten aspects of the causes, prerequisites, and circumstances of the development of women’s congregations from 1850 to 1950

Why did women’s religious orders undergo such dynamic development, comparable to, indeed even surpassing, the development during the foundation and spread of the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth century or the Jesuits in the sixteenth century? The development that we saw in the Hradec Králové diocese was typical of Catholic Europe on the whole.86 Although thousands of young women were, doubtless, called by the Holy Spirit to spread the Gospel, this is something historians can only guess at. Restricting myself to the verifiable, I shall elaborate ten basic circumstances which enabled this development and stimulated it. By knowing what caused the impressive growth, one can also identify the limits that later led to stagnation in the number of nuns and, after that, to the closing of religious houses and a shift in the nuns’ focus to the Third World.

A major prerequisite was the demographic revolution. In the nineteenth century, a high birth rate was combined with a decline in child mortality. A higher proportion of children thus reached adulthood, and then had their own children. This led to a number of problems in societies throughout Europe. One of the solutions to them was the departure of a considerable part of the population to the Americas or to sparsely populated areas of Russia. The rural population, which could barely find work in their own villages and start families, moved to the cities. Urbanization was rapid and dynamic; suburbs became populous new towns, for example, Karlín and Smíchov (both of which are today part of Prague). Essential for our story is the fact that many daughters ‘remained free’ to join an order. This was because, to put it bluntly, they found this calling stronger than any calling to marriage and motherhood. On the other hand, their giving up the idea of marriage and having children was actually welcomed by a society that could not control the growth in its population or cope with it.

This change would have been meaningless had a fundamental change in the conception of convent life not taken place in the Church. In previous centuries, nuns had been strictly cloistered mainly in contemplative convents. Two prerequisites for entering them were membership of the noble or burger estate and a certain amount of property which they brought as a dowry. The entrance of women who were not high born, for instance peasant women, was prevented by social barriers. Only with the abolition of serfdom and, later, the lifting of the last feudal rules and regulations in 1848, was the road to the convent opened also to daughters of large, poor families of peasants and artisans. Women’s congregations, particularly those oriented not to teaching but to caring for the sick and doing

86 See Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au féminin: Les congrégations françaises à supérieurs générales au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1984.

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physical work (and also running their own farms, including the hard physical labour which this entailed), became more democratic and needed hard-working, undemanding members. Though in some orders differences continued to exist between the choir sisters and the lay sisters (conversae, who did all the physical work), the new congregations were more democratic in structure, and there was, on the whole, greater opportunity to take the veil and become a nun.

Similarly, State bodies in the countries that were formally Catholic (like the Austrian Monarchy) or mostly Catholic (France) were relatively open to the establishment of new congregations.87 Whether the State kept the Church firmly under its control, as in Austria, or increasingly squeezed it out of politics and the public space, as in France and Germany, the Catholic Church only slowly ceased to be perceived by the State elite as a potential political rival. Schools and religious orders were the two traditional poles of the dispute between a secularizing State and a defensive Church – but the religious orders of women were, in comparison with those of men, substantially less controversial and problematic. That stems from their orientation to lower education and social and charity work, in other words, activities in which they provided the State and society with valuable low-cost labour that no one else could do or was willing to do. After the initial period of vetting and mistrust, from the 1830s to the 1860s, the State and local authorities began to support the nuns’ activities. That does not mean, of course, that relations between the town authorities and the local nuns were always perfectly harmonious.

The third circumstance is that a large area of activity was opening up. Though the Industrial Revolution and the birth of a new kind of society ensured work and a living or, to put it more precisely, basic survival for tens of thousands of people, it had devastating side effects, leading to the breakdown of the family, a new kind of personal life, one that was completely insecure, in which people owned neither the fields they worked in nor the roofs over their heads, and their lives were accompanied by hunger and unprecedented poverty. Health insurance or old-age pensions did not exist until the end of the nineteenth century, and then only in a nascent form. Previously, orphans and abandoned old people (of which there were few in society) were looked after by the wider family, neighbours, or the community. These institutions, however, ceased to suffice. Urban life was different from rural, and mainly the number of the socially deprived increased many times over. This role, which at the time was not performed by the State, the community, or any other institution, remained unfilled, and at this stage it was mainly the Church that mitigated the negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

It was chiefly nuns who occupied this place in the municipal and State

87 See Jean-Paul Bled et al. (eds), Religion et culture dans les sociétés et les états européens de 1800 à 1914, Paris, 2001, p. 81.

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poorhouses, hospitals, and orphanages, and who, with the help of secular or Church benefactors (bishops and canons), established new institutions. Shortly after they managed to satisfy the most basic needs – the provision of food for abandoned children and old people –, they began other activities. They founded the first institutes for the blind and for deaf and dumb children, where they endeavoured to teach these people, whom industrial society considered unproductive and therefore ‘useless’ and ‘unnecessary’, the art of looking after themselves as much as possible, and helped them to learn a trade and awaken in themselves a consciousness of human dignity.88 They thus helped to improve the lot of thousands of people who would otherwise be entirely dependent on the solidarity of their families, assistance from the community, or begging. In short, nineteenth-century society created new needs and challenges, which neither State nor other institutions could effectively deal with. By contrast, members of the religious orders of women were able to help. Despite the contemporaneous criticism that they met with for their allegedly excessive religious indoctrination or rigidity, their fundamental contribution and importance for society as a whole is beyond doubt.

The fourth aspect has to do with the nuns themselves. For a long time, entering monastic life meant for thousands of daughters of artisans, farmers, and tradesmen the sole legitimate possibility of emancipation from the world of men. It was their only socially acceptable, even appreciated, chance to escape the dominance of men at home, not to let themselves be bound to endless toil in the field, on the farm, or over a hot stove, or continuously to be giving birth and looking after the children. This feminist aspect should not be underestimated; it has even been explicitly stated by women who took the veil in order to be left in peace by men.

This was of course not their sole motive, nor was it perhaps even the main one. For many young women who lacked a dowry, on the other hand, it was impossible to get married, and entering a convent was for them the only socially acceptable solution. Apart from their religious faith and conviction about being called to the life of a nun – and a chance to escape from male dominance – ambitious young women of the time had one other great motive. With the development of women’s congregations, women increasingly entered the school and healthcare systems, and their work long ceased to be only in nursing. For women with professional ambitions, taking the veil had long been the only road to a demanding, sophisticated form of employment, such as being registered nurses, later doctors and laboratory technicians, and, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, teachers and social workers. No longer cloistered, nuns were

88 For more on this, see Traudel Weber-Reich, ‘Wir sind die Pionierinnen der Pflege’: Krankenschwestern und ihre Pflegestätten im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel Göttingen, Berne, 2003.

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the first women to break into hitherto solely male professions and occupations.89 They were soon founding and running schools, where they were also teaching, providing thousands of girls and young women with an opportunity to receive a better education.90

The fifth aspect has to do with the cult of the Middle Ages and something like ‘retro-spirituality’, which became dominant in the nineteenth-century Catholic Church.91 The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment and the revolutionary cult of reason, led, in the nineteenth century, to a return to the spirituality of the Late Middle Ages, and its development. In the style of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (c.1418–27), it puts the emphasis on self-denial, ascetic exercise, and the strict disciplining of one’s body, thoughts, and ambitions, as well as praise of self-sacrifice, of the ideal of martyrdom, of absolute self-abnegation in the service of God. In accordance with the puritanical and prudish spirit of the nineteenth century, celibacy was also emphasized, as were perfection and the superiority of the nuns’ way of life to marriage. The combination of these elements resulted in a somewhat one-dimensional spirituality or religious outlook which demanded total devotion to selfless service, even at the cost of exhaustion and early death. Thanks to this spirituality, the nuns of the nineteenth century were able to perform astonishing, truly heroic, deeds in building their institutions and carrying out their social, charitable, and educational work. Political leaders, for example, of the Third Republic of France used the nuns’ holy enthusiasm and disciplined determination, sometimes quite cynically, and sent them on missions even to places where Europeans tended to die within several months or at best within a few years. The mothers superior often knew that, but in their extreme piety they felt no reason to miss the opportunity to celebrate God and save the souls of ‘unfortunate pagans’. After all, for those nuns, too, there could be no better death, and no better reward, than that found in such self-sacrificing service. At the latest during the formation in their order, young women adopted this ethos of service and self-sacrifice, which could offer them support in the difficulties of their daily work. The boundaries and restrictions of this piety became clear later, when the enthusiasm of building and developing waned, and it was necessary to prepare oneself for the long run.

The sixth factor that contributed to the hitherto unseen development of women’s congregations is the feminization of Catholicism in the nineteenth century.92 Still at that time, of course, the Church was led by men – the pope

89 See Claudia Bischoff, Frauen in der Krankenpflege: Zur Entwicklung der Frauenrolle und Frauenberufstätigkeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main, 1992.

90 This is expressed in the subtitle of the volume of essays, Erika Fritzer et al. (eds), 300 Jahre Englische Fräulein in Österreich: Wegbereiterinnen moderner Frauenbildung, Lienz, 2005.

91 See, for example, Guillaume Cuchet, Le crépuscule du purgatoire, Paris, 2005, esp. pp. 57–189.92 See Ralph Gibson, ‘Le catholicisme et les femmes en France au XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 79,

1993, pp. 63–94.

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and the cardinals in Rome, the bishops and their chapters in the dioceses, the priests and the curates in the parishes. Nothing about their formal and actual dominance changed: during services and when taking decisions, the hegemony of men was in no way threatened. An interesting change occurred, however, in another area. As the Church was gradually losing its standing in society, active Church membership ceased to be an incontestable social necessity. In other words, presence at Mass every Sunday was no longer a matter of course. As the Church lost its political influence, power, and importance in the State and society, it was also losing a considerable degree of attraction for the male part of the population. The Church hierarchy did not know what do about the new scientific discoveries and, much later, the new social sciences, and largely had a defensive response, thus discouraging many intelligent young men from joining religious houses and leading them to look for answers elsewhere. Despite the involvement of the Church in social questions, the fundamental message of Rerum Novarum (Of new things, 1891), the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII, arrived too late, and though the solutions it proposed were well intentioned, they tended to be mostly an appeal to morality. That is also why young working-class men sought their leaders and ideals elsewhere.

All the aspects outlined here affected the men of the population far more oppressively than the women. Although not until the nineteenth century, a division of roles occurred which is, paradoxically, now considered ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’. The sphere of religion, faith in practice, and ‘going to church’ became the domain of women, as if it had been given to them to see to the religious life of their families. Men saw to their own professions or vocations and the financial and public aspects of family life. As religion lost its public influence and political dimension, because of secularization and various kinds of Kulturkampf, men (though by far not all) showed less interest in it. The Church representatives suspected as much, and began to concentrate on holding onto the masses of the faithful by means of family upbringing and passing on the faith, which was increasingly becoming the exclusive domain of mothers and grandmothers. The new or renewed forms of piety of the nineteenth century, such as the litany, the rosary, and the May Devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, meant more to women than men; indeed, the Church seemed to have nothing to offer to men. The emphasis on emotion and religious experience had the same results. Churches assumed their typical appearance mostly in towns (in the countryside, thanks to the traditional communities, the churches were able to maintain their Sunday service longer) – namely, that special polarity, where the priest stood at the altar surrounded by several altar boys, and the pews were occupied mostly by women. Here too one finds explanations for the fact that despite the remarkable flourishing of some male congregations, particularly mission congregations,

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they stand, in terms of their numbers and the scope of their activities, deep in the shadow of women’s congregations.

The seventh circumstance is the greater presence and role of women in the Catholic Church, which stood in contrast to the possibilities of what the social sciences call a career or the professional upward mobility of women. If a capable, pious, dedicated, and ambitious woman desired to excel in the Church and religious life in general, her first opportunity would be in the role of a founder, co-founder, or leading figure of a congregation. This aspect has, unfairly, sometimes been underestimated and ridiculed. To be sure, it may have its negative sides; it used to be said, even at that time, that many a congregation had been established thanks only to the foundress’s firm resolve to be revered and ultimately canonized, and employing to that end the natural desire of every order or congregation to have its founder’s name recorded among the names of the saints. Such a utilitarian approach, seeing the establishment of a religious community mainly as a means to achieve canonization one day, is highly unlikely; and such ambition, the desire to excel and achieve one’s goals, to organize a religious community in one’s own way, based on a definite task and aim, is surely beyond criticism. Though both the atmosphere in the Church and the social conditions were right for their establishment, new women’s congregations could not have been organized and developed if their founders had not had at least some charisma and a contagious enthusiasm for the new work.

The eighth aspect is the fact that the development of women’s congregations encouraged the ambitions not only of women, but also of men, first and foremost in the heart of the Church in Rome, whose leaders soon understood the huge human and Christianizing potential that was being offered. The establishment of women’s congregations was helped tremendously by the relative ease with which these institutes received approval first at the level of the diocese, then at the level of the Church as a whole. Since the Middle Ages, the leadership of the Church in these matters was reserved, and the emergence of new orders was permitted only reluctantly and after great efforts by the founders. The situation changed radically in the nineteenth century. With the institution of religious congregations, the process of Church recognition and integration into Church institutions was simplified and the Church leaders were willing to grant the founders, women as well as men, an opportunity to demonstrate the viability of their intentions.93 In the second half of the nineteenth century, a vast and complex network of missionary, charitable, educational, and combined congregations of men and women was created; these congregations often worked next to each other in the towns. Many a bishop had a natural interest in settling nuns or monks in his

93 A summary of these rules is provided in Eutimio Sastre Santos, El Ordenamiento de los institutos de votos simples según las Normae de la Santa Sede (1854–1958): Introduccion y textos, Rome, 1993.

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diocese, depending on its needs. A number of bishops were also considerably involved in the establishment of congregations, either as patrons, intercessors, and protectors of the women founders or outright as initiators, originators, and co-founders. The vast majority of new convents began by being approved for a specific diocese and only afterwards expanded from there into other regions and countries.

The last two aspects have less to do with the founding of congregations than with their development and continued existence. Life in a religious community necessarily requires an ability to adapt to others and to accept a number of restrictions. In this regard too the development of women’s congregations came at the right time. The process of creating a modern society in Europe was, from the sixteenth century onward, accompanied by ‘social disciplining’. Training in a permanent regular army, the Enlightenment school system, and increasingly greater Church and State supervision all together led to the ‘taming’ of the population. After several centuries, the disciplining of the population reached its peak in the nineteenth century. Never before had people been under so much control by the State, the local community, and the police (who are also a creation of modern society). But it was not just a matter of the external pressure of an institutional framework. From a tender age, people were brought up to be personally responsible, to thoroughly carry out their duties, which were always considered of primary importance, even before the needs of the individual. It was necessary to maintain order in society and the home. People in the countryside, responsible for their farms, and also workers, who faced even stricter, uniform discipline during their gruelling factory grind, were naturally brought up to be responsible and to discharge their duties completely. Most people brought up in this way had no problem with being obedient and adhering to the rules and regulations of the religious orders. Though they were ready to defend themselves against bullying, favouritism, and the abuse of power by the superiors of their communities, and to condemn such acts, they considered obedience and the reliable completion of the tasks assigned to them, as well as going regularly to prayer and to an assigned priest for confession, to be absolutely natural, obvious, and beneficial.

The last of the ten aspects is the fact that simply the act of entering a convent, remaining there, and selflessly serving in this vocation were also highly appreciated in society at the time, though this had mostly to do with their work for that society. The habit they wore and their membership of a congregation brought them prestige in the local community as well as social recognition. In countries where most of the population was Catholic, these women therefore generally did not suffer from a lack of respect or recognition from their families, local communities, and society as a whole. For a poor rural or small-town

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family, an aunt who was a nun would occasionally, though to a lesser extent, fulfil the same social role as an uncle who was a priest, usually not by providing outright financial support, but, for example, by knowing the right people, being able to offer advice, or organizing intercession or support. This social respect and reverence was repaid to society in the form of a stabilizing and supervising element. Nuns were supervised not only by the superiors and other nuns of their orders, but also by their surroundings, their fellow-parishioners and the people they looked after. Consequently, it was not supervision in our sense, that is, something hostile and suspect, but rather the application of pressure to achieve ‘right’ and ‘proper’ behaviour by means of creating positive expectations. Problems were thus discovered early and could therefore be corrected or a helping hand could be offered. Wearing the habit of an order in public clearly and firmly defined the rules of behaviour and helped people to abide by those rules.

The glory and the twilight of the congregations

Greater knowledge of the causes and circumstances of the development of the congregations helps to shed light on current Church debate about the origins of the current crisis and the slow extinction of women’s congregations in western Europe, which some ideological traditionalists erroneously blame on the Second Vatican Council (1962–65).94 A simple enumeration shows how many factors came together to provide a unique stimulus to the development of women’s religious congregations in the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus becomes clear how many of the religious houses were no longer in operation or had vanished, and had been replaced by other social institutions. The prism through which one judges the current state of women’s orders in western Europe was greatly distorted by the circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century when there were many convents with hundreds of nuns, who saw to the instruction and care of thousands of children and needy adults, and there were huge motherhouses with highly developed internal structures and also great property, which the nuns had managed to accumulate over the decades and use to the benefit of the needy. That picture seems ‘normal’ to us, and consequently many people today are upset that convents are being closed and sold, and that few young women are taking the

94 For an analysis of what caused the decline in the number of nuns in western Europe in the last fifty years, see Joachim Schmiedl, ‘Veränderte Lebenswelten: Die deutschen Frauenorden seit dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil’, Ordenskorrespondenz 45, 2004, pp. 272–85. The post-council renewal and changes in the orders were undoubtedly accompanied by the departure of many nuns and the great decline in the number of congregations, but that was not, strictly speaking, because of the council; rather it was connected with the profound changes in Western society. See Schmiedl, ‘Die Säkularization’, pp. 356–58.

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veil.95 From the standpoint of the historian, however, that flourishing period is an anomaly in the 2000-year history of the Church and Europe, a unique historical phenomenon caused by the extraordinary and unique interplay of a whole range of factors. Today’s situation thus seems to be a return to normal, to the renewal of the original, ‘natural’, and ‘traditional state of affairs, when entering a congregation of women or men constitutes an exceptional opportunity for people whose calling is the religious life.

Society in every period faces new challenges and has new needs, to which the Church has to react relevantly and effectively, and, if at all possible, in the light of the Gospel. The Church, by means of its elite and representatives, reacted to the needs of modern industrial society and to the great dynamism of the radical changes in the European nations from 1830 to 1950, in the ‘traditional’ mode of conduct, and created under her wing new religious orders and congregations that were adapted to the new conditions and needs. The situation in the nineteenth century was different, for example, from that in the sixteenth century. In the sixteenth century, the Jesuits managed to do almost everything: they devoted themselves to education, missions, cultural activities, sometimes also caring for sick in times of plague. Naturally, there were also some ‘specialized’ orders, such as the Hospitallers, who cared for the sick, and the Piarists, who worked as teachers, but with the exception of a few special areas, they could not be compared with the Jesuits. In the nineteenth century, the diversity and specialization of orders and congregations of men and particularly of women were incomparably greater than before.

