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Czechoslovakia RELIGION
Czechoslovakia entered the socialist era with a varied
religious heritage. There were nine major creeds listed in its
censuses: Roman Catholic,
Uniate (see Glossary),
the Evangelical
Church of Czech Brethren, Lutheran, Calvinist, Orthodox, the
Czech Reformed Church (the Hussites), the Old Catholic Church,
and Judaism. Nearly 6 percent of the population was without
religious preference. At the time of the communist takeover, two
of every three citizens were Roman Catholics, but within each
major ethnic group there was a sizable minority of Protestants:
Bohemian Brethren in the Czech lands, Lutherans in Slovakia, and
Calvinists among the Hungarians.
In Bohemia and Moravia, the Roman Catholics' numerical
preponderance was further tempered by a tradition of religious
dissent and tolerance dating from the Hussite era. The Old
Catholics split with Rome over the issue of papal infallibility
in 1870, and the Czechoslovak National Church (an explicitly
antipapal, nationalistic sect with Hussite and Unitarian
overtones) followed suit in 1919-20. As the Vatican was amply
aware, Czechoslovakia was hardly Rome's docile follower, and
relations between the Vatican and the First Republic were often
stormy. Twice, in 1925 and 1933, the papal nuncio left in protest
over what he perceived to be antipapal manifestations on the part
of high-ranking government officials. Czechs had associated Roman
Catholicism with foreign domination since the forcible
suppression of the Hussite movement. They viewed Catholicism as
pro-Hapsburg and pro-German.
As of 1987, there had been no reliable national figures on
religious affiliation since before World War II. Estimates based
on limited surveys indicated that Roman Catholics continued to
predominate, accounting for nearly one-half the total population.
Not surprisingly, those who did not profess a religious faith
increased dramatically in the socialist era. The most provocative
information on religious sentiments came from a series of surveys
during the 1960s. In northern Moravia, survey results showed that
30 percent of the respondents were atheists, another 30 percent
were religious believers, and 40 percent were undecided.
Presumably, there were fewer believers in more secular Bohemia
and a greater number of believers in traditionally devout
Slovakia. A late-1960s survey in Slovakia found that "scientific
atheism" had not caught on quite as much as the KSC might have
hoped after twenty years of party rule. Only 14 percent were
atheists and 15 percent undecided; atheism was highest among
people between the ages of 25 and 39. Religious sentiment
reflected social background: nine-tenths of all farmers were
believers, as were three-fourths of all blue-collar workers and
slightly more than one-half of all white-collar employees
(see Social Groups
, this ch.). Perhaps most disconcerting for the
party was the realization that after two decades of denouncing
clerics and clerical meddling in politics ("clerico-fascism"), 28
percent of those surveyed thought the clergy should have a public
and political role.
The relationship between the advocates of "scientific
atheism" and various religious groups has been uneasy at best.
The Czechoslovak Constitution permits freedom of religion and
expression, but in the 1980s citizens were well advised not to
take these guarantees too literally. Government-controlled
organizations existed for most religious creeds except Jehovah's
Witnesses, who were prohibited. The most prominent was the Roman
Catholic Church. There were also a variety of Protestant sects,
including the Czechoslovak Baptist Church, the Evangelical Church
of Czech Brethren, the Slovak Evangelical Church, the Church of
the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Methodist Church of
Czechoslovakia. Also represented were the Czechoslovak National
Church, the Uniate Church, and Jewish communities. In 1981 a
number of church dignitaries stood before the Czechoslovak
minister of culture to take a vow of loyalty to the Czechoslovak
Socialist Republic.
Official policy toward religious groups in the 1980s was
consistent with that of the early socialist era, when a series of
measures sought to bring organized religion to heel. The state
exercised substantial control over clerical appointments,
religious instruction, preaching, and proselytization. Roman
Catholics and Uniates were the major targets. The government
closed convents and monasteries and strictly limited admissions
to the two remaining seminaries. During the Stalinist trials of
the 1950s, more than 6,000 religious people (some old and sick)
received prison sentences averaging more than five years apiece.
Between 1948 and 1968, the number of priests declined by half,
and half the remaining clergy were over sixty years of age. The
Catholic Church had already lost a substantial number of clergy
with the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans; it faced significant
problems with understaffed parishes and an aging clergy.
Protestant sects, less dependent on a centralized hierarchy in
the running of ecclesiastical affairs and less prominent because
of their minority status, fared better.
Uniates had close historic ties to both the Roman Catholic
Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. The communist regime
sought to Russify whatever it could and followed a longstanding
Russian policy of opposing the Uniate Church. Soon after coming
to power, the party forcibly repressed the Uniate Church
(following the earlier example of the Soviet Union) in favor of
the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox had been a distinct
minority in Czechoslovakia, but Orthodox priests took over
parishes as the Uniate clergy were imprisoned or sent to work on
farms in the Czech lands. The shortage of priests was so extreme
that the party gave a crash course in Orthodox doctrine to
"politically mature" teachers in the region and sent them into
Uniate churches as replacements. Uniates responded with various
forms of resistance, ranging from simply leaving church whenever
an Orthodox priest arrived to holding services among themselves.
