The Czechs in a Nutshell

The body of Jan Hus, who was burnt at a stake as heretic in July 1415, had barely turned to ashes when wild turmoil broke out among his followers in Prague. The subsequent Hussite Wars raged for two decades. Thanks to the fighting spirit and also appalling brutality demonstrated by the Hussite Boží bojovníci (God’s Warriors) and their military leader, the one-eyed Jan Žižka, Rome decided to grant the rebellious Czechs certain concessions in 1436.

Most important among them was the revolutionary innovation of letting common believers taste the Communion wine (thus making the chalice the Hussites’ main symbol). This period of relative religious tolerance lasted until 1620, when the mainly Protestant Czechs suffered their “heroic defeat” in the Battle of White Mountain, and the victorious Habsburgs then launched a forced Counter-Reformation.

This treatment has apparently marked the Czechs’ relations to religion forever. The historian Dušan Třeštík puts it like this:

“After the Battle of White Mountain, we found ourselves between two camps — the Catholic and the Protestant. When the Czechs, during the national revival 250 years later, emerged as a self-confident and modem nation, they naturally started to distance themselves from the Austrian Habsburgs — and their main ally, the Catholic Church. Since the Czechs supported the liberal ideas of that time, we should logically have become Protestants. But ultimately, we didn’t become either Protestants or Catholics, either Liberals or Conservatives, only atheists.”

Indeed, when Czechoslovakia emerged as an independent state in 1918, the Catholic Church, because of its close ties with the former rulers in Vienna, didn’t exactly enjoy high credit among urban Czechs (but in Moravia it did — and still does). As one of its first measures, the Prague government expropriated vast lands belonging to the Church, and symbols of its glory, such as the magnificent Marian column at Prague’s Old Town Square, were torn down. On the other hand, the teaching of Jan Hus underwent a certain revival. Feeling that changes were imminent, his followers (see: Sokol) had already erected a monument of the Mister on Prague’s Old Town Square in 1915.

Five years later, they established the Czechoslovak Church (officially renamed the Czechoslovak Hussite Church in 1971), a liberal Protestant Church, which was to carry on Hus’ ideals. Even though the Hussites didn’t succeed in their ambitions of becoming Czechoslovakia’s state church, they were supported by some of the First Republic’s most influential persons. President Tomáš G. Masaryk himself was an ardent Hussite, and infuriated the country’s Catholic clergy every 6th of July by hoisting a flag featuring the Hussites’ chalice outside his residence at the Prague Castle.

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

The flourishing of religion during the First Republic ended in 1938 with the Munich Agreement, which heralded a half-century of tyranny hostile both to the Catholic Church and to their Evangelic and Protestant brethren. True to Lenin’s words that “religion is the opiate of the masses”, the communists, who seized power 10 years later, did their utmost to complicate life for believers.

In the early 1950s, thousands of Catholic clergymen, monks and nuns were locked up (some of them even killed), and churches of all denominations were held under constant surveillance by the Secret Police. Any Czech, eager to have a career, was better off not turning up to mass. This applied especially if you happened to be a Jew. The small community (hat survived the Holocaust was not only regarded as suspicious because of their religious convictions, but, due to the regime’s pro-Arab orientation, they were politically “highly unreliable” as well.

Also when it came to religion, the Bolshevik regime played skilfully with sticks and carrots (see: Communism). While those members of the clergy who demonstrated personal integrity were mercilessly badgered — Prague’s archbishop, Josef Beran, was interned for 14 years, and then, in 1965, deported to Rome, where he soon after died — those willing to pay lip service were richly rewarded. For the Catholic clergy, this meant membership in Pacem in Terris, a quisling organization, which was supposed to give the world the false impression that Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed religious freedom.