The society of a new type was vastly more complex. The needs resulting from modernization were much greater, more intense, and more diverse than those of the thirteenth or even the sixteenth century. Demographic growth, together with the disintegration of traditional institutions and their earlier roles in the social sphere, meant that the family and the community of the Church and of the town or village, unlike in pre-modern agrarian society, were no longer able to look after their members. Because there were enough generous men and, in particular, women willing and able to enter this sphere and to serve – and also because there were now many remarkable men and women who wished to found convents and monasteries, and were able to recognize the problem areas in society, to create the right kind of congregation, and to attract a sufficient number of other workers –, various women’s congregations were established, of different orientations, with different forms of spirituality, and from different countries of origin and places where they had worked. They were considerably helped by the favourable attitude of the Roman Curia, which fundamentally simplified the

95 See, Zoe Maria Isenring, Die Frau in den apostolisch-tätigen Ordensgemeinschaften: Eine Lebensform am Ende oder an der Wende?, Freiburg im Üchtland, 1995.

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procedures for establishing congregations at the level of both the diocese and the Church as a whole. That too was an important stimulus: the founding of a congregation became much simpler both legally and psychologically. Obtaining Church approval for this institution from the authorities of the diocese and Rome ceased to be a laborious, even exhausting, struggle with uncertain results.

Women in the Church were able to respond to that unique combination of challenges and opportune conditions in the Church and society with extraordinary success. In Europe from about 1830 to present, they have thus performed what by any standard is a huge amount of work which no one else would, or could, have done. But can this same approach be applied to current problems? Can one deal with the question of how to work with the mass media by founding a special congregation for the mass media, and will questions of business ethics and the ethics of genetic engineering be solved by the founding of special congregations? Unfortunately, probably not, even though individual nuns could significantly contribute to this. These complicated and demanding tasks of today fall into the competencies especially of Christian laymen, various mixed expert commissions, and Catholic universities and faculties of theology. In the search for spirituality for people today, the leading role falls to the new spiritual movements. The future of the Church most probably lies there.

Nothing of what has been said in this book should be understood as denigrating the contribution of women’s congregations. Their fading glory in Europe today is, paradoxically, first and foremost the result of their success. To be sure, feminists and suffragettes played their role, and without their efforts and political struggle it would probably have never even occurred to men to give them the vote and equal rights or to let them attend university and so forth. But a prerequisite of their success was the heroic engagement of thousands of nuns. Thanks to them, hundreds of thousands of women received basic and higher education, which established the basis for further emancipation. Nuns penetrated many fields that had hitherto been strictly reserved for men. That meant penetrating the public space and shattering the stereotype of ‘public man, private woman’.96 Even though they were viewed differently in terms of their social roles and gender (just as priests were supposed to be sexless), the fact that the nuns succeeded in finding employment in those occupations shattered stereotypes and changed that view. It was thus only a matter of time before people started asking why, if a woman who wore a habit could do work of this kind, could a woman not dressed in a habit not do such work? Nuns demonstrated that women are capable of such work, and that the problem does not lie in their allegedly being less capable than men.

Seeing to social services has become a responsibility of the Czech State.

96 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981.

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The areas possibly not covered by the State, which have always existed, it was hoped, would be covered by non-profit organizations and institutions like Člověk v tísni (People in Need) and Česká katolická charita (Czech Catholic Caritas). Although a reason for the existence of religious congregations has thus vanished, it presents an opportunity to concentrate on work inside the Church and to focus one’s energies on problems ignored by the State and society. In this area too, the efforts and ethos of the nuns has contributed to the fact that in Europe it is now impossible to ignore the poverty and suffering of the handicapped or people living on the margins of society, people in difficult situations, and that this awakened sensitivity towards the physically handicapped, including the deaf and the blind, is intensifying and being taken as something natural. In their work, the nuns were not satisfied just to ensure that these people did not starve or freeze to death; it was nuns who began to integrate them into society, helped them to learn the skills necessary to lead more autonomous lives, and awakened in them a sense of human dignity. Though the progressive, optimistic ethos of the nineteenth century vanished, and the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War undermined the belief that a perfect society could be built here on Earth, the efforts to improve the living conditions of all people, the idea of solidarity in action, and active work for the benefit of the needy continue to be in the programmes of all political parties in Western society today.

One loss that perhaps need not be mourned too much is the disappearance of that late medieval, excessively self-denying piety with its liking for strictly physical asceticism and mortification, with its being disgusted at and offended by human physicality and the world of human sexuality in general. Though theses traces of Manichean thought and Jansenist spirituality have survived to this day, they are gradually receding into the background. Without any idealization of the present and its complicated, timid search for new forms of religiousness, one can observe many encouraging phenomena. Compared to the past, the return to the message of the Bible, the reawakening of interest in the Old Testament and the biblical culture of the life of the faithful in the family and in society are signs of progress. To be sure, the ethos of service to others and God, the decision to sacrifice one’s life to such service, self-denial, and devotion to God by means of hard work remain the supreme expression of Christian heroism. It must not be a destructive attitude, but one that is ‘permanently sustainable’ and ‘compatible with earthly life’. Can the whole Christian ideal really consist only in toiling to death or ‘fasting to death’ at the age of thirty? Where, then, is the strength, fullness, and joy of the Catholic faith? Is it not, rather, that a person who in service to others denies himself elemental love for himself is actually disregarding the Judaeo-Christian commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself and is thus the same as the person who suffers from excessive self-love? Despite all the outward

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and inward drama, to toil to death or to burn out at the age of forty is no art. It is much more difficult to persevere in service to others throughout a long life, remaining cheerful with true Christian joy.

The mission of Christians of every generation is also, indeed chiefly, the need to read the signs of the times correctly. In the nineteenth century, nuns were living testimony to an extraordinary love for God and one’s neighbour by means of devotion and service. But is not, for example, the endeavour to build, maintain, and protect a functioning marriage today a greater heroism and expression of courage, going against the current? In today’s cult of the career and success, in today’s admiration for the ‘singles life-style’, the decision not to live in a marriage and not to have children is not perceived as sacrifice, but, paradoxically, as agreeing with one of the expressions of modern selfishness. Just as it once presented the faithful with the example of the nuns, emphasizing their good deeds and elevating them to the altar, so today the Church should be spreading respect and admiration for exemplary husbands and wives, demonstrating their importance for the Church and society, developing a spirituality to suit their needs and desires, and providing them with space for self-realization also in Church institutions. Here, too, the focal point of Church life is shifting, and it would be a grave mistake to ignore this process.

The religious congregations of women are not the only Catholic institution which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped the Church to meet the challenges of modern times. A good example in the Czech Republic is provided by the Catholic associations and societies. They were founded by priests and laymen on the basis of civil associations for a wide variety of activities, ranging from music, school teaching, and politics to Marian and other religious Christian brotherhoods. In 1923, the Hradec Králové diocese had 396 lay Catholic societies (a surprisingly large number) with thousands of members involved in diverse activities, not only supporting and developing east Bohemian religious life, but also leaving a legacy and work of a lasting character, for example, in the form of sporting grounds and meeting halls, as well as new churches and chapels. Despite their importance in organizing life in Church and society, despite all their successes, these societies can today no longer be fully revived. They carried out their mission and played an important part in the maintenance and development of Catholic identity in revolutionary times, but an effort to restore them in the expectation that they would have the same influence today as what they had in the past is destined to fail. Nonetheless, both phenomena demonstrate how firmly rooted Catholicism was in the Czech nation and how extensive and organizationally demanding were the works which Catholics managed to accomplish.

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5. CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

ON CHANGES IN RELIGION IN THE BOHEMIAN LANDS

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC

ONWARD

The period of the crisis in religion at the beginning of the Republic, in particular the founding of the Czechoslovak Church, has lately been reconsidered by historians. In addition to works that are neutral as regards confession,97 these reconsiderations include works that seek to explain the beginning of this Church, in January 1920, in a spirit similar to the spirit of its founders, that is, as the ‘logical’ culmination of Czech religious development.98 This dramatic episode in Czech religious history becomes increasingly clearer when the micro-history99 of the individual communities and parishes is examined. This will one day result in a more complete picture of a period that brought a serious attempt to settle accounts with Catholicism and remove it once and for all from Czech life. The Czechoslovak Church was founded by about 200 Catholic clergy. Although it soon attracted more than half a million Czechs, and, ultimately, in the early 1930s well over a million, the clergymen’s original ambition had been to be the largest Church, a national Church, a felicitous synthesis of the ideology of the fifteenth-century Bohemian Reformation and modern trends in Catholicism (to which its founders originally and in their spiritual training as Catholic priests had been part of).

Several days after the founding of the Czechoslovak Church, the two most respected Czech historians, Josef Šusta (1874–1945) and Josef Pekař (1870–1937), voiced their opinions about its founding. Šusta’s and Pekař’s commentary is usually at least mentioned in articles about the founding of the Church, but considerably less attention is paid to an analysis of their arguments and motives. The fact that Pekař, a year later, wrote another key essay about the crisis in the Church, in which he explains his attitude from a different point of view, is generally ignored. One learns more about Pekař’s views on the Czechoslovak

97 See Marek, České schisma; for an edition of valuable documents, see Pavel Marek, Církevní krize na počátku první Československé republiky (1918–1924), Brno, 2004.

98 See Karel Farský, Z pode jha (Vznik církve československé), Prague, 1920; Rudolf Urban, Die Tschechoslowakische Hussitische Kirche, Marburg an der Lahn, 1973; David Frýdl, Reformní náboženské hnutí v počátcích Československé republiky: Snaha o reformu katolicismu v Čechách a na Moravě, Brno, 2004; David Tonzar, Vznik a vývoj novodobé husitské teologie a Církev československá husitská, Prague, 2002.

99 See, for example, Jan Krško, Historie Církve československé v Rakovníku, vol. 1, Rakovník a české schizma 1918–1920, Rakovník, 2001.

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Church from fairly recent editions of primary sources100 and from attempts to present an overall or at least partial synthesis.101 Pekař left his mark in several areas of Czech history writing.102 As a promising young historian, he published a work, in 1895, on the Waldstein/Wallenstein conspiracy (1630–34). Later, he was concerned with the legends of St Wenceslas, and, in 1903 and 1906, convincingly defended the earlier estimated time of origin of the tenth-century Christianus legend. At that time, he was already a docent at Prague University and would soon be Professor of Austrian and, beginning in 1918, Czechoslovak History. He began his pioneering research on the Bohemian land rolls, and contributed importantly to our knowledge of the agrarian, economic, and social history of the Baroque period. A highpoint of his work, and reflecting his return to his native region, is Kniha o Kosti (The book of Kost, 1909, 1911, 1913–16). It was followed by his research on the history of Hussitism, which culminated in the monumental Jan Žižka a jeho doba (J.Ž. and his times, 1927–33). In the last stage of his research, it was if Pekař were returning to his beginnings, and he prepared another work about Waldstein (Albrecht z Valdštejna, 1583–1634), published in 1934, to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. Pekař died in January 1937, the first of three great Czech figures to die that year – the other two being the former president, T. G. Masaryk, and the literary critic, F. X. Šalda), whom Providence thus spared the tragic events of the subsequent years.

This is of course only the briefest of sketches of Pekař’s work as a scholar, teacher, and organizer.103 The scope and depth of his research interests are striking (few Czech historians have covered so many different fields) as is his courage to face pressing questions. That is especially true of the occasional ‘lesser’ areas of his interest. Pekař is among the first historians to say that Czech Baroque culture, Baroque patriotism, and the veneration of St John Nepomucene were as much part of Czech culture as the Hussites were, and he did so in extraordinarily unfavourable times, in 1919–21, that is, just after the establishment of the Republic. Similarly, Pekař defended the cult of St Wenceslas, supported the Bohemian nobility during the land reform beginning in 1919, and was one of the few to reject Czechoslovakism, that is, the idea that rather than two separate nations, Czech and Slovak, only one, a Czechoslovak, existed, comprising two branches. He epitomized the engagé university intellectual. Ever since his youth

100 Josef Pekař, Deníky Josefa Pekaře 1916–1933, ed. Josef Hanzal, Prague, 2000. For a valuable edition of correspondence, see Jana Čechurová and Jaroslav Čechura, Korespondence Josefa Pekaře a Kamila Krofty, Prague, 1999; eid., ‘Dialog Josefa Pekaře a Františka Teplého o šlechtě a pozemkové reformě’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philosophica et historica 1, Studia historica LI, Prague, 2003, pp. 13–22.

101 For example, Hanzal, Josef Pekař; Martin Kučera, Rakouský občan Josef Pekař, Prague, 2005; Zdeněk Kalista, Josef Pekař, Prague, 1994.

102 For a concise and reliable discussion of Pekař’s (and other’s) work, see František Kutnar and Jaroslav Marek, Přehledné dějiny českého a slovenského dějepisectví, Prague, 1997, pp. 489–502.

103 He was Editor-in-Chief of Český časopis historický, Chairman of the History Society (Historický klub), Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Vice-Chancellor of the University.

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he had been a careful observer of politics104 and society, and was often actively involved in both in his academic work, thus changing our understanding of the Czech past, and by his articles in the popular press.105 The best known of Pekař’s debates is doubtless the very public dispute over the meaning of Czech history, in which he clashed with Masaryk and Masaryk’s followers.106

Josef Pekař and the founding of the Czechoslovak Church

The Czechoslovak Church was established at a meeting on 8 January 1920. Two days later, its representatives issued a declaration to the nation, in which they called upon the people to join the new Church. ‘It is now up to every individual,’ they declared, ‘to show, by formally defecting from the Church of Rome and by joining the Czechoslovak Church, that his true interest is in freedom of conscience, in the moral enhancement and democratic education of the nation, as well as religious life.’107 Pekař responded immediately, in the Národní politika (National politics) daily newspaper on 13 January: ‘I wish briefly to explain why I do not intend to heed this call.’ Since he did not try to conceal the fact that he was a non-practising Catholic, it should come as no surprise that national and State interests were central to his decision: ‘my Czech national conscience commands me to avoid everything that would seriously harm the future of our young republic.’ The enemies of the Czechs, that is, the Germans and Hungarians, Pekař argues, will be delighted with the founding of the new Church, and Catholic Slovakia will become alienated from the Czechs. ‘A new national rift, another dangerous quarrel’ will weaken the nation at a decisive moment, and will confirm the view that the Czechs do not know how to govern themselves and that their lack of solidarity and their mutual animosity will always throw them into foreign thrall.108

According to Pekař, not everyone would join the new Church, and this would consequently result in the ‘militant division of society in the country, the districts, and the towns and villages; there will again be awkward struggles over churches (not just the buildings but also the livings), cemeteries, schools, town halls, struggles led with a doggedness that impassioned servants of the Church are better at than anyone else’. By rejecting the universalism of the Church of Rome ‘religion will somehow be nationalized, and therefore politicized, and our relations with

104 Kalista, Josef Pekař, p. 54.105 Whereas before 1916 he wrote mainly in specialist periodicals, from that year on he published in periodicals for

a wider readership.106 The fundamental articles on this question are published in Havelka (ed.), Spor o smysl českých dějin 1895–1938.107 In the periodical of the reformist priests and now of the new Church, Právo národa, 11 January 1920.108 Pekař tended to put his hopes in the reform of the Monarchy rather than in the establishment of an independent

State, but after the founding of Czechoslovakia, he accepted it as the fulfilment of the national longing, and put himself completely at its disposal. See Kučera, Rakouský občan Josef Pekař, pp. 256–58.

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the Catholic nations (of which France and Poland are particularly important to us) will worsen, without, however, achieving [good] relations with the Protestant nations’. From the standpoint of foreign policy and the long-term orientation of the Czech nation, the establishment of the Czechoslovak Church would mean more of a loss than a gain.

The second reason for Pekař’s rejection of the Czechoslovak Church was social. It seemed to him to be the least suitable time for a ‘great religious struggle’.109 Society was being convulsed by material worries, unrest threatening everyone, and ‘in neighbouring countries and at home there is the threat of bolshevism’. Moreover, he asks, is it reasonable to divide the faithful? Pekař was made uneasy by the idea of the founders of the new Church, that after the political revolution of October 1918 a revolution in the Church and religion would be carried out in the same style: ‘the whole idea comes from outside, not from within, from a superficially grasped opportunity, not from a profoundly felt and experienced inner need.’110 From these considerations, Pekař moves to considerations about the motives and purport of the establishment of the new Church.

Expressing himself frankly, Pekař stated that the impulse for the new Church was ‘markedly shallow in origin, an impulse that was under-developed and ill-prepared […] The words [of the founding statement] are not the words of prophets or thinkers, which would attract the masses and ensure their leadership’.111 Promoting the use of Czech in the liturgy and declaring freedom of conscience were, according to him, more like propaganda slogans, which were added to the elimination of the requirement of clerical celibacy: ‘After all, freedom without a sense of responsibility and duty,’ Pekař argues, ‘means little, and free will, if it is to inspire respect and gain sympathy in the struggle with the secular authorities, means little without, above all, the notion of conscience.’ On such shaky foundations, he says, one cannot build a Church and then afterwards formulate its ethos, programme, and internal organization.112

To ensure that he will be properly understood, Pekař concludes by explaining

109 That also met with the approval of one of the leaders of the reform priests, Jindřich Šimon Baar (1869–1925), who, however, did not join the new Church, even though he disagreed with Pekař’s position. Marek, České schisma, pp. 137, 140.

110 See his diary entry of 14 July 1920: ‘The Proclamation of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Church, about money, about the Czechness of the Church, seeks to consolidate our political independence by means of religious independence. Man has created God in his own image.’ Pekař, Deníky, p. 74.

111 This is demonstrated also by one of the spiritual leaders of the new Church: ‘the first year of the Church has meant utter chaos in ideological views.’ Alois Spisar, Ideový výklad církve československé, Prague, 1936, p. 143.

112 Here, Pekař was quite in agreement with the leading thinker of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren, Hromádka, who did not see the connection with the Reformation. Instead, he claimed that the new Church was established from ‘distant echoes of Czech Modernism, from the general public’s dissatisfaction with the Austrian orientation of the Catholic Church, and from the national-historical, anti-Rome sentiments of the Progressives’. J. L. Hromádka, Katolicismus a boj o křesťanství, Prague, 1925, p. 142. From a religiously ‘unbiased’ milieu, Peroutka perceived ‘religious fatigue of a sort’ and the ‘not particularly demanding nature’ of membership of the new Church. See Ferdinand Peroutka, Budování státu, vol. 3, (1936) Prague, 1991, pp. 899–901.

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that as a Czech historian he is not defending the Church of Rome: ‘What is decisive for me is whether something is of benefit to our nation and our State.’ And he adds:

I also recall how the Catholic Church has behaved, for example, in modern Hungary, where it let itself be used by the ruling class as a particularly insidious weapon of immoral Magyarization. I know how it has behaved in Austria in recent centuries, slavishly serving the nobility and the court, usually disregarding the needs of the people and the Church. I recall Archbishop Skrbenský’s113 recent move from the Prague see to the less prominent, but juicier, see of Olomouc! But I also know what one can say in defence of the Catholic Church. Its educated clergy […] preserved us and brought us up in national consciousness, when everything seemed hopeless.

But Pekař mainly does not want to measure the guilt and merits of the Church in the past; after all, as he states, ‘it is necessary to be guided by the needs and requirements of the present’.

