VATICAN II AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA 107Church staunchly resisted. The government, meanwhile, blocked
the implementation of many conciliar reforms, refusing to per-
mit the establishment of a conference of Czechoslovak bishops
or the introduction of the office of deacon. It also maintained
existing restrictions on Catholic publishing, seminary educa-
tion, and lay involvement in the Church. The talks ended in an
impasse in early June. Meanwhile, the Prague Spring was on its
way. As it burst into bloom in early 1968, it would have signifi-
cant repercussions for the Church in the Czech lands.
The Prague Spring
With the profound political changes underway in the early months
of 1968—the replacement in January of the Stalinist Antonín No-
votný by the reformist Alexander Dubček as first secretary of the
Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the
promotion of reformers within the party and state apparatuses,
the drafting of a reformist agenda culminating in the proclamation
of the Action Program in April—a space emerged for the Church
to advance certain demands. Now there was a regime that was far
more willing to accommodate them than at any previous time dur-
ing the Communist period. On March 21, the newspaper Lidové
Noviny published an open letter to Dubček signed by eighty-three
former political prisoners, who had been sentenced to a combined
734 years of incarceration (plus one life sentence) and had collec-
tively served 472½ years of their sentences. The letter stated clear-
ly Catholic grievances against the regime’s past policies toward the
Church, asserting that the regime would need to revoke its words
and revise its policies in order to gain the trust of Christians.
Still, the letter breathed with a conciliar spirit. Its authors ex-
pressed a readiness to forgive and an openness to cooperation.
They noted that “informed and honorable Marxists” are ashamed
at the way the regime has been contradicting the Charter of Hu-