The situation for the churches brightened only briefly during
the Prague Spring. The regime of Alexander Dubcek allowed the
most closely controlled of the government-sponsored religious
organizations (the Peace Movement of the Catholic Clergy and its
Protestant counterpart) to lapse into inactivity. In 1968 the
government also promised a prompt and humane solution to the
Uniates' predicament (induced in part by the Uniates seizing
"Orthodox" churches and demanding their own clergy and rites) and
officially recognized the Uniate Church.
This was an ephemeral thaw in the party's hard-line approach
to religion. In the 1970s, the situation of religious groups in
Czechoslovakia again deteriorated. The Roman Catholic Church,
under the spiritual leadership of Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek,
archbishop of Prague, was once more the principal target.
Throughout the 1970s, the regime arrested clergy and lay people
for distributing religious samizdat literature. Protestant and
Jewish groups were also harassed, but the Orthodox churches and
the Czechoslovak National Church were generally spared. In an
effort to ensure a group of compliant and loyal clergy, the
regime of Gustav Husak organized a number of state-controlled
associations, including the Ecumenical Council of the Churches of
the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Czechoslovak
Association of Catholic Clergy (more commonly known as Pacem in
Terris), with Czech and Slovak branches.
The regime showed a willingness to permit religous groups to
practice their creeds as long as the clergy and the faithful did
not bring religion into public life. The complication was that
the regime counted almost anything as public life and so, for
example, disallowed sermons on the high divorce rate or neglected
children. Because the state licensed all clergy, it could weed
out anyone deemed unresponsive to state requirements. Thus the
clergy, who needed state approval to minister at all, were in a
vulnerable position. By mid-1986 the regime had prohibited some
400 (of an approximate 3,200) Roman Catholic priests from
ministering.
Theology departments continued to operate under strict
admission quotas, and staffing problems grew throughout the
decade. Chief Rabbi Richard Feder died in 1970, leaving the Czech
Jewish communities without rabbinical direction until 1984.
(Slovakia's rabbi was Samuel Grossman.) The new chief rabbi for
the country, Daniel Mayer, studied for the rabbinate in Budapest.
In 1972 the death of three Roman Catholic bishops and the
revocation of state approval of a fourth exacerbated the already
acute shortage of Roman Catholic leaders. Talks between the
Vatican and the regime were sporadic through the 1970s and
produced few material gains for Czechoslovak Roman Catholics. The
perennial conflict remained: the appointment of regime loyalists
in opposition to choices for parish and diocesan posts. In 1986,
out of thirteen church offices, nine bishoprics were vacant and
two archbishoprics (Olomouc and Trnava) had only bishops holding
office.
In late 1980, there were signs of worsening church-state
relations. In October a number of students at the Cyril and
Methodius Faculty of Divinity in Bratislava began a hunger strike
in protest against Pacem in Terris. The state-controlled
movement, they said, tried to undermine unity between priests and
bishops. In an apparent reply to the incident, Bratislava's
Pravda took the opportunity to denounce the resurgence of
"clerico-fascist ideology," which, given the growth of socialism
(commentators were quick to note), lacked a constituency in
Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, clericalism acted on "instructions
of the church and clerical centers in the capitalist world." The
official media were particularly critical of the "secret church,"
which the Vatican described as " not only the secretly ordained
priests and bishops, secret convents and secret printing
establishments in the country, but also the existing Catholic
organizations and spiritual underground movements, as well as all
priests and believers who are working illegally in the sphere of
the church." These, however, were not organized into a single
network. The underground church was believed to be particularly
strong in Slovakia.
If normalization after 1968 took a higher toll on the Czechs,
the Slovaks have more recently borne the brunt of religious
persecution. Slovakia's traditional adherence to religion and an
upsurge in belief and practices in the mid-1980s brought on
sustained harassment and atheistic propaganda in Slovakia to a
greater degree than in the Czech lands. Although methods
differed, religious persecution in Slovakia equaled that suffered
by the Charter 77 human rights activists and proscribed writers
in the Czech lands
(see Popular Political Expression
, ch. 4).
A development that was particularly distressing to the
authorities was the growing interest in religion on the part of
young people in Czechoslovakia. Of the more than 100,000 people
who took part in celebrations relating to the 1,100th anniversary
of the death of Saint Methodius, Cardinal Tomasek noted that "
two-thirds of the pilgrims were young people...." One culprit was
seen to be the education system, which did not sufficiently
stress a scientific-atheistic education
(see Education
, this
ch.).
A number of policies were aimed at curtailing public
religious observance. Known adherence to a religious sect meant
limited opportunity for advancement in the workplace. Parents had
the right to religious instruction for their primary-school
children, but to ask for it was to seriously hamper a child's
chances for admission to secondary school and the university. The
Ministry of Education issued a series of directives for teachers
elaborating the errors of religion (among which were idealism and
an inadequate set of ethical directives) and calling it an
ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie.
Data as of August 1987
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