As a historian, Pekař was able to appreciate the religious peace in the country, and reminded his readers of the past confessional conflict that had had such grave consequences for the nation. An agnostic, Pekař recalled the contribution that the faithful had made to society, and he asks: ‘Would we be taking revenge on Rome by organizing a new Church using people who do not feel religious, and will actually not even be a Church?’ As an alternative solution, he suggests patience, for he believes in the power of reform in the framework of the Catholic Church: ‘we all know and feel that reform is necessary.’ He puts his hopes both in the separation of Church and State, which was in preparation and would provide religious life with new energy, and in the manifest renewal of Catholicism in the countries of Europe and overseas.

Pekař’s essay was a great disappointment to champions of the new Church.114 Observers from both the Roman Catholic and the Czechoslovak Church agreed that the negative reactions of the two historians, Pekař and Šusta, against the creation of the new Church and its ambitions, had a huge impact on the people and the government. Šusta, after all, was the second most important Czech historian at the time.115 Unlike the historian David Frýdl, I do not think that Pekař ‘must

113 Lev Skrbenský z Hříště (1863–1938), Cardinal Archbishop of Prague (1899–1916). In 1916 he left Prague to become Archbishop of Olomouc. He resigned from this office in 1920, and spent the rest of his life in seclusion.

114 Farský, Z pode jha, p. 31. See also the long reply to Pekař in Právo národa, 1 February 1920, and, ibid., this time under the title ‘Český zápas’, 5 March 1920. For references to others taking issue with Pekař’s standpoint, see Marek, České schisma, pp. 220–21.

115 For the Catholic side, see František Cinek, K náboženské otázce v prvních letech naší samostatnosti 1918–1925, Olomouc, 1926, pp. 29 and 38.

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have expended a lot of energy to deprecate the new Church’.116 It was, after all, a reaction written in haste, with which Pekař wanted to enter the public debate and influence events with the weight of his authority as a professor. One should, instead, mention both the sense of responsibility he felt towards the Czech nation and the extraordinary courage he showed in going against the stream. Pekař came out similarly against the destruction of Baroque monuments with his defence of the inheritance of Baroque spirituality, including the cult of John Nepomucene. He was determined to prevent potential damage, and therefore immediately warned the Czech public and its political elite not to yield to the temptation to heed the new Church’s call to support it with the power and revenues of the State. He tried to ward off the Kulturkampf being waged by the State in connection with the establishment of a national Church, and to weaken the Break with Rome movement.117

The founders of the Czechoslovak Church and their followers doubted Pekař’s motives and accused him of crypto-Catholicism.118 Pekař denied it. He was not really defending the Catholic Church as such; he was not an apologist for it, nor was he its historian. As a man of learning who wanted to shape the State, his main motive were to further things that were in the interests of the State and of benefit to society. Not that religious and Church matters or reforms were unimportant to him; they were; but at that moment they simply had to give way to more pressing matters and wait. Another reason he refused to give up the values of the Catholic confession was that the new confession which was meant to take its place did not inspire much confidence in him. In this respect, too, he sought to be just. Though he accused the founders of the Czechoslovak Church of rashness and a desire to seize an opportunity, and he criticized the project as somewhat immature, he recognized the genuineness of the reform efforts of this group of priests and the urgent need for Church reforms as such.

Criticism levelled at attempts to organize a campaign encouraging Czechs to leave the Church

Thirteen months later, on 8 February 1921, Pekař published in the daily Národní politika an even more urgent essay, entitled ‘Ve vážné chvíli’ (At a grave moment).119 In it, he comments on the huge propaganda campaign urging Czechs to defect from the Catholic Church (with the slogan ‘Break with Rome!’), which, beginning

116 Frýdl, Reformní náboženské hnutí, p. 157. Pekař’s biographer also calls it unjustified and superfluous. Hanzal, Josef Pekař, p. 224.

117 For the same reasons, Pekař, as early as the turn of the century, rejected the ‘Los von Rom!’ (Break with Rome!) movement, which was supported by Masaryk and other eminent Czech figures. See Kalista, Josef Pekař, pp. 57–58.

118 Hanzal, Josef Pekař, pp. 131, 136.119 Národní politika, 8 February 1921, pp. 1–2.

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in 1920, became the prelude to the planned census of 15 February 1921.120 Its organizers were determined to weaken the standing of the Catholic Church by compelling half-hearted Catholics to change their confession, to defect from the Church. A wide variety of groups121 and Churches were involved in political events such as mass demonstrations on town squares and in public meeting halls, where orators gave speeches full of historical references in an effort to compel listeners to leave the ‘papist’ Church. The main organizers were the Czechoslovak Church, the Church of the Bohemian Brethren, and the Freethinkers, an atheist movement.122 Pekař was concerned about these activities and particularly about the support they received from the political parties,123 which the leaders of the Czechoslovak Church had been turning to with requests for more energetic support in the fight against the Catholic Church.124

Discipline is of course required to hold a State together, and Pekař perceived a great danger in that ‘strong and sophisticated propaganda, because many matters concerning the organization of Europe had not yet been solved and the priority should have been to consolidate the State.125 He was made uneasy mainly by the radical anticlerical propaganda of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party, because ‘their programmes do not require it [anticlericalism] […] Nor have we ever observed the German or French socialists devoting such effort to stirring up unrest. Only the Russian Bolsheviks demand that their organized members be without confession’. Pekař believed that some socialist leaders somewhere found similar Jacobin enthusiasm repellent, and were able to dampen anticlerical passions in the interests of the State. After all, ‘the campaigning of the Freethinkers for the destruction of the Catholic Church’ only supports those people who ‘with all conceivable anger and energy’ seek a Habsburg restoration.

120 The same thing occurred again before the census in December 1930.121 For example, the Association of Social Democratic Agnostics (Sdružení sociálnědemokratických bezvěrců),

the Union of Socialist Agnostics (Svaz socialistických bezvěrců), the Constance League (Kostnická jednota), the Czechoslovak Teachers’ Association (Československá obec učitelská), the Czechoslovak Association of Legionaries (Československá obec legionářská), the Union of Working-class Physical Education Leagues (Svaz dělnických tělovýchovných jednot), the National Council of Women (Ženská národní rada), and the Central Association of Czechoslovak Teachers (Ústřední spolek československých profesorů).

122 In Czechoslovakia, the Freethinkers (Volná myšlenka) were a lay Church and a considerable social force, with almost 22,000 members in 590 local organizations in 1922, enjoying the favour of influential figures in politics and the arts and sciences. See Antonín K. K. Kudláč, Příběh(y) Volné myšlenky, Prague, 2005, pp. 49–53, 66–72.

123 Of these parties, the greatest supporter of the Czechoslovak Church was the Czechoslovak National Democratic Party. Its founder and Chairman, Karel Kramář (1860–1937), was a personal friend of a co-founder of the Church, Karel Farský (1880–1927). The Czechoslovak National Democrats supported the idea of a national Church and its Slav orientation.

124 Farský, Z pode jha, p. 14.125 As is stated by Kutnar and Marek: ‘By the way, Pekař did not hesitate to declare that in the bitter struggle

between extreme principles the role of consolidation and balancing should be played by sound conservatism and traditionalism.’ Kutnar and Marek, Přehledné dějiny českého a slovenského dějepisectví, p. 497.

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Pekař also rejected the campaigners’ appeal to conscience, with which they argued that anyone who did not fully accept Catholic dogma should leave the Catholic Church with honour. He admitted that a considerable part of the Czech nation, particularly its intelligentsia, was Catholic only in the parish registries: ‘I too am one of them. And yet in the census I shall declare that my religion is Roman Catholic and shall vigorously reject any accusation that I am acting inconsistently or dishonourably.’ With the paternalistic detachment of the erudite professor, he added that if every Christian who more or less split with the catechism of his Church then defected, ‘very few independent, educated individuals would be left in any Church organization’. Nevertheless, they do remain in their Church, for ‘they know that even within its framework they can serve their God in good conscience – those who are completely indifferent to religion are certainly but a negligible minority.’ For Pekař, imperfect faith, though it might seem more like unbelief, is, in other words, no reason to defect from the Church of Rome.

Influenced by Romanticism, Pekař could not fail to notice even the ‘aesthetic’, ‘emotive’, or ‘consoling’ element of Catholicism, its value and role:

To expel – and I mean expel – hundreds or thousands of families all at once from any Church, to snatch from a child’s soul the timid reverence for supernatural mystery […], to deprive thousands of men and women of religious consolation in times of hardship and suffering (yet give them nothing, absolutely nothing, of the same value in compensation), using the pressure of ruthless campaigning and slogans whose inner emptiness no simple person can defend himself against, is pure Bolshevism in theory and in practice […].

And, in the style of Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme (1802), he continues in his defence of Catholic Christianity:

Before you take your decision, go into St Vitus’ at Prague Castle, a cathedral built and decorated by the faith of our forebears for centuries, and just try to resist the powerful impression made by the sacredness and the silent appeals of our past accumulated there! Enter the graveyard of a rural church, where your fathers and grandfathers are buried. Recall the first joyful impression made by the hymn ‘Narodil se Kristus Pán’ (Christ the Lord is born) at the great Christmas Mass in your youth. Recall the emotion with which only recently, during the great days of excitement throughout the nation, the hymn about St Wenceslas filled your soul. If you are strong enough to resist all of that, if you wish to spiritually impoverish

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and deprive yourself and your children of all of that, then you and your family should defect from the Church!

Pekař leaves their historical argument (‘Czech history commands a separation from the Church’) for the conclusion, seeing himself supremely qualified to assess it: ‘I am a historian. I have considered many of the pros and cons of these questions; perhaps my word will carry some weight in countervailing the appeals of the campaign leaflets which portray in the most lurid colours the crimes Rome has committed against the Czech nation.’ He protests against the misuse of the Masarykian teleological concept ‘the meaning of Czech history’, but does not want to open a debate on the teleology of history. ‘But I warn you,’ Pekař adds, ‘our history does not provide the slightest support for the efforts to increase the number of Czechs without confession; on the contrary, it teaches us that the more educated the Czech of the past was, the more emphasis he put on religion.’ That is probably what Masaryk had in mind when he talked about the religious meaning of Czech history. Historical events have to be judged without bias:

the dreadful violence that Czechs were subject to after the Battle of the White Mountain [Pekař writes] is mainly attributable to the impassioned times (not to the Catholic Church itself, though it is not without guilt; the Protestant Churches were no better) but it is also attributable to the ruling Habsburgs’ intention to mete out punishment. We also know that it was the Catholic clergy who built up a new intelligentsia for the Czechs in a country spiritually destroyed (by the violence of Church and Emperor), provided it with national consciousness, created a new nation, and laid the foundations for its future.

Is it therefore possible, Pekař asks, to take revenge against Rome and return to the Bohemian Brethren of the sixteenth century? ‘No’, he states, ‘it is neither necessary nor advisable; indeed, it is not even possible!’ Contemporary problems, Pekař reminds his readers, are different, and a hitherto Catholic nation’s mass adherence to Protestantism would not be possible even at considerable sacrifice and with political support.126 He concludes by appealing to the authority of Palacký, who appreciated the contribution of the Catholic Church in Czech history, and also the authority of Ernest Denis (1849–1921), a French expert on Bohemian history. For the same reasons as Pekař, Denis, a Protestant historian,

126 Pekař believed in the organic growth of the nation, and thought that sudden radical change and revolution would only harm the nation. And he was highly sceptical about all attempts to return to the circumstances of some former era. See Kalista, Josef Pekař, pp. 224–25. That is also why he condemned attempts at expunging ‘troublesome’ parts of history: ‘The Government has allowed the demolition of the Joseph II monument in Teplice [northwest Bohemia]. That is a colossal act of stupidity’. Pekař, Deníky, p. 77.

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who could not reasonably be suspected of harbouring sympathies for the Church of Rome, spoke out against the activities of the Czechoslovak Church.

The engagé intellectual and religion as a political question

Why did Pekař’s attitude to the emergence of the Czechoslovak Church meet with such a reception at that time? The question of the ‘beginning’ in general, but also of the beginning of new States, Churches, and nations in particular, plays a fundamental role in European thought. The moment of emergence, the circumstances, the people involved, and the course taken play an almost mythical role in the construction of identity, as if they partly predetermined the future development, success, or failure of the whole enterprise. It is not so much a matter of the grandness of the beginnings; they can be inconspicuous, allowing subsequent developments and success to stand out all the more. What is decisive in the emergence of a new religion or Church is the genuineness of the founding figures and their intentions. Questionable preconditions laid into the foundations mark the whole undertaking with failure, threaten the future, the symbolic factor again outweighing what we might call the ‘objective’ factor. It is not even so much a matter of how things really are, but of how they will affect contemporaries, how they will appear to future generations. If an authority of Pekař’s standing reveals the shortcomings of the motives and liturgical aspects of the founding of a Church – in our case, the Czechoslovak–, he thereby weakens the prestige of the Church and its appeal for the general public. This is particularly true if he calls its very founding an event detrimental to national and State interests.

It should also be noted, however, that although Pekař is settling accounts with the historical or, rather, historicizing arguments of the leading figures of the religious aspect of the revolution of the nationalities, he is also emphasizing contemporary needs and requirements. He disapproves of the desire to take revenge on Rome for its real or imagined crimes against the Czech nation if revenge at that moment entails fundamentally damaging the interests of the nation and threatening the stability of the new republic. Although Pekař was accused of an antiquarian, aesthetic attraction to the Church of Rome, actually the opposite is true. The genuine problems of the present day were at the forefront of this thinking. His attitude, however, was not motivated by only a utilitarian understanding of the interests of State. The campaign against the Church (and the nobility), he believed, was undemocratic: everyone has a right to belong to his or her own social group, to his or her own estate, and to have his or her own convictions and express them publicly.127

127 Kučera, Rakouský občan Josef Pekař, p. 262.

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Pekař was thus only performing the intellectual’s function as a prophet in society; as a principled historian he convincingly predicted the possible consequences of the founding of the Czechoslovak Church on society and the State. It is remarkable how much of his prediction came to pass. Though he somewhat overestimated the possible international consequences,128 he precisely estimated its impact on domestic politics – namely, the further alienation of the Slovaks and the Bohemian Germans, the further division within the Czech nation, and the struggle over parish offices, churches, and the faithful. The 1920s were full of protracted, exhausting struggles over Church buildings. Fighting in the streets and in the Press, the protest occupation of churches, chapels, and parish houses, and the calling in of the police and the State authorities to decide matters – all caused bad blood and poisoned relations between the two Churches for a long time to come.

As a result of his involvement in the debates over the role of the Catholic Church, Pekař was widely described as a Catholic author and became somewhat isolated. Though he claimed membership of the Catholic Church and had a number of close friends in the clergy, he did not attend Mass, despite the urgings of his Catholic friends.129 For him, the Church was the custodian of order and tradition, but he closely guarded his independence and his individuality,130 and, more than anything, he did not want to be exploited by political Catholics.131 Pekař, who did not suffer from any anti-reformist sentiment,132 found himself on the side of Catholicism from the logic of his inner development as a scholar, while exposing the weak and barren points of the official interpretation of Czech history, as is evident from a commentary he made in 1924: ‘But you see how unanimously and impudently Bartoš, Herben, and Vančura,133 those popular interpreters and proponents of Huss’s truth, tell their lies today […] you should not be surprised that the Catholic front is gaining sympathy.’134

Pekař also accurately exposed the internal weakness of the Czechoslovak Church, its liturgical and spiritual emptiness.135 In the confusion after the First World War, the compromise between Christian teaching and contemporary

128 Hanzal, Josef Pekař, p. 131.129 According to Kalista, Pekař nevertheless died having been given the last rites before falling into a coma on 22

January 1937. Kalista, Josef Pekař, p. 79.130 See, for example, his rebukes of the Catholic Church in 1924. Pekař, Deníky, pp. 100, 102. 131 Kučera, Rakouský občan Josef Pekař, pp. 271, 273.132 He particularly appreciated the Czech reformation, and even privately confessed to a certain ‘philo-

Protestantism’. See Kalista, Josef Pekař, pp. 55, 57.133 The historian, archivist, and teacher František Bartoš (1889–1972), the politician, writer, and historian Jan Herben

(1857–1936), and the physician-writer Vladislav Vančura (1891–1942).134 Similarly, in correspondence with the professor of history, politician, and diplomat Kamil Krofta (1876–1945):

‘But, rebus hodie stantibus, he is a person who has after all been pushed to the right by progressive clericalism, which is a few degrees more mendacious and less moral than Roman clericalism.’ For both quotations, see Hanzal, Josef Pekař, p. 138. For more on this, see Kalista, Josef Pekař, pp. 156–63.

135 Similarly, Hromádka, Katolicismus a boj o křesťanství, pp. 257–58; Peroutka, Budování státu, p. 901.

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academic thinking, the emphasis on a national progressive ideology, the one-sided interpretation of Czech history, and the changes to Church practice (for example, a national liturgy and the abolition of celibacy) may have been able to attract hundreds of thousands of supporters to the new Church, but could not in themselves create a viable ethos after the Great Depression and the Second World War had dealt profound blows to faith in progress and to nationalism.136 Thus began the continuous decline in the membership of the Czechoslovak Church, which, as Pekař had predicted, became rather a stage for registered Catholics on the way from implicit to explicit atheism. It is difficult to assess the impact137 of Pekař’s attitude, but, apart from his general influence on the Czech public, his views were respected by the Agrarians, a key political party, especially in the countryside, in interwar Czechoslovakia. The critical attitude of eminent figures such as Pekař thus deterred the State from entering the religious conflict and joining, with the weight of its authority, in the creation of a national Catholic Church.

136 In retrospect, many of its founding fathers expressed their disappointment over the developments in the Czechoslovak Church. Marek, Církevní krize, p. 216.

137 The 1921 Czechoslovak census revealed that, since the last census, the Catholic Church had lost about one sixth of its faithful to other confessions or to agnosticism or atheism; in absolute numbers that was a loss of 1,272,000 people in Bohemia and 1,161, 000 in Moravia and Silesia; by contrast, in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus, the decline was insignificant.

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6. THE MODERN HISTORY

OF THE CHURCH IN THE BOHEMIAN LANDS

AS A HISTORY OF PERSECUTION

At the start of this chapter I shall try to make two points more precise. Although Czechoslovakia, officially the shared state of the Czechs and Slovaks, existed for most of the twentieth century and, until the post-war expulsions, included three million Germans and, until the Shoah, about 357,000 Jews, I will limit my discussion to the history of the Bohemian Lands and the part of the population which considered itself Czech.138 Although the history of the persecution of Christians of other ethnic-linguistic groups certainly merits discussion, there is not enough space for that here, and in many respects their history basically resembles that of the Czechs. The history of the German part of the population, including the fate of their Churches, which ended with their expulsion in 1945–47, and the history of Christianity in Slovakia (or Upper Hungary) are in many respects different from that of the Czechs because the Church was more deeply rooted in the Slovak national consciousness.

