106 JAMES RAMON FELAK
support for freedom of conscience and to demand that govern-
ments stop suppressing religious freedom. He then recounted
a litany of unacceptable transgressions against religious faith
and its practitioners that fit the Czechoslovak experience well:
priests and laity in prison for religious activity; bishops and
priests prevented from carrying out their duties; restrictions on
the Church’s internal government and communications with the
Holy See; obstacles to men seeking the priesthood; prohibitions
against religious orders; and obstacles to professing, propagat-
ing, and educating children in the faith.
While a Catholic “traditionalist”—in the pre–Vatican II sense
—would have agreed with Beran’s highlighting of the ways in
which an oppressive regime sought to suppress the Church, his
speech was in fact far from traditionalist. First, in defending free-
dom of conscience, Beran attacked not only those regimes that
tried to suppress religion, but also those that mandated a partic-
ular form of belief. The latter brought with it the temptation to
lie and dissimulate, as well as—Beran argued—“the hypocrisy of
ostentatiously pretending a faith hurts the Church more than the
hypocrisy of hiding one’s faith.” Second, putting a Czech twist on
his position, he noted that the Church in the Czech lands seemed
to be continually suffering from what had been done in the past
in its name—above all, the execution of Jan Hus and the imposi-
tion of Catholicism on the Czech nation by the Habsburgs during
the Counter-Reformation.
At least in part because of Beran’s speech at Vatican II, the
Czechoslovak government did not resume talks with the Holy
See until May 1967.13 At those talks, Prague continued to press
for the elevation of “progressive” clergy to bishoprics, which the
- Prague was also upset by speeches at the Council on September 26, 1965, by
exiled Slovak bishops Pavel Mária Hnilica and Michal Rusnák. Hnilica, among other
things, identified atheism as the chief contemporary problem, and Rusnák spoke of
the repressive measures taken against the Church by Czechoslovakia’s Communists;
Balík, “The Second Vatican Council and the Czechoslovak State,” 12.