102 JAMES RAMON FELAK
fessional life in Czechoslovakia need to be explained. First, with
respect to confessional life, the Czechoslovak regime was the most
repressive in the region during the Communist period. Bishops,
priests, and members of religious orders were interned or impris-
oned in large numbers. The state exercised tight control over re-
ligious media and publishing, educational institutions (including
seminaries), and contacts with coreligionists abroad. The state’s
refusal to consent to episcopal appointments that it deemed un-
favorable meant that as many as ten of Czechoslovakia’s thirteen
dioceses remained without a bishop for much of the Communist
period.4
Second, because the predominant Czech national historical
narrative viewed the Catholic Church negatively, the Czechs pre-
sented for Catholicism a challenge unparalleled among their
neighbors. Whether it was the burning at the stake by the Cath-
olic Church in 1415 of the great Czech religious reformer Jan
Hus; the successful defense of their homeland by Hussite war-
riors against papal and imperial crusades in the 1420s and 1430s;
the equation of Catholicism with Austrian domination of the
Czechs in the wake of the crushing defeat of a Bohemian Prot-
estant revolt at White Mountain in 1620; the anti-Catholic spirit
of František Palacký’s monumental history of Bohemia from the
period of national revival; or Czechoslovakia’s founder Tomáš G.
Masaryk’s identification of the Czech nation with a Protestant
spirit and his own personal abandonment of Catholicism for a
liberal Protestantism—Czech nationalism was inextricably en-
tangled with suspicion, if not outright hostility, toward the Cath-
olic Church.5
- For a detailed discussion of the repressive nature of Czechoslovak Commu-
nist religious policy, see Sabrina Petra Ramet, “The Catholic Church in Czechoslo-
vakia 1948–1991,” Studies in Comparative Communism 24, no. 4 (December 1991):
377–93. - Of the series of intellectuals-writers-activists over the centuries who have
held dominant positions in the Czech national pantheon, most were associated