For the same reasons, I shall also concentrate here only on the history of the dominant Church of the Czechs, the Roman Catholic Church, to which more than ninety per cent of the population still belonged, even if often only nominally, in 1918. Because of its great size, it became the main target of persecution, and not only by the Communists. It had already experienced persecution under the Nazi regime in the Protectorate, and had even been the target of attacks in the interwar years. That is why I have conceived this chapter as a history of the fate of the Catholic Church in Bohemia and Moravia throughout the twentieth century, which can reasonably be seen as a time of persecution. Even though it was the established Church of the Habsburg Monarchy until the end of 1918, the Catholic Church perceived itself as threatened. This turned out to be an accurate perception, as was confirmed by events after 1918.

138 According to the 1921 census, the population of Czechoslovakia was 13,608,000 people, of whom, according to what they declared as their ethnicity based on mother tongue, 8,760,000 were Czech or Slovak (counted together as ‘Czechoslovaks’), 3,123,000 were German, 745,000 were Hungarian, 462,000 were Rusin, 180,500 were Jewish, and 76,000 were Polish.

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Although attempts were made even under the Communist regime to chart out the persecution of the Churches in Communist Czechoslovakia,139 the main research on the Communist suppression of religion could be done only after the Changes of late 1989. In the twenty-five years since then, a number of noteworthy works have been written, from short articles on narrow topics to large books by a single author and volumes of conference proceedings, which, for example, consider the persecution of the religious congregations of women. Scholars have increasingly been able to do research using the files of the Communist secret police, to record the recollections of persecuted Christians,140 and to discover more about the fate of the underground Churches. Also, international comparisons of the Communist repression of religious life in the Soviet bloc have markedly added to our knowledge. Consequently, this chapter can be based on firmer foundations than was possible even ten years ago.

The standing of the Catholic Church in Bohemia and Moravia at the beginning of the twentieth century

Although it was the Church of most Czechs, that definitely does not mean that the status of the Catholic Church in Czech society was without problems or that it was even perceived as an essential characteristic of society – unlike its standing in Poland, Slovakia, and Ireland. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century identification of Czechness with Catholicism had vanished by the middle of the nineteenth century. Until that time, the Catholic clergy was a source of support for the Czechs’ struggle for national cultural autonomy. The cult of the patron saints of the land and the nation, like Saints Wenceslas and John Nepomucene, continued to form the core of national identity, and nothing yet suggested that the Bohemian Lands would in a mere 150 years (almost no time from a historical point of view) be presented as the most secularized, indeed most atheist, country in the world, and that atheism would become a sign of modern Czech identity.141

To gain a proper understanding of the subsequent history of the Church in the Bohemian Lands and mainly of the ease with which the regimes, particularly

139 See Jiří Stříbrný, ‘Katolická církev v českých zemích v čase dvou totalit’, in Libor Jan (ed.), České církevní dějiny ve druhé polovině 20. století, Brno, 2000, pp. 78–115, esp. 91–93.

140 See, for example, the ‘pebbles of the mosaic’ of testimony, which were gathered and edited by the Bishop of Hradec Králové, Karel Otčenášek, and were published in German as Mosaiksteinchen: Kleine Zeugnisse über die Christenverfolgung in der Zeit der kommunistischen Totalität und über ihre Bemühungen um die Freiheit und das Wohl des Vaterlands, trans. from the Czech by Wilhelm Sitte, Hradec Králové, 2004.

141 One thinks of the reaction to the statement of one of the greatest ‘icons’ of the Czech nation, the famous hockey player Jaromír Jágr (b. 1972), who declared that he was a pious Christian and owed his successful career to his faith. Some members of the public said they were disappointed to learn this and that it was an attitude not befitting a twenty-first-century man.

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the Communist, suppressed the Church,142 one has to return to the second half of the nineteenth century. To be sure, developments in Czech society are in several respects identical to the general history of the secularization processes. Industrialization and urbanization soon eroded the faith of the rural dwellers who had moved to the rapidly growing towns. The Church quickly lost support amongst the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie. The relationship between the clergy and the teaching profession was a traditional area of conflict. The teachers, who, as a result of measures taken by the Austrian government, had been emancipating themselves from Church supervision, dealt the Church a blow ‘in return’ for real and imagined wrongs that they felt the priests had done them.

In two respects, the standing of the Church of the Czechs in relation to a secularizing society was lower than in other countries. The first complication was its position ‘between two stools’. As in other countries of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Catholic Church in the Bohemian Lands was firmly under the control of the State. The Church had coalesced with the State. Its representatives were loyal to the ruling dynasty. It was one of the institutions which brought children up to be obedient and loyal to the Monarch. The problem is that a number of the elements which the legislation of the Monarchy used to force the population at least outwardly to conform, for example, making it compulsory for teachers and army officers to attend Mass, had long ceased to correspond to the mentality of these groups, and instead of the desired loyalty it bred staunch anticlericalism.

The second contributive factor influencing the standing of the Church in the Bohemian Lands was symbolic. Although the Monarchy created good conditions for the all-round development of the Czech nation, the Czech national elite were dissatisfied with the part assigned to them share in running the country. The nineteenth century was not only the century of nationalist movements but also a period of historicism, when political demands were based on historical arguments. In the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal Protestant historian and politician František Palacký published his History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia, first in German and then in Czech. The work became a valuable conceptual tool of the Czech civil elite in their struggle with the Austrian governing elite for a greater role in running the country. Palacký ended his history in 1526, when Ferdinand Habsburg became the King of Bohemia, but for Palacký the main line of Czech history is the struggle between the mythological pre-Christian democratic Slav orders (which for Palacký reappeared in large parts of Hussitism) and the undemocratic Teutonic feudal elements. Particularly in the works of Palacký’s successors and imitators, the Catholic Church was portrayed as an

142 Though genuine resistance to the Communist suppression of the monasteries and convents and the sending of monks and nuns to labour camps and prison occurred in several religious regions of Moravia and especially in Slovakia, it was not a significant phenomenon.

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organization that was insufficiently national, indeed even hostile to the Czechs; after all, the Church had condemned one of the greatest Czechs, Huss, and later forced another ‘icon’ of the nationalist movement, Comenius, a bishop of the Church of the Bohemian Brethren, into exile.

Czech society thus found itself severely split. A large part of the population nominally still belonged to the Catholic Church, while in politics and the arts the Church was being depicted as an enemy of progress and as an age-old adversary of the Czech nation. That hardly meant, however, that people endorsed the non-Catholic Churches; instead, they tended to find a substitute religion in nationalism and political activism. The Protestant Churches in the Bohemian Lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained numerically minor. These trends found their expression only after 1918; until then, they were expressed in the erection of many statues of Huss, Jan Žižka (the Hussite commander), and Comenius, placed beside Baroque statues of Catholic saints in the streets and squares of Czech towns.

The difficult position of the Church in the interwar years

The beginning of the first Republic was accompanied by the first experience of open hostility towards the Church and Catholics by a considerable part of the Czech public and elite of the new State. Though one may object that this hostility towards Christians was based not on religion but on the anti-clerical attitude of the State and society towards the role of the Catholic Church in the Austrian Monarchy that had just fallen apart, the reason for this hostility is hard to discern from the ways it was expressed. Just six days after the declaration of Czechoslovak independence on 28 October 1918, the Baroque Marian column, on the main square in the Old Town of Prague was torn down.143 It had stood right next to a modern statue group of Huss, which had been erected only three years earlier as a settling of accounts with the Catholic tradition of the Czech nation. Priests were verbally and physically attacked in the streets, and the slogan ‘After Vienna, Rome too must be tried and sentenced!’ was heard. A large part of Church property was expropriated in the land reform.144 The anti-Catholic atmosphere did not, however, automatically lead to people rushing to join the non-Catholic Churches. Though the membership of the Catholic Church declined to seventy per cent of the population of the Bohemian Lands, the only Church to profit

143 This work of Baroque architecture was erected in thanksgiving when the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had come to an end. There have recently been debates about its possibly now being erected again on the same place.

144 The reform was intended to strengthen the small-holders, and it affected mainly the nobility. Unlike expropriation by the Communist regime, however, this entailed compensation for the previous owners.

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as a result was the Czechoslovak, when about 1.5 million formerly registered Catholics joined it.

Criticism of the Catholic Church tended to appear as criticism of Christianity per se. For example, in his Jed z Judeje (The Judaean poison, 1905–06), the influential writer and politician, Josef Svatopluk Machar (1864–1942), who was Inspector General of the Czechoslovak Army, reproaches Christianity for having, with its pessimism and fondness for suffering, spoiled the life-affirming sensation of classical antiquity, and in his work Golgotha (1901) he criticized the misuse of religion. He believed that religion was an outmoded stage of human development, and that the mission of the elite was to help the masses to overcome the religious mentality and to emancipate them from religion. Instead, it was necessary to return to the ideals of the pre-Christian society of classical antiquity and to the healthy natural virtues of the ancient peoples.

Although there was no constitutionally enshrined separation of Church and State in the First Republic, the standing of the Church in society was weak compared to what it had been before, particularly in the towns and amongst the intellectual elite. At the official level, too, the Czechoslovak Republic did not conclude a concordat with the Vatican. Various anti-Church incidents took place, the best known of which was in 1925, when, on the newly legislated holiday commemorating Huss’s death at the stake, President Masaryk hung out the Hussite flag (a red chalice on a black background) at Prague Castle, the presidential seat. In protest, the papal nuncio temporarily left the country, and so did several important prelates. Though Masaryk’s calling on people to defect from the Catholic Church met with little response, it left an unpleasant aftertaste and misunderstanding.

In the 1930s, the situation rapidly improved thanks to the Church’s having adapted to the new regime, and thanks to the coming of age of new Catholic clerical and lay elites, who accepted the new State as their own. A symbolic moment was the millennium of the martyrdom of St Wenceslas, the enduring ruler and patron of the Bohemian Lands, and, in connection with this anniversary, the completion of St Vitus’ Cathedral, Prague, in 1929. The Great Depression and the social engagement of the Churches, as well as the threat to Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany, then papered over the ideological disagreements and contributed to the integration of Christians into the Czechoslovak State and society, which in spirit were predominantly lay, more agnostic and progressive than atheist.

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The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

In the period from the Munich Agreement in late September1938 to Allied Liberation in early May 1945, two important events affected the relations between the Church, the State, and society. Immediately after the acceptance of the terms of the Munich accord and the ceding of the largely German areas in the border regions to the Third Reich, disillusion and scepticism took hold in the rump Czechoslovakia. Amongst Catholics this took the form of an awakening of Ultramontanists and authoritarian sentiments amongst some of the intellectual elite, who perceived the crisis of the Czechoslovak state as a consequence of its anticlericalism, liberalism, and parliamentary democracy. They promoted the idea of a non-secular State inclined towards Catholicism and a corporate State. They often scathingly criticized prominent public figures whose position was, they argued, derived from political patronage; some of this criticism was antisemitic. Although the period from the Munich Agreement to the German occupation (now often referred to as the Second Republic) lasted less than six months, it greatly strained and compromised Christianity.145

With the declaration of Slovak independence on 14 March 1939, the German invasion of the Bohemia and Moravia on the following day, and the declaration of the Protectorate on the day after that, the situation changed. As in Germany, here too there were attacks against ecclesiastical institutions, including the confiscation of buildings, the conscription of divinity students to do forced labour in the Reich, and many other measures that limited the activities of the Churches. As in other occupied countries, so too in the Bohemian Lands, the Catholic clergy was perceived as an important part of the national elite and was therefore seen by the Nazis as an obstacle to their plans to make Czechs work in factories and farms for the German war effort. In November 1939, the Nazis closed down Czech universities, greatly restricted access to secondary schools, and closed down Jesuit grammar schools in Prague and in Velehrad, south Moravia, and they also began to persecute individual Christians and whole groups as well.

During the war almost 500 Catholic priests were imprisoned in Nazi jails and concentration camps, 76 of whom died there or shortly after liberation. Interned in the Dachau concentration camp were 143 Czech Catholic priests and 16 Protestant pastors. Among them were Josef Beran, a future Archbishop of Prague, and Štěpán Trochta, a future Bishop of Litoměřice. The religious orders were also seriously affected, including the Benedictines of the Emmaus Abbey, in Prague, who were deported to a concentration camp; Abbot Arnošt Vykoukal (1879–1942) and Father Miloslav Filip (1910–1942) did not survive the ordeal. Eight friars of the Order of the Hospitallers of St John of God from the Na Františku 145 See Med, Literární život ve stínu Mnichova.

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monastery and hospital, Prague, were also sent to the Dachau concentration camp; three of them did not survive. Premonstratensians from the monastery in Nová Říše, on the border of Bohemia and Moravia, were falsely accused and imprisoned. The Gestapo also selected its victims from the ranks of the local German religious communities, for example, Benedictines from Broumov Abbey, north-east Bohemia, and Cistercians from the Vyšší Brod Abbey, in southernmost Bohemia – these friars had refused to join the celebrations welcoming Adolf Hitler, and their abbot had made no secret of his distaste for Nazi ideology.146 The reasons for the persecution were therefore not only national or political. In total, 195 Bohemian priests whose main language was German were persecuted by the Nazis; 23 of them died as a result.147

A well-known example is Josef Štemberka (1869–1942), a priest who was preparing to go into retirement, but was waiting for his successor in Lidice, just west of Prague, when the whole village was to be razed, in 1942, as part of the retribution for the assassination of the Acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. In view of his advanced age and his being a priest, Štemberka was offered a chance to leave; instead, he voluntarily went with the other men of the village to the mass execution. Another important figure at this time was the Prague Augustinian, Augustin Schubert OSA (1902–1942), one of the few members of the German-speaking community who did not succumb to the Nazi ideology of ‘Heim ins Reich’ (Back Home in the Reich) and defended the idea of maintaining a democratic Czechoslovakia and Czech-German rapprochement; for his critical attitude to the neo-pagan ideology of the Third Reich, he was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died.

Although the national and State aspects naturally played a role, the main aspect of the resistance of the Czech and German Christian resistance to the Nazis, and their subsequent repression, was their rejection of Nazi ideology, including its racism, totalitarianism, and conception of the State and man. It was because of this fundamental irreconcilable clash of the views of man that the Nazi regime systematically suppressed the Churches here from the start, to weaken and control them. Though the persecution was massive and brutal, the regime lasted only six years; the Communist regime that followed would last almost 41 years.

146 For an overview of the memoirs discussing the Nazi persecution of the clergy, see Stříbrný, ‘Katolická církev’, pp. 88–89.

147 Ibid., p. 81, including, on p. 89, an overview of German works on the topic, for example, Helmuth Moll (ed.), Zeugen für Christus: Das Deutsche Martyrologium des 20. Jahrhunderts, Paderborn, 1999. See also František Vašek and Zdeněk Štěpánek, Trnitá cesta moravského duchovenstva (1938–1945), Brno, 2003.

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The years of limited democracy with authoritarian elements, 1945–48

After the war, to prevent the appointment of an unsuitable candidate, the Vatican preferred to leave the archiepiscopal see in Prague vacant following the death of Cardinal Karel Kašpar (1870–1941). The suffering the Occupation brought led to a consolidation of the Czechs. Having been incarcerated together in concentration camps also led to some reconciliation between those Christians and, for example, leading members of the left-wing parties. The senior posts in the Church were taken up by members of the new generation, often people who had proved themselves or been imprisoned or both during the Occupation. The prestige of the Churches, from whose ranks many resistance fighters and victims of the Nazi regime had come, was quite high.148 Nevertheless, even at this time, signs of future problems began to appear.149

Both the spontaneous and the organized ‘transfers’ (expulsions) of the Germans were clearly acts of violence against Christians as well. Apart from people whose anti-Nazi credentials could be demonstrated, the whole German-speaking population was included in the forced transfers to Germany and Austria. The first months after the war in particular were accompanied by much violence, including the murder of priests, monks, and nuns whose main language was German. A well-known example is the murder of two Benedictine monks from Broumov Abbey, which was committed by members of the Revolutionary Guard in the village of Šonov, near Náchod, north-east Bohemia, in the summer of 1945. In this case and many others, it is clear that these people did not become the targets of brutal violence only because they were German; rather, they were attacked primarily because they were Christian, members of the Church. The departure of thousands of German priests and nuns, as well as lay believers – and it should be noted that people in the German areas were generally more religious than those in the Czech areas – greatly weakened not only the Church but also Christianity in the country. To this day, the newly settled areas have yet to recover socially, economically, culturally, or in matters related to religion.

It was difficult for the Church to retain the convents and monasteries that had previously been occupied by German nuns and monks, but gradually succeeded in stabilizing the situation. Even the land reform and the confiscation of farmland that it entailed150 did not present a fundamental problem to the Church, though the political campaign for land reform employed historically motivated anti-Church slogans. In the post-war enthusiasm, these warning signs were overlooked, and the

148 Stanislav Balík and Jiří Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu 1945–1989, Brno, 2007, p. 15.149 See Václav Vaško, Neumlčená: Kronika katolické církve v Československu po druhé světové válce, 2 vols, Prague, 1990.150 See Milena Janišová and Karel Kaplan (eds), Katolická církev a pozemková reforma 1945–1948: Dokumentace, Prague

and Brno, 1995.

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bishops sought to remain strictly neutral and to avoid intervening in the political struggles of these years during which it was decided whether Czechoslovakia would join the Eastern bloc. One should recall that the Soviet Army was not based on Czechoslovak territory and that the government coalition comprised four parties, including the Czechoslovak People’s Party (one of the two main Czech Catholic parties before the war, and the only one afterwards). With the exception of a number of intellectuals, however, the Church hierarchy preferred not to enter the ideological fray, partly in the belief that a developed country like Czechoslovakia could not be Sovietized.

Communist persecution of the Church

The situation quickly changed following the Communist takeover in late February 1948, which began the era of the totalitarian State. The Communist regime needed some time to become stable. First, it settled old scores with its political rivals, and acquired a monopoly of power, controlling the State, the politicians, the police, and the armed forces. Once it had succeeded at that, the period of feigned tolerance, symbolized, for example, by Klement Gottwald’s (1896–1953) request to have the Te Deum service held while he was sworn into office in June 1948, came to an end, and the period of persecution began. The reason was simple: the Churches represented the only part of society which had continued to escape supervision and surveillance by the Communist State, and were the only legally existing institutions and organizations that kept the Communists from gaining a complete monopoly of ideology.151

The assault on the Catholic Church took place in several waves and directions. For this purpose, the Communist government set up a special commission of the most important ministers, called the Church Six.152 Next, a State Office for Church Affairs (Státní úřad pro věci církevní) was established.153 The attack was supposed to be led by all the Communist security forces at once, directed by the Party institutions and of course the secret police (StB). In 1956, the Office was closed down and its jurisdiction was transferred to the Ministry of Education and Culture and, mainly, to a network of regional and district secretaries of Church affairs, who de facto took decisions about the allocation of priests to parishes.

Gradually, the regime succeeded in getting the whole Church under its control, and the clergy were divided into three categories to suit the totalitarian State. The first category comprised the so-called ‘Progressive’ priests, who were ready

151 On their relations, see Karel Kaplan, Stát a církev v Československu v letech 1948–1953, Prague and Brno, 1993. 152 See Marie Bulínová, Milena Janišová, and Karel Kaplan (eds), Církevní komise ÚV KSČ 1949–1951: Edice dokumentů,

vol. 1: Církevní ‘šestka’ (duben 1949–březen 1950), Prague and Brno, 1994.153 Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, pp. 20–21, 29–34.

