VATICAN II AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA 103The years of the Second Vatican Council saw the resumption
of negotiations between the Holy See and the Czechoslovak re-
gime after a ten-year hiatus. By the early 1960s, it was clear that
Communist regimes were here to stay, and the Church’s accep-
tance of this fact, along with John XXIII’s new openness toward
the Soviet Bloc and outreach to Communists, paved the way for
the possibility of rapprochement in what had long been a tense
relationship.6 The Vatican was also hoping that at least one bish-
op from Czechoslovakia would be permitted to attend the Coun-
cil, while the Czechoslovak regime was hoping to enhance its in-
ternational prestige by mending fences with Rome. The two sides
met six times between March 1963 and February 1965, alternat-
ing the venue between Prague and Rome.7
Though the talks covered a range of issues—the reform of
seminary education, religious education in the schools, the word-
ing of the loyalty oath required of clergy, the release and return
to service of imprisoned priests, and the fate of Czechoslovakia’s
then-suppressed religious orders—the question of bishops dom-
inated the negotiations in a number of respects. First, in 1963,
some bishops were still imprisoned or interned. A number of dio-
with Protestantism and/or anti-clericalism, from Hus through exiled Protestant
leader Jan Amos Komenský, the historian Palacký, the anti-clerical journalist Karel
Havlíček Borovský, and down to President Masaryk. For the connections made by
Czechs among these figures, see Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of
Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp.
26–28, 32, 52, 123, 193, 218.
- Among other actions, John XXIII abandoned the anti-Communist rhetoric
common under Pius XII, pleased Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with his appeal
for a peaceful settlement to the Berlin Crisis in 1961, and received Khrushchev’s
daughter and son-in-law, an editor of the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, with warmth
and hospitality, on a short visit to the Vatican in March 1963; Michael P. Riccards,
Vicars of Christ: Popes, Power, and Politics in the Modern World (New York: Crossroad,
1998), 180–81. - For a discussion of these negotiations and their results, see Stanislav Balík
and Jiří Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu 1945–1989 (Brno: Centrum pro
studium demokracie a kultury, 2007), 41–44.