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to collaborate with the regime in official associations; one by one, they soon took over top posts in the Church, university faculties, chapters, and other key offices. The second category consisted of the silent majority of the clergy who were willing to make the necessary compromise if it meant they could carry out their priestly mission.154 Using a combination of pressures and promises, the regime sought to manipulate them to carry out Communist policy. The last of the categories comprised clergy who refused to yield to regime pressure; for them, the regime prepared monasteries and convents as concentration and work camps, organized show trials, and applied draconic punishments, including imprisonment and the death penalty. The StB sought to have many agents and informers in all three categories.155

The regime’s first ploy was to create a national Church, which, separated from Rome, could be manipulated more easily. To confuse the clergy and the faithful it was called Catholic Action (Katolická akce), whose name was similar to that of an interwar initiative of Pope Pius XI’s. Even so, the operation did not quite meet expectations. The regime was more successful in creating collaborationist associations of priests, who, out of fear, opportunism, careerism, or responsibility to their flocks, accepted membership in organizations. Among them was the Party-inspired Peace Movement of the Catholic Clergy (Mírové hnutí katolického duchovenstva, established in 1950), which, in 1969, was replaced by the Pacem in terris Association of Catholic Clergy (colloquially known as the pax terriers). The best-known collaborator-priest was Josef Plojhar (1902–1981), who was involved in bringing the Czechoslovak People’s Party under control. He became its Chairman and the longest serving government minister (1948–68) in Communist Czechoslovakia. While he was Minister of Health, for example, a liberal abortion law was passed in 1957. Although the Church canons punished him, for example, with excommunication, he continued to pose as a priest, and the bishops were unable to get him dismissed.156

The Communist regime first began a series of apparent negotiations on future relations between Church and State. After the bishops discovered that their private meetings were being monitored by the secret police, and after the first acts of repression, for instance, the limiting of Church schools and periodicals, the bishops issued a pastoral letter, ‘At a Time of Great Tribulation’ (‘V hodině veliké zkoušky’), which, however, few of the intimidated priests read.157 Thanks to their knowledge of the structure and mentality of the Church, the Communists

154 For example, from 1949 onwards, the obligation to swear an oath of allegiance to the republic and its ‘people’s democracy’.

155 For the means and motives of priests’ collaborating with the Communist regime, including an international comparison, see the articles in Salve: Revue pro teologii a duchovní život 21 (2011), no. 1.

156 See Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, pp. 124–52.157 Ibid., p. 23. See also Jiří Hanuš and Jan Stříbrný (eds), Stát a církev v roce 1950, Brno, 2000.

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decided that one of their first steps would be to eliminate the bishops. Because they did not want to draw attention to the bishops in a show trial, or make them into martyrs, they chose instead to intern practically all the diocesan bishops, completely isolating them from their colleagues, by moving them from one secret location to another.158 In their place, the Communists installed compliant vicars capitular (diocesan administrators), but the office itself was run by Communist secretaries of Church affairs, who also took decisions on personnel questions. After a series of provocations, the Communists also succeeded in breaking off diplomatic relations with the Holy See and expelling its representatives from Czechoslovakia in March 1950.159

An important aspect of the Communist struggle against the Church and religion was the confiscation of all Church property except for churches and parish buildings. This was followed by a special 1949 law, by which the regime committed itself to financing the material needs of the Church. Under this law, the priests became completely dependent on the Communist State, which could, in the form of State Consent for the Performance of Priestly Duties, at any time stop paying their salaries and prevent them from serving the Church. If someone was discovered to be working independently of State-regulated institutions, he could face imprisonment for the alleged ‘obstruction of State supervision of the Church’.160 From the late 1940s onwards, particularly in the 1950s, and the 1960s, State repression often included accusations of spying for the Vatican, which could result in a life sentence or even the death penalty.

By the autumn of 1949, the regime had drafted legislation totally subordinating the Church to the State and enabling State intervention in internal Church affairs. Since the State had total control over the justice system and the police, there was no recourse or appeal against Communist injustice. The faculties of theology and the diocesan seminaries were closed down, together with Church schools, for example, those of the Redemptorists and the Salesians. Instead, there was only one faculty of theology for the Bohemian Lands, and it was controlled by the State; it was also symbolically separated from Charles University, in Prague, and relocated to the town of Litoměřice. By putting a quota on the number of theology students and ensuring a collaborationist teaching staff, the regime strictly controlled the school. Consequently, the bishops and religious superiors of the orders initially forbade people from studying there.

Another blow followed when, in early 1950, the Communist regime misused an unexplainable event. In December 1949, in the unimportant rural parish of Čihošť, in east-central Bohemia, the crucifix on the altar began to sway during

158 In Bohemia, only one diocesan bishop remained in place, Mořic Pícha (1869–1956), who was old, sick, and alone in the bishop’s palace in Hradec Králové.

159 See Halas, Fenomén Vatikán, pp. 595–600. 160 Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, pp. 26–33.

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a sermon given by the local priest, Josef Toufar. Shortly afterwards, the secret police opened an investigation, followed by the prosecution of Toufar. After a month of interrogations, he was beaten to death on 25 February 1950, even though he had never seen the ‘miracle’, which has to this day never been properly explained.161 In this operation, several other important Church representatives were arrested and accused of being agents of the Vatican and the CIA who were manipulating believers, and they were consequently sentenced to many years in prison.

Similarly, three innocent Catholic priests were sentenced to death in the ‘Babice Affair’, during which, in the Vysočina region, in July 1951, a secret policeman provoked local farmers to create a resistance group and then to murder several Communist officials.162 The aim of these police provocations was to break the bonds between the local clergy and the farmers during the collectivization of agriculture, when the Communists forced all the private farmers to give up their lands and join Soviet-style collectives. Because they were still a natural moral authority in a number of rural areas, the Catholic clergy were criminalized and many ended up in prison or doing manual labour in towns.

The regime led a ruthless propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church, in the Press, on the radio (and later television), in films, belles-lettres, and particularly in school. Not only did it use aspects typical of the struggle against the Churches in all countries where the Communists had taken power, but it also employed the interpretation of Czech history is discussed in the introductory part of this book. The Communists depicted the Church as the national enemy from time immemorial, the vehicle for reactionary thinking, the ally of the nobility and the Germans. The Church, the nobility, and the Germans were depicted as the greatest enemies of the Czechs, with diabolical characteristics, against whom only the Communist Party and the mighty Soviet Union could protect the population. The consequences of this operation affected not only the Catholic Church but also Christianity and religion as a whole; even religious figures of authority were presented in a distorted way, for example, Huss as a social reformer and nationalist and Comenius as a pantheistic humanist. Communist propaganda claimed that these figures were Christians only because of the times they had lived in; today, it was claimed, they would definitely be Communists. The propaganda claimed the same about the hundreds of priests who had been engaged in national and social movements for greater Czech cultural autonomy under Austrian rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and were therefore, unlike the other clergy, at least ‘patriotic priests’.

161 The event inspired ten books and a television film. For the most recent and most complete critical biography of Toufar, see Miloš Doležal, Jako bychom dnes měli zemřít, Pelhřimov, 2012.

162 Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, pp. 119–21.

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In April 1950, the regime launched the notorious ‘Operation K’ (K as in klášter, monastery).163 In the course of a single day, all the monks who were still in monasteries, with the exception of the Brothers Hospitallers of St John of God, were taken into detention. This logistically difficult operation, involving the arrest of a total of 1,240 monks, with the participation of the police, the Army, and the People’s Militia, was cynically explained as being for the protection of the monks against the ‘anger of the people’. The operation aimed to deprive the Church not only of a considerable part of its elite, but also to confiscate the movable and immovable property of the orders and to send their members to do forced labour for an unlimited period in concentration-camp-like monasteries or, later, as part of the Czechoslovak Army pioneer corps (a disciplinary unit, the pomocné technické prapory – PTP), in which they toiled for the Communist regime for between three and four years.

In order to provide ideological justification for this operation, the Communists, on the Stalinist model, organized one of the three largest Czechoslovak show trials of the period, involving superiors and important monks. In all, ten prelates of the monastic orders were arrested and tortured, for example, with hallucinogens, and were, on the basis of forced confessions, eventually sentenced to many years in prison, including life, for treason and espionage. The sentences were delivered precisely a week before the launch of Operation K.164

The measures against the convents were implemented more slowly, but were equally thorough. There were more than 7,500 nuns in more than 500 convents in the Bohemian Lands. Since the work of these nuns could rarely be substituted for by laymen and did not seem as threatening to the regime as that of the monks, the Communists first excluded them from the school system and social work and then sought to demoralize them and force them to leave the orders. It is therefore admirable how extremely devoted the nuns remained to the Church and that almost no nuns were secret-police informers. Nevertheless, Operation Ř (for řeholnice, nuns) resulted in emptying out convents not involved in charity work, and the internment of more than 4,000 nuns in concentration camps from July to September 1950, where they toiled in agriculture and industry. The women’s orders, unlike the men’s, were not banned outright, but existed in a legal vacuum, and it was almost impossible for them to take on candidates for the novitiate. In addition to the official convents, a secret network of novices and convents existed in this period.165

163 For more on this, see the volume of primary sources, Karel Kaplan (ed.), Akce K – likvidace klášterů v roce 1950: Dokumenty a přehledy 2 pts, Prague, 1993.

164 For all the sentences, see Vojtěch Vlček, Perzekuce mužských řádů a kongregací komunistickým režimem 1948–1964, Olomouc, 2004.

165 See Vlček (ed.), Ženské řehole za komunismu.

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A consequence of Communist policy was that all religious expression was pushed into the churches and the purely private sphere. In general, the regime achieved a monopoly of power over the public sphere and the symbols and values promoted there (in celebrations, music, film, television, and the speeches of politicians). Religion thus became a tolerated means of satisfying the individual religious needs of the politically and intellectually less enlightened members of the population. Gradually, public celebrations, such as the Feast of Corpus Christi, were banned, and even the previously always popular midnight Mass at Christmas was restricted. At Easter and Christmas, the regime emphasized the pagan roots, both alleged and real, of these holidays. The traditional central European custom of the Christ Child bringing the presents at Christmas was meant to be supplanted by the Russian Santa-Claus-like figure, Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost). The Soviet policy of removing religion from the public space provided a model that was faithfully followed in Czechoslovakia.

Lay Christians were also persecuted. They were denied access to teaching or other occupations, and were threatened with sanctions against their children. In 1950, a civil ceremony became compulsory if one wished to marry, and the original Christian framework of everyday life and festivities was systematically substituted for by Communist ceremonies and symbols, such as the ‘welcoming of new-born citizens’ instead of infant Baptism and May Day parades instead of Church processions. Probably the hardest hit were Christian farmers, who were often forced to move to the borderlands (to take the place of the expelled Germans) and saw their farms confiscated, and Catholic intellectuals, who had to reconcile themselves to doing manual labour, provided they did not end up in prison or labour camps, which happened to most Catholic writers; they had to abandon any hope of studying or working at a university, except in scientific or technical fields.

The Protestant Churches had a different status. Since there were far fewer practising Protestants than practising Catholics, and their leaders were not as staunchly anti-Communist as the Catholic Church during the pontificate of Pius XII (fl. 1939–58), the Communists generally felt no need to come down so hard on them; initially, they even played a double game with the Protestants (promising that they could take over as the main national Church), the Communists won them over to collaborate with the regime. They succeeded completely in this with the Czechoslovak Church, whose representatives supported regime measures and even became Party members. They did so not only out of fear or opportunism, but also because of the Utopian vision that they would succeed in ‘baptizing’ the Communist movement and would create a superior synthesis of Christianity and Communism. But immediately after consolidating its position, in about 1952,

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the regime quickly dispelled these illusions and ruthlessly put the Czechoslovak Church under its control.166

The Protestant Churches, however, still outwardly played the role of furnishing evidence that freedom of religion was not suppressed in Czechoslovakia. Also for the purposes of gathering intelligence, the Communist regime supported the membership of non-Catholic Churches of ecumenical organizations and tolerated studying abroad. The best known figure here is Josef Lukl Hromádka (1889–1969), the most important Czechoslovak Protestant theologian and thinker of his day, a sincere critic of modern capitalist consumer society, and an advocate of Communist ideas. That, however, did not mean that most of the Protestant Churches and their clergy were not in silent opposition to the regime. A small group of Protestant pastors and intellectuals, for example, later became Charter 77 signatories or were involved in other activities opposed to the Communist regime.

Despite persecution by the regime, Church life was not completely extinguished. Within the State institutions, traditional pastoral care continued, even if with continuously declining numbers of the faithful and the diminishing administration of the basic Sacraments of baptism and matrimony. The teaching of religion was also quickly declining; parents did not want to lessen their children’s chances of future education and employment by sending them to Church-organized religious instruction. Other areas of Church life, such as publishing and charity work, tended just barely to survive, and were not really parts of active Church life.

Christianity, however, drew from its experience of persecution, which brought together interesting people from across the spectrum of the Church, and also representatives of non-Catholic Churches and other schools of thought. The bitter experience of being violently separated from the well-functioning institutions led the imprisoned Czech hierarchy of the Catholic Church to new ways of thinking about the core of Christianity, which in many areas anticipated some of the results of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). After their return from prison, particularly after the general amnesties granted by the President of Czechoslovakia in 1960, 1962, and 1965, groups and larger institutions of the Church and the orders developed in parallel to the official Church, and sought to ensure that Church life would continue. Practically none of them could return to their mission as clergymen, and had to do manual work instead. Thanks to the underground ‘Mexican faculties’,167 new clergymen were ordained in prisons and outside

166 For more on this, see the important recent publications Jaroslav Hrdlička, Život a dílo prof. Františka Kováře: Příběh patriarchy a učence, Brno, 2007, and idem, Patriarcha Dr. Miroslav Novák: Život mezi svastikou a rudou hvězdou, Brno, 2010. These two works show, in addition, that a number of clergymen of the Czechoslovak Church also were victims of the Communist regime, or actively came out against it.

167 The Vatican granted the persecuted local Church a dispensation to ignore certain regulations of canon law if their observation meant threatening to expose the local Church and would lead to its destruction. The name ‘Mexican faculties’ is derived from the powers granted by Pope Pius XI to the Church in Mexico when it was being persecuted in the 1920s and 1930s.

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the country, mainly monks and students of theology, whose training had been interrupted in 1949/50.

In other countries, several centres of Czech Catholics in exile were established right after the Communist takeover. They intensively joined in providing spiritual and material assistance not only to emigrants but also to local Catholics, which, of course, meant risking even accusations of espionage. Of particular importance was the centre around the Nepomucene Pontifical College in Rome (the Bohemian College in Rome), where in normal times, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the future Czech elite of the Catholic Church studied. A number of important figures, such as Karel Vrána (1925–2004) and Tomáš Špidlík (1919–2010), found themselves stuck there during the Communist takeover. They too tried to help the Czech Roman Catholic Church, for example, by publishing devotional literature and smuggling it into Czechoslovakia. Also of great importance were the broadcasts not only of Vatican Radio, but also of the Voice of America from Vienna and Radio Free Europe from Munich, which had their Christian desks.

The ‘liberalization’ of Czechoslovak Communist policy, which began in the mid-1960s, was perceived with scepticism by many Czech Catholics. After all, the last Catholic priests and monks had only recently been released from their sentences of fifteen to twenty years. Together with the return of these people, two other circumstances played a role in reviving the local Church. The regime had after all loosened its grip and, thanks in part to Vatican diplomacy, it allowed several diocesan bishops to return to office. Though Cardinal Beran had left for Rome in 1965 and never returned, Bishop Trochta was able to take office in Litoměřice and Josef Hlouch (1902–1972) was made the Bishop of České Budějovice. In Prague, Bishop František Tomášek (1899–1992), known for his compromises with the regime, became an administrator.168 By contrast, Karel Otčenášek (1920–2011) never returned to his office as Bishop of Hradec Králové after the Soviet-led military intervention in August 1968.

Another factor was the general enthusiasm about the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council. A number of the impulses it provided resonated with the ideas about faith which were shared by formerly imprisoned theologians and priests, such as Josef Zvěřina (1913–1990), Antonín Mandl (1917–1972), and Zdeněk Bonaventura Bouše (1918–2002). A movement, called ‘A Work for Conciliar Renewal’ (Dílo koncilové obnovy), was born, and was promoted by a new periodical, Via, which published articles reflecting Western theological thinking; to this day, it has remained an original source of reflections on Church life in a changed society.169 All of that also came to a quick end with the arrival of

168 For the relevant changes in Communist policy, see Jaroslav Cuhra, Církevní politika KSČ a státu v letech 1969–1972, Řada Sešity, vol. 32, Prague, 1999.

169 Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, pp. 44–47.

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Warsaw Pact tanks and the subsequent reconsolidation of hard-line Communism, which the regime called ‘Normalization’. This short period, however, had brought a quickly and successfully carried-out liturgical reform, whose smooth reception by the priests and the believers amongst the public demonstrates that the times were ripe for this. The brief experience of relative freedom, the opportunity for non-conformist figures to teach at faculties of theology, and the publishing of a number of books in the years between 1967 and 1970 greatly helped the Czech Roman Catholic Church to survive the next two decades of darkness.

After the consolidation of the regime in the early 1970s, a new stage in the persecution of the Church began with the aim of completely wiping out Christianity in Communist Czechoslovakia. Whereas in Poland a modus vivendi seemed to exist between the Church and the regime, in Czechoslovakia it was meant to be a modus moriendi for one generation. The work of the Church was again restricted. After the deaths of Trochta and Hlouch, their two bishoprics were occupied only by vicars capitular who collaborated with the Communists. The collaborationist Pacem in terris Association of Catholic Priests was re-established. The Vatican frowned upon compromises with the Communist regime, for example, in the appointment of Bishop Vrána as the diocesan administrator in Olomouc.

The experience of persecution in the 1950s, together with the experience of the Soviet-led military intervention in 1968 and the occupation that followed it,170 raised fears amongst some members of the Church about the regime attempting a final solution to the religion question, including the deportation of priests and lay Christians to the Soviet Union and the destruction of all expression of religious life. An underground Church was formed around the secretly ordained bishop, Felix Davídek (1921–1988), who had been a political prisoner for fourteen years. It included parallel institutions for education, administration, and the performance of the Sacraments. Davídek gave support to his ideas with reference to the ‘Mexican faculties’, which, influenced by the theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), he further ‘evolved’. In order to keep the Communist secret police guessing and to ensure the continued administration of the Sacraments, he gradually ordained dozens of married men as priests and also as bishops.171 Two new centres were quickly established: the so-called ‘Prague community’ around Bishop Jan Konzal (b. 1935) and an east Bohemian centre, led by Fridolín Zahradník (b. 1935).

170 Before August 1968, post-war Czechoslovakia was the only Eastern bloc country without a Soviet garrison.171 For more on this, see Franz Gansrigler, Jeder war ein Papst: Geheimkirchen in Osteuropa, Salzburg, 1991, and Felix

Corley, ‘The Secret Clergy in Communist Czechoslovakia’, Religion, State and Society 21 (1993), 2, pp. 171–93. For considerably more complete and recent works, see Petr Fiala and Jiří Hanuš, Koinótés: Felix M. Davídek a skrytá církev, Brno, 1994; idem, Skrytá církev: Felix M. Davídek a společenství Koinótés, Brno, 1999; and Ondřej Liška, Církev v podzemí a společenství Koinótés, Brno, 1999.

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A man bordering on genius, Davídek ultimately dared to take the revolutionary step of ordaining women, even appointing Ludmila Javorová (b. 1932) his vicar general.172 Despite a rift, which harmed the underground Church internally, its activity in all three centres survived the twenty years of Communist terror and constitutes a heroic chapter in the history of the Church of the Czechs. The underground Church was definitely not completely separated from the official and semi-official institutions of the Church; for example, another clandestine bishop, Stanislav Krátký (1922–2010), played an important role as an intermediary. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of mistrust created by the years of persecution, together with a lack of sensitivity by the Czech bishops and the Vatican after the Changes of 1989, resulted in only part of this underground Church being integrated into the Czech Roman Catholic Church.

Apart from these clandestine communities, another large network of Church groups existed throughout the years of Normalization. The orders had their clandestine novices and studies, thanks to which they were able quickly to resume their work after 1989. The Salesian Province developed widespread, unique activity called ‘cottages’, where, in the guise of summer camps, it brought up youth in Christian values. Former political prisoners, underground priests now retired, such as Josef Zvěřina and Oto Mádr (1917–2011), educated clandestine circles of laymen throughout the country and, using a mimeograph, secretly disseminated Christian literature. Although the persecution continued, and the number of priests and lay believers continued to decrease, and Church buildings continued to fall into disrepair, and thousands of historical monuments vanished for ever, the Church in Bohemia and Moravia got a second wind, particularly in the 1980s.

A number of priests joined the Charter 77 human rights movement, putting forward not just the demands of lay society but also those of the Church and the religious in general. Perhaps the most important of them was the petition for religious freedom, which was written by an ordinary farmer from Moravia, Augustin Navrátil. In 1987, he set out 31 points, concerning, for example, religious freedom, the separation of Church and State, and the return of Church property. The petition was signed by 600,000 people. A similarly important expression of Church life and the will not to give in to the Communist regime was the pilgrimage to Velehrad in 1985, to mark the 1000th anniversary of the death of St Methodius. It had 200,000 participants, many of whom whistled their disapproval at the Communist officials and prevented them from addressing the pilgrims.

172 See Miriam Therese Winter, Out of the Depths: The Story of Ludmila Javorova, Ordained Roman Catholic Priest, New York, 2001.

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Expressions of Church renewal were increasingly frequent in the 1980s, for example, the publishing of Christian samizdat periodicals.173

In the 1980s, Cardinal Tomášek, the Archbishop of Prague, also underwent a personal change.174 He surrounded himself with a group of nonconformist priests from the older generation, including Zvěřina and Mádr, as well as younger, secretly ordained priests like Tomáš Halík (b. 1948) and Petr Piťha (b. 1938). Together with them, Tomášek prepared and announced the programme ‘A Decade of National Spiritual Renewal’, every year of which was to be dedicated to one topic, for example, education, under the auspices of a patron saint of Bohemia. The unexpected climax of these efforts was the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia (1211–1282) two weeks before the collapse of the Communist regime, recalling the fulfilment of the old prophecy linking the salvation of the nation with the celebration of this Přemyslid princess. Thanks also to his now firm refusal to be misused by the collapsing regime, Cardinal Tomášek became a symbol of the democratic revolution of 1989.175 As it had done after the Second World War, the Church now emerged from a period of persecution weakened in personnel and as an institution, but with great prestige.

Is the history of the Church in Bohemia and Moravia a history of persecution?

From our brief overview, it should be clear that one can easily interpret the twentieth-century history of the Church in the Bohemian Lands as a history of persecution. This is particularly evident, when one realizes that the Church emerged from the period extremely weakened and damaged and that its standing in Czech society is today threatened. The public has a low opinion of the Churches in general, and the Catholic Church in particular is a popular target of frequently coarse criticism. The legislation on the partial restitution of Church property and on a new form of relationship between the Churches and the State, which was passed in 2012, aroused much negative feeling towards the Churches and Christianity, and political parties, such as the Social Democratic Party, have not resisted the temptation to use anti-Church rhetoric to mobilize their voters.

To be sure, the Communist persecution of the Churches was the worst of all the persecutions; it lasted longest and was the most thorough. It was planned

173 Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, pp. 56–59.174 See Jan Hartmann, Bohumil Svoboda, and Václav Vaško, Kardinál Tomášek: Svědectví o dobrém katechetovi, bojácném

biskupovi a statečném kardinálovi, Prague, 1994.175 For the importance of Cardinal Tomášek in the Normalization period and the transition to democracy, see Aleš

Opatrný (ed.), Význam kardinála Tomáška v období normalizace a přechodu k demokracii: sborník textů ze sympozia ke 100. výročí narození kardinála Tomáška, Prague, 2000.

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by the State, ideologically motivated, and made use of all the instruments of power in an effort to de-Christianize what was once a mostly Catholic country. Nevertheless, the Communists mainly worsened and accelerated trends that had previously been present here and were in the same period also substantially weakening the practice of religion in the free countries of the West. The years of Communist indoctrination left an important residue in mentalities, education, and public opinion. To this day, one talks about the persecution of the Churches in the Bohemian Lands from the standpoint of the history of the martyr Churches. But now other historical and theological interpretations are appearing, which do not consider the Communist and Nazi eras only from the position of the victims, but also see them as a consequence of, or punishment for, the lack of Christian testimony about the Christian Churches and also as a kairos, which enabled the Churches to jettison all the historically determined ballast and penetrate the core of the Christian faith. It is up to us to work our way to deeper levels of interpretation and understanding.

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7. CLERICAL COLLABORATION

WITH THE COMMUNIST REGIME

It is now time to consider in its historical context the phenomenon of priests’ and the Church ‘collaborating’ with the Communist regime, mainly with its secret police. In order to analyse and assess this fairly, one must not fail to mention the heroism of the many more people who did not collaborate, and one must not limit the discussion to the instruments of secret-police manipulation. One must also look at the mentality, education, and training with which the priests entered this stage of Church history in central Europe. To what extent were the priests prepared or unprepared for the conflict with the State? What were their chances in the struggle? And where did the pitfalls lie, which they only gradually recognized and slowly adapted to?

A Catholic clergyman’s illegitimate behaviour from the point of view of ethics and the Church could have had two basic aspects. One aspect is outward, open collaboration, that is, participation and activity in the clerical associations that openly supported the Communist regime; just because the regime considered them reliable does not mean that these people were necessarily police informers. The same is true of the clergy who took office in the official, State-controlled Church. The second aspect consists in collaboration with the secret police stemming from a number of motives and in various ways, from actively seeking information to being forced to ‘work together’. I shall now consider the preconditions that led priests to both forms of collaboration.

The historical preconditions: Established models of clerical behaviour

For centuries the priests were de facto part of the State machinery. True, they were an autonomous part, but they were part of the institutions that ran, supervised, and led European society. The Church, the State, and society together formed an indivisible whole. With a brief interruption during the Reformation and with the exception of some territories, the State tolerated the presence of only

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one confession,176 in which the Church and its ordained servants administered important sectors of society and the State.177

The Reformation did not lead only Protestant countries to subordinate their Churches to State power. The popes also rewarded individual rulers and their families for their loyalty to the Catholic Church with extensive powers over the local Churches, including the appointment of bishops, which was then only confirmed by Rome. The idea that the ruler was responsible also for the local Church and the salvation of his subjects was not new, but in the post-Reformation period it was elaborated considerably. The reforms of the Enlightenment State of the eighteenth century took this idea even further; the State used the reforms to make the operation of the institution of the Church more efficient in its territory, and to spread the Enlightenment, struggle against superstition, promote technological and economic innovations, and keep a close eye on the population by means of parish registers and other instruments.

In this period, priests had several authorities over them. Though the Church itself was important, it was only one of three superior bodies. The one that was nearer and more pressing, deciding about the priest’s income, his parish, and his church, was the church patron, usually the lord of the manor on which the parish church was located. He also took decisions, with the consent of the Church, concerning the appointment of the priest. The last of the three authorities was the State, whose edicts and laws the priest had to read out from his pulpit; the State sought to intervene in his training and checked on the content of his sermons. For generations, priests were instilled with an unquestioning respect and even reverence for the State and its representatives; for generations, they, like everyone else, were brought up with the idea that society needs strong, orderly government, and that the worst evil in the land is anarchy. In its statements, the Church used to appeal to the well-known words of the Bible, ‘For there is no authority except from God’ (Romans 13:1), with a frequency which today could almost seem blasphemous.

Reliance on the powers that be and the State increased and became profoundly rooted in the mentality of the clergy, paradoxically, in consequence of the French Revolution. The first State-led programme of systematic de-Christianization of the whole country left a large part of the population alienated from the Church and religion. The process of secularization continued. The phenomenon of anticlericalism emerged, which cast doubt on the Church’s place and role in

176 For lack of space, I must leave aside the Jewish minority, whose status and rules were completely different.177 I must also skip over the Middle Ages, when the clergy, probably for the last time, played an important role as

critics of the State authorities, and were able to debate with them and even compel powerful rulers to admit their mistakes and rectify them. The question of changes in the priesthood are considered in Tomáš Petráček, ‘Kněžství, kněží a dějiny: Několik poznámek k proměnám forem kněžského života v moderní době’, Salve 29 (2009), no. 4, pp. 25–35.

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society. Even in a confessional State of a nominally Catholic monarchy, the elite of the State gradually deprived the Church first of its monopoly, then of its control, and ultimately of its influence over the sectors of society with which it had once been entrusted by that society and State – particularly over the spheres of matrimony and schooling.

Despite these negative experiences with the State, the Church reacted to the continual decline in the number of the faithful and the deterioration of its influence by drawing close to State power and relying on maintaining the original idealized alliance of Church and State, two perfect communities, God given and predetermined, in order to lead man hand in hand to bliss in this world and to eternal salvation in the hereafter. In the public and private statements of Church representatives one perceives mistrust of human spontaneity as the predominant mentality, together with profound scepticism about the idea that social change could lead to something better, as well as the repeatedly expressed fears that without the power and support of the State the Church would not stand the test of time, and that if man is not firmly led by the Church and the State, admittedly with a bit of coercion, he will succumb to his corrupted nature and become feral.

One would certainly find, particularly amongst the lesser clergy and the cleric intellectuals, a wide range of opinions about the relationship between Church and State. But the predominant attitude, obedience to the State and the regime, was deeply rooted and typical of the vast majority of bishops, other members of the Church elite, and the clergy in general. These priests had been brought up to respect and revere the State and its representatives, and that State ceased to exist in late 1918. Their fundamental loyalty was divided, and belonged not only to faraway Rome, but also to the monarch and the other State representatives, who were the guarantors of Catholicism as the State religion and of the Church’s influence on society.

Twentieth-century changes in central European State power

The countries of central Europe changed regimes several times in quick succession. The fundamental change for the Church and its ordained servants was the end of the Catholic or, generally speaking, old confessionalized monarchies. The successor States were of various natures, but the legal and other conditions for the Church were never again what they had been in Austria-Hungary. For the Bohemian Lands, the next regime after the Republic, Nazi rule, though nasty and brutal, was at least short compared to the four decades of Communist rule and its aggressive nationalist and atheist ideology which would follow the brief

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couple of years of uncertain democracy right after the Second World War. The supremacy of the State remained, but its ideology, its vehicles, and its means of executing power changed radically. Moreover, parts of the previous legislation remained in place, which, although it involved the Church in the operation of the State, also enabled the State to intervene in Church affairs.

Neither the clergy nor the bishops were at all ready for these changes. Their life experience had not prepared them at all for life under this regime or negotiations with this new kind of State power and its representatives. For a long time the clergy continued to perceive authority as they had before; their attitude of respect and reverence for the holders of power, from the State all the way down to the local level, was deeply rooted; they had always been required to reach agreement with State power regardless of who was holding it. In the past, too, negotiations between the clergy and the bishops on the one hand and the secular authorities or representatives of the State on the other hand often involved conflict. After the democratic republic, however, a completely different kind of person had come to power in Czechoslovakia: first the Nazis, then the Communists, who did not hesitate to use brute force or break an agreement. Although on the basis of experience of previous regimes it might have seemed that all State authority was bad, since it seemed mostly to oppress and cause harm, and that the Communist was only a bit worse, the clergy were in fact now facing an adversary whose determination and methods they could for the time being mostly only guess at.

Although they go through a long, hard training (including, for many, minor seminaries), which fortified their ecclesiastical thought and devotion to the Holy See, even clergymen, laymen, monks, and nuns are not immune to changes in society. Today, one can no longer know exactly the extent of the shock to the mentality and certainties of ordinary people, let alone clergymen, which was caused by the First World War, the disintegration of values, and the advent of new ideologies. The clergy also had doubts about whether a confessionalized monarchy was the ideal form of government, even though it provided a firm framework for values, which was reflected in legislation as well. The massacres of the First World War, political confusion, social and national unrest in the successor states, and aggressive new ideologies that made great promises – all of that had a disintegrative effect also on priests, though few of them fell for any of the new ideologies. The Second World War brought about even more disintegration of traditional European values.

Before the end of the First World War, the Church had not experienced such a mass abandonment of priests from their vocation; even in the crises related to the reform movements of 1848 and 1905–10, few priests had left the clergy. The first priests left their occupation in dozens and then in hundreds to become laymen. Some, however, helped establish the new Church. This could only take

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place in the chaos of morals and values that succeeded the First World War. The clergy were also well aware of the social injustices of their day, and desired the creation of a socially just society and political stability; and in the course of the first Republic, they tired of the parliamentary democracy which, they felt, had often acted unjustly towards the Church. Many priests must have been wracked with doubt about whether they were not making a mistake, whether history was not showing the others to have been right, whether their inward or outward resistance to the values, politics, and politicians of the new system was not futile and condemned to failure from the start.

Communist Policy towards the Church

In most Communist states, the Churches were seen as the chief enemy of the people. In particular, the Catholic Church, with its leadership in Rome, and its traditions, was a thorn in the side of the new regimes. Where it was weaker, as in East Germany, the Church was not under as much pressure, and was able, for example, to serve the Church in Czechoslovakia as a source of new literature or a place to hold secret ordinations. A Church that was too strong for the regime to challenge, as in Poland, was under greater pressure in the form of infiltration and checking up from inside. Today, when considering the Catholic Church’s collaboration with, or resistance to, the State, one should bear in mind that the Communists in the Eastern bloc never succeeded in carrying out their plan of creating local ‘national’ Catholic Churches that would break away from Rome and thus be easier to manipulate and use for propaganda purposes.178

By its actions, the State was sending the priests a clear signal right from the start of the 1950s: whoever resists and does not collaborate in some way will go to prison for years, will be cast out of the new socialist society, and will end up a broken man in some inferior, marginal occupation; whoever does not resist, yet does not collaborate, will remain on the margins with no opportunity of a Church career, always threatened with having State approval withdrawn and being sent to do a secular job. By contrast, whoever complies with the regime or goes out of his way to help the regime, will move up in his career, will find money to repair his church, will be able to salvage something for the Church, and possibly use his influence and intercession to help others.

The impression of the stability of the regime also weakened the will to resist. Although many people initially assumed that Communism would not last long, especially after the death of Stalin and Gottwald (both in 1953), the regime gave the impression of being unshakeable, capable of lasting ‘for ever’. In the Eastern 178 The sole exception was the national Catholic Church in Albania, which was established in 1950.

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bloc States, irreversible changes were under way, fundamentally changing the social stratification of society, systematically destroying the traditional elite, and creating a new image of the present and the past according to a set programme. One behaves quite differently in a regime in which one can hope things will return to normal relatively soon, as, for example, during the Nazi regime once war had broken out, from the way one behaves in a regime whose oppressive rule offers no hope of change either from within or by defeat or removal from the outside.

At first the faithful did, on occasion, protect their beloved priests and refused to let the State security forces arrest them, but the brutality of the new regime soon triumphed. Gradually, it became evident that priests were collaborating with the regime, for example, in the form of pro-regime movements, but the parishioners largely ignored this. The faithful were happy that their parish had a priest; and as long as he was kind and pious they forgave him his concessions to regime, particularly if he was still able to compel his superiors to reward his collaboration with money for the clergy house or the church.

Highly placed collaborators in the garb of a priest had a good opportunity to gain something from the regime including space for Church life, publishing, helping others financially or interceding on their behalf. Such collaborators were often charismatic. Thanks to their education, piety, and Church-mindedness, a number of professors of theology enjoyed the respect and devotion of priests and students of divinity. A recently published collection of correspondence demonstrates that even a priest who had gone through the hell of Communist prisons and had no illusions about the regime or excuses for it could still befriend and appreciate a canon who had accepted a high post and had been collaborating, because, according to rules that neither he nor the other had chosen, he was behaving decently, trying to salvage for the Church what he could, even at the price of his own collaboration.179

Part of the Communists’ struggle against the Church was the systematic destruction of the priest’s image in public opinion, using both film and literature to achieve its end. The preferred method was elimination: when it proved impossible, despite all its efforts, for the regime to wipe out the last traces of the nation’s Christian past in the towns and countryside, it tried at least to squeeze the Church and all traces of it out of contemporary life. In TV series and films, no character who was meant to have positive traits would associate with a priest or go to church. If a priest appears in such works, he does so only as a problematic figure, sometimes criminal and hateful,180 or as a caricature of a ridiculous muddler, a magnanimously tolerated survival of the old days.

179 See 77 dopisů poslaných jeho Milosti: Korespondence dvou kněží v době normalizace, with a preface by Karel Herbst, Kostelní Vydří, 2008.

180 One recalls the priests and nuns in the propagandistic TV series Třicet případů majora Zemana (Thirty cases for Major Zeman).

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Aspects of priests’ collaboration

The first factor one needs to consider is the fragility of the priest’s life, the opportunities available to the regime to find a weakness in him and exploit it. Every priest, like any human being, has his weaknesses, which can be used by others by means of threats, offers, or a combination of both. To be sure, priests do not have wives and children whom they would be responsible for, but they put everything into their work, and their reputations, names, integrity are at stake. The demands made on their personal integrity by the faithful and society in general were sometimes unreasonable, showing little understanding for the human weaknesses and fragility of servants of the Lord. In this respect the regime could easily threaten to publish some real or fictitious affair to discredit the priest or, alternatively, to offer him something that they knew he was longing for.

Collaboration with the regime took various forms. Many priests accepted various kinds of collaboration as a necessary evil to ensure the continuity of service to the children of the Lord – as most people do in their own occupations. Their chief motive for collaboration was a sense of responsibility for their flock, which mattered more to them than their own conscience. They had been trained for that since their seminary days; after all, someone had to stay behind to celebrate Mass and administer the other necessary Sacraments. Many priests, furthermore, were unable to imagine another way of life or of making a living. This factor must also be fully taken into account – not everyone can reconcile himself to going to work on the assembly line; unlike most people today, a priest cannot simply ‘change jobs’. The priesthood is a mission and a calling in the original sense of the word, and many priests were not prepared to do manual labour or to lose their standing amongst their parishioners.

Those who took every opportunity to further their own careers were naturally more inclined to collaborate with the regime. Frustrated ambitions could play a decisive role in two ways. The outstanding Bible scholar Vojtěch Šanda (1873–1953), who was appointed the first Dean of the State-run Faculty of Theology at Prague, in 1950, is an example of a man who felt that the Church had wronged him, and he saw in the new regime an opportunity to gain belated satisfaction, academic titles, and achieve other long-held aspirations.181 But younger priests too saw that the regime was stable and that no change was on the horizon. Whoever considered a Church career therefore had to justify to himself how and why to

181 For a biographical sketch and Šanda’s role in establishing the faculty, see Vojtěch Novotný, Katolická teologická fakulta 1939–1990: Prolegomena k dějinám české katolické teologie druhé poloviny 20. století, Prague, 2007, esp. pp. 392–94. For more about him, see Lukáš Nosek, ‘Christologická a soteriologická analýza v díle Synopsis theologiae dogmaticae specialis od ThDr. Vojtěcha Šandy’ Diss., Charles University, Prague, 2007; idem, ‘Vojtěch Šanda jako dogmatik’, Studia theologica 11 (2009), no. 2, pp. 50–60; Tomáš Petráček, ‘Vojtěch Šanda jako biblista’, Studia theologica 13 (2011), no. 4, pp. 25–41.

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accept some form of collaboration with the regime. The regime was able to push through appointments to important Church posts, and not everyone had the will or motivation to resist.

Financial security certainly also played a role. Although the financial security of the priests in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and in the first Republic differed from parish to parish, the priests were among those who were materially secure. And this was connected with their social status and role. Mostly, however, they had no great wealth. The arrival of the new regime meant a certain pauperization of the clergy and the levelling of their incomes. Nevertheless, differences remained between parishes that were better provided for with traditional incomes and the poor parishes of the suburbs, where the priests lived in poverty. The opportunity to move to a better parish, and possibly to get a better-paying post, could be a powerful temptation, which even priests could not resist.

After the Communists confiscated Church property, priests were completely dependent on the Communist State materially. Not only their salaries, but also the repairs of churches and clergy houses were paid for from the State budget. Although the priests themselves tried to find funding, they again required the permission of State bodies, such as the historical preservation institute. There was no chance of appeal for them, nor were there any other authorities that would stand up for them against the arbitrariness of State representatives. The chronic, repeated experience of helplessness and injustice further eroded their faith in society and weakened them in the struggle to maintain their own integrity. In this period, simply remaining a decent person and not getting involved with the regime was in itself true heroism.

In the seminaries, in addition to having a firm framework of values impressed upon them, the priests were also rigorously and thoroughly trained to obey the authority of the Church and, indeed, authority in general. To whom, then, could a priest turn when approached by the secret police and compelled to collaborate? The vicar capitular and other high-ranking Church officials had been vetted by the regime. The State on the whole was hostile; even the existing clerical associations were firmly in the hands of regime supporters. Obedience to authority thus came back to haunt the Church, and it was some time before the clergy became accustomed to having only themselves and their closest friends to rely on. But that is not the whole story.

The disposition and training of the priests

Since the nineteenth century, a phenomenon has appeared which is fair to call the plebeianization of the Catholic clergy. In the previous period, most of the

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priests were sons of noble and bourgeois families. In the nineteenth century, the Church democratized access both to religious congregations of women and to the clergy. Many people in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century saw the priesthood as an opportunity to improve their social standing, to escape the vicious circle of poverty and toil on a farm, to get financial security for themselves and their relations, and to gain the respect and reverence that priests still enjoyed in those days. Whoever wished to train for the priesthood, even if his family could not have afforded to pay for it or at least not all of it, could with relative ease find a patron or religious order that would pay for his education.

It would be unfair to say that the men who became priests in order to move up in society lacked faith or had not really considered the vocation of the priesthood. People in those days had a well-developed sense of duty and professional honour, so that even if a student lacked the charisma for the vocation, he would still conscientiously discharge his clerical duties. One cannot ignore the fact, however, that people of humble origins did not have such a distinctly negative attitude towards the two new regimes (of 1945–48 and 1948–89), nor that they lacked the mental and ethical training that the members of the nobility and middle class had (who from childhood had been brought up in a fixed frame of values, tending overall to reject left-wing ideas and to respect private property), which makes the latter two classes more resistant to the pressures and temptations of totalitarian power. A man who has experienced poverty not only has greater understanding for demands for social justice, even if those are sometimes insincere; he is also more afraid of losing the social status and standard of living that he has worked hard to achieve. This should be understood not as social exclusionism but as certain dispositions, which should not be overlooked if one wants to properly understand what happened.

Concerning disposition and training, there is a difference between priests who went through seminary before 1948 and those who went through it afterwards. Priests who had been trained earlier were sent a clear message by the regime about the fate of those who had in any way tried to resist, in the form of the show trials of the late 1940s and early 1950s. After these trials, one could no longer harbour any illusions about the regime and its intentions with the Church. Many divinity students and priests did their military service as members of the pioneer corps or the regular army, where the regime broke their spirits with ghastly efficiency. The priests were thus deterred early on, and the secret police could manipulate them easily. Neither before 1950 nor afterwards had anyone prepared divinity students psychologically or spiritually for the pressure that they were put under in encounters with the secret police or the Communist secretaries of Church affairs.

Priests who had graduated from a faculty of theology that was run by the State right from the start became accustomed to making compromises in their relations

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with the State authorities. From its very founding, the status of the faculty was unclear. The faculty was under the control of the regime; students and teachers had to make small concessions to the regime; divinity students knew from the start that if they wanted to work in pastoral care they needed State permission. On the other hand, the professors and administrators at the seminary were respected priests, whose professionalism and, often, spiritual and human qualities cannot really be doubted. The impression, therefore, was that one had to get along with the regime and that this was indeed possible in certain circumstances. When even these educated and pious priests were able to justify their collaboration with the regime to themselves, God, and the Church, why, it was asked, could others not do the same? Outright collaborators who all too willingly accommodated the regime, or did so out of avarice and careerism, met with contempt; but those who ‘sacrificed themselves’ so that the Church could continue in its public work met with great tolerance.

If they wanted to force a priest to collaborate, the secret police could exploit the typical human weaknesses which even priests are not immune to. A liking for alcohol or luxury, breaching morality, breaking the vow of celibacy, homosexuality, material problems, personal debts, misappropriation of Church property, a passion for gambling – all of that made it easier for the police to compel a priest to do what they wished. A priest did not even have to be truly guilty; all that the secret police needed to discredit him was a trumped up charge of paedophilia, absolutely groundless yet sure to destroy his credibility in public and in the Church.

At other times, to get a priest to collaborate it was enough to threaten him with the withdrawal of State consent or with being sent to work in a factory, or to tell him that his relations were at risk, or to state outright that he faced possible imprisonment or violence. Some leading figures in the priesthood were forced into open or covert collaboration with the regime simply out of the fear of physical violence. In particular, priests who had already been through Gestapo interrogations and the hell of German concentration camps were prepared to do anything to avoid a similar situation. The life of a priest in a State that did not conceal its policy of systematic de-Christianization, in a deteriorating parish, watching the continuous decline in the number of faithful, with no hope of change for the better, made it easy for the secret police to conduct their perverse operations.

It should now be clear how equipped or, rather, ill-equipped Catholic priests were when confronted with the power of the State. After the Communist takeover, the priests found themselves in the proverbial lion’s den, in which they had little choice; they were in a very weak position with regard to the State. It is therefore remarkable how far the Catholic clergy as a whole were able to hold their ground in these difficult conflicts and temptations.

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8. RELATIONS BETWEEN

THE CZECHS AND THE CHURCH AFTER 1989

In the general opinion of scholars of religion, Church representatives, and people generally concerned with the topic, the Czech Republic – which after the destruction of the Jews during the Second World War and the expulsion of the Germans shortly afterwards is comparatively homogeneous ethnically – is considered the most atheist country not just in Europe but in the whole world.182 This fact was confirmed by the 2010 Czech census, which, for the first time since censuses began here, enabled citizens, if they wished, to declare their religion or confession. Of the 2.6 million people who had declared their religion to be Roman Catholic ten years before, slightly more than one million declared the same now. The results for the two main non-Catholic Churches – the Czechoslovak Hussite Church (which, until 1971, had been the Czechoslovak Church) and the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren – were even more devastating: from less than 100,000 people who had declared one of these two Churches as their confession in 2000, the numbers fell to less than 40,000 in 2010. The only growing Christian communities are the Church of Brethren (Free Reformed Church) and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but even here the statistics are not impressive: a change of 500 faithful in the course of ten years is truly nothing striking.

No doubt, the position of the Churches in modern Czech society is marginal; they do not represent mainstream Czech thought; indeed, they are considered by many people to be even beyond the margins. A look at Web discussions under articles on Church topics – and they need not necessarily be about the restitution of Church property – reveals how much negative emotion a large part of the Czech public feels towards organized Christianity in general and towards the Catholic Church in particular. Even clearer evidence is the woeful standing of the Churches in public opinion polls about the credibility of individual institutions of Czech public life and the prestige of the clergy.183 Although anti-Church campaigns have taken place in other Western countries as well, such a fundamental rejection of

182 Viewed globally, other countries with a particularly low level of religious feeling are the lands of the former East Germany, the Baltic States, and Bulgaria.

183 The Churches are usually second from the bottom, just before the lower house of the Czech parliament; clergymen are in third place from the bottom, just above cleaning women and members of parliament.

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the traditional Churches and their ordained servants is extremely intense amongst the Czechs.

But that does not mean that Czech society comprises convinced atheists, particularly not of the old Marxist materialist type. In this respect, the map of religious conviction of the Czech population is extremely unclear and complicated. One would actually find here less truly convinced atheists than believers. Czech society is much better described as a ‘religious grey zone’, that is, people who think that something exists, that it must exist; a large part of this zone comprises agnostics, who have completely ceased to consider the question, and consider it unimportant and unanswerable; a large part of the population comprises people who are searching and building various pseudoreligious alternative models and systems; they believe in reincarnation and extraterrestrials, carefully study their horoscopes and zodiac signs, and seek out various healers. All these groups nevertheless share a mistrust of the traditional Churches and express reservations about them. The Catholic Church is perceived particularly negatively, the papacy even more so.

The dynamic course of secularization in the Bohemian Lands

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a symbiosis between the nation and the Catholic faith was part of Czech self-perception, much as it was in the Polish, Slovak, and Irish milieux, including the role of the Catholic priests as pioneers or vehicles of national emancipation. Later, the situation began to change. The Catholic Church in the Bohemian Lands was part of the ruling institutions in the sense of both ideology and power. The ideal of the Austrian Monarchy, until it collapsed, was the State based on Roman Catholicism and the spiritual and secular authorities, which helped the monarch’s subjects to a decent life on earth and eternal bliss in the hereafter. Whatever position the elites of trade and commerce, government, and other members of the bourgeoisie wanted to gain for themselves, they also had to surmount the resistance of the Catholic Church, which adhered to the old ideal until the Second World War, and, because of the horrors of the French Revolution, had an instinctive fear, verging on a feeling of panic, of the modern and everything that smacked of the modern. Here too the Church seemed to be a relic of ancient times, venerable and noble but outside the main developments of modern society, even an obstacle to them.

The situation became more acute with the growing conflict between, on the one hand, the Church’s demands to compel the public by means of force to openly conformist religious behaviour and, on the other hand, the true state of mind

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of most of the population, particularly the elite. The Church continued to insist that all teachers, soldiers, and civil servants discharge the duties that stemmed from their being its members, including regularly attending Mass. Because of the inability of the Church in the nineteenth century to harmonize its traditional interpretations of the Bible and other parts of its teaching with the advances of the natural and social sciences, many members of the elite had already lost their faith in the God of Christian revelation a long time ago, and understood the imposition of these regulations to be an act of violence against their conscience, reason, and freedom. The consequences are obvious. By clinging to outdated and, incidentally, not very evangelical regulations to force people to conform with it, the Church created and fostered generations of militantly anticlerical teachers; though they did their religious duties pro forma, while gnashing their teeth, they were, in their teaching, journalism, political activity, and club life, among the workhorses of anti-Church activity.

Although the years of Communist terror brought the Church considerable credit amongst the intelligent part of the population, these promising starts soon ran aground, and the wariness towards the Church and its institutional representatives returned. In 1990, when he visited Czechoslovakia in the atmosphere of revolutionary euphoria, Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) met with a triumphal reception; the other papal visits, however, were met with markedly less interest and even critical remarks, for example, about the canonization of Jan Sarkander (1576–1620), a Moravian priest tortured to death by the Protestant estates at the start of the Thirty Years’ War; the Protestants and patriots of the nation criticized this canonization (in 1995) as an effort to rewrite Czech history and glorify the Counter-Reformation in the Bohemian Lands. By contrast, Benedict XVI’s visit to the Czech Republic in 2009 took place in a surprisingly favourable atmosphere and he was welcomed by politicians and other members of the elite, even though one also heard the usual criticism of the unnecessary financial costs the visit entailed for the State.

The honeymoon of Czech society and the Catholic Church soon came to an end for several reasons. The Church emerged from the years of Communist persecution extremely weakened in numbers of clergy, and devoted all its energies to the renewal of its institutions, the parish network, Church schools, charity, and many other areas. To carry on a competent dialogue with atheist and non-Catholic Czechs, the Church had neither the energy nor the people, though one finds exceptions, like Tomáš Halík (b. 1948) and Václav Malý (b. 1950). What should have been natural centres of intellectual searching and dialogue, like the Faculty of Roman Catholic Theology, which was reintegrated into Charles University, in 1990, unfortunately became their opposite – rigid, sterile training institutions that saw modernity as an adversary or enemy that should be mocked

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and eliminated.184 Most of the public soon showed their old attitudes; in particular, the continuous debates about the restitution of Church property and the State settlement with the Churches aroused strong emotions amongst them. The peak was the rejection of the already signed bilateral agreement between the Czech Republic and the Vatican, which still awaits ratification.

Potential points of agreement between the Church and the public

Despite some promising starts, for example, on questions of human rights, which had been so emphasized by John Paul II, the basic prerequisites soon gave way to the approach typical of the Czech majority, which is based on an anticlericalism and mistrust of anything related to the Church. The ‘atheist’ Czech public, still not yet religiously defined, can therefore be usefully divided into two parts. One part, considerably larger, is not especially interested in the magisterial statements of the Church; only sometimes do the moral statements of popes enter the public discourse, where that part of the population takes various positions, and even accepts some of the statements and shares them. Apart from them, however, one also finds a militantly anticlerical atheists, who, though not heard in the early years after 1989, have come out all the more intensely in the early twenty-first century.

For many leading representatives of humanist agnosticism and atheism, John Paul II’s fight for the abolition of the death penalty all over the world was highly inspiring. In the Czech Republic, despite the public opinion polls, the death penalty was abolished immediately after the Changes of late 1989, and references to the pope’s personal initiative played a very important role here, though, obviously, more so in liberal and leftist circles. There, the peace appeals that the popes have addressed to warring sides in various local conflicts have also been highly regarded. Sometimes one hears criticism that these are merely moral appeals and that the Vatican should come out more strongly against the powerful actors in international affairs. The humanist non-religious Czech public has appreciated the Vatican’s ability to remain non-partisan while criticizing hasty military solutions to conflicts. Here, too, however, the popes’ engagement has been tarnished by affairs or pseudo-affairs in the mass media, such as the Church’s alleged participation in the genocide in Rwanda. The paedophile scandals of the Catholic clergy have been misused in a similar spirit of superficial condemnation, though they are an absolutely marginal phenomenon in the Czech Republic. The stereotype of every Catholic clergyman’s allegedly being a latent paedophile is part of the debaters’

184 On this, see Dominik Duka and Milan Badal, Bílá kniha církve s černou kapitolou: 20 let svobody 1989–2009, Kostelní Vydří, 2009, pp. 97–98.

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arsenal on Web forums; it substitutes for earlier stereotypes, but is harder-hitting and brings greater disgrace.

The criticism of liberal capitalism and of globalization, which was regularly expressed by the last two popes, and the popes’ ability to stand up for local cultures and traditions against mass culture and its non-values have been appreciated mainly by left-wing groups. John Paul II criticized Western society, which in the years of totalitarianism in eastern Europe seemed exaggerated, because, in comparison with those under Communist regimes, Western societies truly appeared to be ideal and exemplary. After Czech society had sobered up somewhat from the euphoria of the Changes, atheist groups also suddenly appeared by the second half of the 1990s, and pointed out that capitalist liberalism and the free-hand of the market, tirelessly promoted by the then Czech premier, Václav Klaus (b. 1941), do not solve all social problems, and that a society does not function well without legal and ethical principles.

The Church’s social teachings and its greater involvement in social problems could be used more to bring the atheist public closer to the Church. Here the Church as an advantage in the great work of Catholic associations such as Charita Česká republika. Long ago, the Church in this country made heard its demand for solidarity in society and the necessity to look after its weakest members, but it now rarely speaks up on current social questions, even though it has the extraordinarily capable Václav Malý, a suffragan bishop who heads the Iustitia et Pax council of the Czech Conference of Bishops.185 Probably because the other bishops have found some of Malý’s documents too leftist, the activity of Iustitia et Pax has been very low key. That is a great pity, because, for example, when the Czech Government, rightly seeking to enforce budget responsibility, limited some social programmes in 2010–12 while questionably diverting astronomical sums into other, basically useless, things, an ideal opportunity arose for the Church to comment on this, but was not taken.

It is certainly not part of the mission of the Church and its leaders to ride the wave of dissatisfaction with the system. But a bit more courage in criticizing the government and the way State power is executed would perhaps be helpful. In this context, it seems that the letter of the Czech bishops in reaction to the wave of public dissatisfaction, expressed, for example, in strikes in April 2012,186 was too much in the Austro-Hungarian tradition of the Church as a source of support for the ruling establishment. The letter urges the public to be patient and put up with government reform as the only possible policy. In the context of the debates on the law on Church restitution, this might be seen as an effort to

185 For documents of the committee, see <http://www.iupax.cz/> Accessed October 2013.186 Slovo českých a moravských biskupů k situaci ve společnosti, 25 April 2012. <http://tisk.cirkev.cz/z-domova/slovo-

biskupu-k-situaci-ve-spolecnosti/> Accessed October 2013.

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ingratiate itself and be popular with the governing elite, even though it is surely not that (or at least one hopes it is not). The Church should defend the democratic regime, its stability and continuation, and should not join in what is often populist criticism. At the moment, however, a more dynamic, more critical, and more diverse voice of the Church speaking out on various reforms and government policy is generally lacking.

Among the other contributions of the Church in the Czech Republic is its important role in Czech-German reconciliation, a role the Church also plays in Poland.187 The expulsion of the three million Czechoslovak Germans after the Second World War can be well explained in the context of the end of the war,188 but that does not change the fact that this was a tragic event, which is perceived by the expellees and many others as an injustice. For a long time, the Communists used the fear of alleged German revanchism as a way of presenting the Soviet Union as the only power that could protect the Czechs. The Germans, in the twentieth-century, in particular, the Sudeten Germans, are part of the ‘canonized unholy trinity’ of hereditary enemies of the Czech nation: the Germans, the nobility, and the Catholic Church. The role of the Church in reconciliation in the form of a declaration and in cooperation and friendship in practice has been highly appreciated by those who long to heal the historical memory and establish good relations between these two central European nations.

The last positive element, which is, oddly enough, especially appreciated by agnostic intellectuals, is the emphasis Pope Benedict XVI (b. 1927; fl. 2005–13) put on the rationality of knowledge and his defence of modern science. As part of the struggle against the postmodern relativization of values, including knowledge, the academic canon of modernism was criticized as an excessively aggressive authoritarian approach to reality and truth. The criticism points out the plurality and relativity of truths, the diversity of standpoints, and the limitations of academic knowledge and its evidence, and condemns the rape of nature by technology. Despite some important positive testimony, the criticism occasionally comes across as the rejection of academic discourse and of the possibilities of objectively and rationally knowing the world. Benedict XVI’s speeches and statements are perceived, particularly by academics, as important, which is attested to by the warm reception that Benedict XVI was given during his visit to the Czech Republic in 2009. In Vladislav Hall, at Prague Castle, he gave a speech which received a standing ovation from the audience of several hundred academics, most of whom were not from the Church.189

187 For more on this, see the joint declaration of the Czech and German bishops in 1995 or of the Czech and Austrian bishops in 2003.

188 This includes Czechoslovak excesses and cruel acts of revenge at the end of the war vhich were committed in return for the gratuitous militarily violence of German soldiers in the occupied Bohemian Lands.

189 For an account of the visit, see Papež Benedikt XVI. v České republice, Kostelní Vydří, 2009.

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A leading Czech intellectual and president of the country (1989–92 and 1993–2003), Václav Havel (1936–2011) emblematized the cautious agreement between Church and public. While still a dissident, Havel was a close friend of Václav Malý, the future suffragan bishop, and was imprisoned with Dominik Duka (b. 1943), who became a Cardinal and is now Archbishop of Prague. Though he had great respect for John Paul II and his successor, and considered the Church a natural ally in cultivating the ethics and positive values of Czech society, during his life Havel made little public mention of his formally belonging to the Catholic Church, and instead expressed his religious sympathies for Buddhism, Judaism, and agnostic humanism. Nevertheless, he considered the overall values of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to be of central importance, and greatly promoted them. His Catholic funeral service in St Vitus’ Cathedral, in December 2011, though criticized by some people as the Church’s attempt to appropriate his legacy, and by others as being phoney since, they claimed, Havel probably did not consider himself a Catholic, signified a certain reconciliation of the Czech Catholic tradition with the humanist tradition of religiously neutral agnosticism.

Limiting factors in the dialogue between Church and society

Atheist and agnostic critics of religion and the social role of the Churches in the formation of an ethical framework for Czech society find it quite easy to present religion as socially harmful. To this end, they use and misuse a number of examples from the Western past, not only from the Middle Ages, but also from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, when Church representatives came out against modernizing trends in European society and rejected ideas such as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and the concept of human rights. A fear of Islamic fundamentalism has also played a role here. In this agnostic/atheist criticism, religious attitudes are understood as anachronistic, outmoded, and absurd; the Church, these critics claim, wishes to maintain stereotypes and obsolete Church attitudes, particularly those concerning sexual minorities and birth control, and thus hampers social progress.

For the Church, the loss of certain contact points that make discussion at all possible is vexing and hard to get used to. The representatives of modern society absolutely refuse to accept arguments about tradition and authority, both of which they find counterproductive. After a wave of rejecting authority and tradition, which began in the 1960s, every attempt to argue from those positions is perceived as an expression of aggression, poorly disguising a lack of real arguments. Many of the Czech atheists who speak in public are still influenced by this ethos, perceiving the Church and organized religion as a threat to modern

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man’s freedom. They still believe that it is necessary to shift the boundaries of human freedom and emancipation by limiting Church influence and squeezing the Church out of the public discourse.

Today’s dominant thinking does not include the basic concept in Catholic moral theology – namely, the existence of human nature. The assumption that man is somehow created, with a firmly structured personality, which is not controlled by historical development or influenced by social, political, and economic factors, and from which stem the fundamental principles of immutable human behaviour, is not shared by the majority. Man, in the popular view, is whatever he or she wants to be, and the world of moral rules and principles is subordinated to developments and determined by social discourse. That naturally complicates, and sometimes even makes impossible, any rational discourse about the values and ethical framework of contemporary Czech society, which is well demonstrated by the projects that ethics committees are endlessly coming up with and the codes for various occupations and spheres of life in society, the introduction of the teaching of ethics, and the realization, again and again, that these projects are ineffective. The inability to carry on a rational discussion about a number of burning questions, for instances, in bio-ethics, stems from the absence of a shared philosophical world, a world of conceptions, as well as an absence of discourse, which instead becomes a cluster of fragmentary claims and convictions.

Despite all this, Czech society takes a very conservative position on a number of questions. One recalls how long it took to pass the law on civil union (registered partnership), which in the Czech Republic, otherwise ultra-liberal on sexual matters (or at least claiming to be, though actually quite different), took more than ten years and required a total of six readings before being passed. But one could easily name many other matters – particularly in the area of family protection, help for the needy, the protection of children, and environmental protection – regarding which the Church could enter into dialogue with non-religious currents of Czech society and build bridges of confidence and understanding, thus helping to strengthen the voice of the Church.

That would doubtless be easier if the Church could shake off its media image of authority in the field of ethics, an image too focused on only a few areas of moral teaching: abortion, birth control, sexual ethics, a ban on divorce, and the rejection of homosexuality. Perhaps the greatest problem in the Czech Republic is the failure to distinguish the importance of each of these phenomena individually, perceiving them instead as a whole. Particularly when they are presented by old men who have gone through life in celibacy, the Church’s views are too easy to dismiss as the obsolete totalitarian behaviour of a moribund institution unable to respond to contemporary change. In this way, the whole ethical mission of the Church is waved aside, because the secular mass media welcome statements by

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the pope on these subjects, which are then presented as the Church’s dogmatically clinging to outmoded principles.

The Church has not tried hard enough to explain its attitudes in the language of secular society, and, together with Christians in general, it labours under the misconception that the Catholic faith qualifies them alone to discuss ethical questions. An important task for the Church is to regain the ability to convince others of its positions by more than just the force of its authority,190 tradition, and nature, in order to show the destructive effects of acting against the principles of the moral teaching of the Church, and to convince society that it is not a matter of clinging to arbitrarily determined principles, but of the overall good of humankind. A prerequisite is the ability to admit that the Church does not have ready answers to everything, that it often lacks adequate competence in bio-ethical questions, that it needs to hear the ideas and make use of the abilities of experts outside the Church, that it must take seriously the mentality and values of modern secular men and women, and abandon the idea that everything in Europe will be solved by conversion to the Roman Church. In a number of areas, the Church is fighting past wars, and is missing the boat on a number of essential questions, particularly that of the preservation of life.

Criticism of the Church and the papacy is sometimes so off the mark that it almost arouses a wave of sympathy. Those who admire the Church, however, tend to do so for its tradition, stability, and liturgy, not directly for its position on moral questions, though sometimes one hears the claim that ‘nothing the Church teaches is bad’. An informed dialogue, such as the one that existed between Christians and atheists in the 1960s, is lacking, though, then too, the Marxists were considered the ones with the monopoly of historical truth. This is reflected in the title of a book by the Czech philosopher Milan Machovec (1925–2003), first published in Germany as Jesus für Atheisten (1972), and then in English, as A Marxist Looks at Jesus (1976), but published in his native land, as Ježíš pro moderního člověka (Jesus for modern man, 1990), only after the Changes. Certain overtures to dialogue have been made, but both sides still have a long way to go before they begin to take the other side seriously and before the discussion is more about ideas and less about ideology.

190 Jean-Pierre Torrell, Fenomén ‘katolická teologie, trans. Oldřich Selucký, Prague, 2013, esp. pp. 64–85; idem, La Théologie catholique, Paris, 2008.

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9. SOME CONCLUSORY REFLECTIONS

Relations between the Church, the State, and society in Europe are fundamentally changing, from being the State Church with a powerful and influential standing in society to being a Church that is increasingly losing its rights and privileges and being restricted to the purely religious sphere. In most of Europe these trends led to the collapse of mass, ‘automatic’ Catholicism in towns already in the nineteenth century, while in the countryside this took place gradually in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Bohemian Lands share these general secularizing processes with other countries of western and central Europe, but because of the early and dynamic urbanization, industrialization, and modernization of the countryside these processes took place more quickly and more thoroughly here than in the neighbouring countries.

In the first chapter, I sketched out three particular phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Church history of the Czechs. This outline was intended to provide the reader with insight into the dynamics and complexity of the history of Czech Christianity, but it also sought to point to the importance of inculturation and its close link to the level and extent of Christianization. The main aim, however, was to argue that three particular Czech elements – the tradition of Cyril and Methodius and its suppression, Hussitism (as the first successful reformation before the Reformation) and its legacy, and, lastly, the re-Catholicization that was imposed with the help of State power – could not properly be considered possible roots of the profound, massive secularization of the Czechs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the next two chapters, we came to the heart of the matter, in which I offered a summary of the reasons why one can talk about an acute double Catholic diaspora amongst the Czechs. This diaspora is the result not only of the striking minority presence of Christians in society, but also of the exclusion of Catholicism from the national tradition, and also possibly of the notion that Catholicism is an alien, indeed hostile, element in the history of the Czech nation, an idea that gained currency as early as in the second half of the mid-nineteenth century. This process was completed by the self-proclaimed ‘heirs of the best traditions of the Czech nation’, that is, the Communist propagandists of the second half of

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the twentieth century. An expression of this change is the term ‘patriotic priest’, which has been used to suggest the unusualness of the link between the Catholic clergy and Czech national identity.

The history of the Church in the nineteenth century, however, includes some glorious chapters. Among them is the development of the religious congregations of women, the extent of which constituted an utterly new phenomenon in Church history. This book documents their development in one Czech diocese and provides a brief outline of their huge contribution in the fields of charity, social work, education, and civilization in general. No other institution in Western history has done so much to alleviate the negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and migration, processes accompanied by the disintegration of traditional social networks and institutions. The high number of nuns in the years between 1850 and 1950 is evidence of the enduring deep roots of Catholicism in the Czech nation, including such noble forms as life in a religious order.

To help to provide deeper insight into the line of reasoning of the period, the next chapter offers a probe into disputes that accompanied the emergence of the new Czechoslovak Church in 1920. The chief figure in these debates was Josef Pekař, the most important Czech historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As an engagé intellectual and a respected figure in public life, he published two works with which he entered the religious conflict between the Catholic Church and the Czechoslovak Church. He took the position of an agnostic scholar, who comments on the dispute from the standpoint of the interest of the State and the nation. In this way, and also with an analysis of the historical line of reasoning of the new Church, Pekař became an important witness to, and analyst of, his times.

In the last part of the book, I considered the fate of the Roman Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century, which can reasonably be seen as a history of persecution and the concomitant phenomenon of the Catholic clergy’s collaboration with the apparat of the totalitarian, Communist regime. Although most of the clergy stood the test and did not collaborate, one does encounter instances of priests’ collaborating, both by their joining the official institutions and conforming to the regime and its ideologies, and by collaborating with the secret police. I do not provide an exhaustive discussion of this phenomenon here, but rather offer a historical-anthropological essay about the social, political, and psychological prerequisites that handicapped priests in their confrontation with the machinery of the totalitarian State.

I have presented several reasons in support of the idea that the Catholic diaspora situation amongst the Czechs has become worse. The situation is in certain respects like that of the Church in the West in general, for example, the task the Church faces of how to cease being alien to modern society and of how to renew its

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creative powers and abilities to adapt its mission of the Gospel and its means of expression to the needs and possibilities of contemporary man. Among the basic prerequisites are a new inculturation of Christianity, an ability to draw careful distinctions, and the courage to ‘embrace’ and accept contemporary culture and to evangelize and Christianize from within, as the Church was able to do when it adopted Hellenistic culture and when it adapted Christianity to the possibilities of the barbarian tribes’ perceptions in the Early Middle Ages. Without a renewal of will and courage to search creatively for new ways to formulate and spread the Gospel and new forms of Church life, one cannot realistically expect any renewal of Christianity in the Western world.

Among the tasks of the Church in the Czech Republic, therefore, is that of reflecting critically and truthfully upon the past of the Church and the nation. This reflection should provide the prerequisite for an honest recovery of the national memory.191 This effort will require, among other things, the courage to admit past failures of Church representatives, as well as the contribution of the non-Catholic Churches to the Czech nation. First and foremost, however, Czech Catholicism must be reintegrated into the history of the nation. We have something to follow on from, and we also have much to discover. In the future, it is to be hoped, there will not be a single view of Czech history which has been imposed by the State, as was the case under the Communist regime. Instead, there will be a competition of various interpretations of Czech history, which will be formulated by the individual confessions and currents of political and ideological opinion. In this competition, they will influence and correct each other, and will be able to move towards a more mature synthesis of national history.

In this connection, I would underscore two factors. The Catholic Church has absolutely nothing to fear, because the contribution of Christianity and the Church to civilization is indispensible. It is even fair to say that Catholicism has largely created and formed that which is good in the Czech nation. On the other hand, it is involved in a never-ending struggle over how the past is perceived. Those who are in future more active, who assert their vision of history not only in historical essays and books, but also in novels, plays for the stage and the radio, on television, and in film, will shape the view of the past and thereby considerably influence the future as well. There is nothing to guarantee that they will necessarily and automatically assert a more truthful or more comprehensive view of history; indeed, the example of how Czech history has been depicted tends to suggest quite the opposite. Nothing here, however, will happen or change by itself.

The way to overcome the diaspora status and mentality is by accepting them,

191 For the passionate debates on the topic amongst Charter 77 signatories, see Jiří Hanuš, Tradice českého katolicismu ve 20. století, Brno 2005, pp. 222–25.

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by admitting that Catholics are a minority, and that they will long continue to be a minority, to admit that the Church itself is largely to blame for this situation, and that without any real effort being made to change it, this situation will not improve much. History has generally shown that a minority that wants to survive in the long-run must be more active and more cohesive than majority society. Nostalgia for an idealized past in which the standing of the Church in society and the State is unquestioned and assured is of no help at all.

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127

•Agnes of Bohemia, 93

•Bartoš, František Michálek, 73

• Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), 19, 107, 110

•Beran, Josef, 43, 80, 90

•Berka, Zbyněk z Dubé, 118

•Borovský, Karel Havlíček, 34

• Bouše, Zdeněk Bonaventura OFM, 90, 118, 122, 123

•Brynych, Edvard, 26

• Comenius (Komenský, Jan Amos), 26, 28, 29, 78, 86

•Cyril, 9–12, 27, 28, 114, 119

•Davídek, Felix, 91, 92

•Denis, Ernest, 71

•Doubrava, Josef, 47, 48

•Duka, Dominik, 108, 111, 119

•Farský, Karel, 63, 67, 69, 120

•Filip, Miloslav, 80

•Gottwald, Klement, 83, 99

•Hais, Josef Jan, 47

•Halík, Tomáš, 19, 93, 107

•Havel, Václav, 111

•Herben, Jan, 27, 73, 120

•Heydrich, Reinhard, 81

•Hitler, Adolf, 81

•Hlouch, Josef, 90, 91

• Hromádka, Josef Lukl, 66, 73, 89, 120

•Huss, John, 26, 28, 29, 78, 86

•Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 91

•Chenaux, Philippe, 119

• Jágr, Jaromír, 76

• Jan Sarkander, 107

• Javorová, Ludmila, 92

• John Nepomucene, 15, 28, 31, 64, 68, 76, 90

• John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), 107-109, 111

• Jirásek, Alois, 27

• Jirsík, Jan Valerián, 26, 121

• Jungmann, Josef, 34

INDEX OF NAMES

128

• Kalista, Zdeněk, 30, 64, 65, 68, 71, 73, 121

•Kamarýt, Josef Vlastimil, 34

•Kašpar, Karel, 48, 82

•Klaus, Václav, 109

•Komenský, Jan Amos, 26

•Konzal, Jan, 91

•Krátký, Stanislav, 92

•Lenz, Antonín, 26, 125

• Leo XIII (Vincezo Pecci), 22, 27, 41, 54

•Mádr, Oto, 92, 93

•Machar, Josef Svatopluk, 79

•Machovec, Milan, 113

•Malý, Václav, 107, 109, 111

•Mandl, Antonín, 90, 121

•Marek, Antonín, 24, 34

• Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, 31, 42, 64, 65, 68, 71, 79

•Maurras, Charles, 118

• Methodius, 9–12, 27, 28, 92, 114, 119

•Navrátil, Augustin, 92

•Otčenášek, Karel, 76, 90

• Palacký, František, 26–29, 31, 40, 71, 77, 124

• Pekař, Josef, 28, 30, 31, 63–74, 115, 119, 120–122

• Peroutka, Ferdinand, 28, 30, 66, 73, 121, 122

•Piťha, Petr, 93

• Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto), 22, 84, 118

•Pius XI (Achille Ratti), 84, 89

• Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), 88, 120, 121

•Plojhar, Josef, 84

•Podlaha, Antonín, 26, 123

•Puchmajer, Antonín Jaroslav, 34

•Rastislav, 10

•Sangnier, Marc, 118

•Schubert, Augustin OSA, 81

•Schwarzenberg, Bedřich, 125

•Skrbenský z Hříště, Lev, 67

• Stojan, Antonín Cyril, 27, 28, 125

•Šalda, František Xaver, 64

•Šanda, Vojtěch, 101, 122

•Špidlík, Tomáš, 90

129

•Štampach, Odilo, 19, 124

•Štemberka, Josef, 81

•Šusta, Josef, 63, 67

•Taaffe, Eduard, 22

•Tomášek, František, 90, 93

•Tomek, Václav Vladivoj, 27

•Toufar, Josef, 86

•Trochta, Štěpán, 43, 80, 90, 91

•Troška, Zdeněk, 30

•Vančura, Jindřich, 73

•Vašica, Josef, 10, 30, 124

•Vavák, František Jan, 17

•Vávra, Otakar, 30

•Vrána, Karel, 90, 91

•Vykoukal, Arnošt, 80

•Zahradník, Fridolín, 91

•Zvěřina, Josef, 90, 92, 93

•Žižka, Jan, 64, 78

SUMMARY

Published by EL-PRESS, Lublin, 2014 Oficyna Wydawnicza sj. 20-227, tel. +48 81 444 10 84

Vetterów 3, Lublin, PolandDesigned, set, and printed by MORAVAPRESS, Ltd.

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TOMÁŠ PETRÁČEK

Translation Derek & Marzia Paton, 2014

Peer-review Prof. Dr. Pavel Marek Ph.D.

andMartin Bedřich Ph.D.

IN THE MAELSTROM OF SECULARIZATION COLL ABOR ATION AND PERSECUTION

ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN MODERN

CZECH SOCIETY AND THE STATE