Daunting Task for Pope Among Secular Czechs
PRAGUE — As Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the Czech Republic on Saturday on a three-day pilgrimage aimed at battling the forces of secularism, religious leaders warned that he faced a daunting challenge in a largely secular nation.
When the pope comes to town, a city usually pulls out all the stops. Not so here in the Czech capital, where banners heralding the pope’s visit were all but absent. The local newspapers that highlighted the trip seemed more preoccupied with the pope’s penchant for bright red loafers than with the substance of his religious mission.
“If the pope wants to create a religious revival in Europe, there is no worse place he could come to than the Czech Republic, where no one believes in anything,” said Jaroslav Plesl, a self-confessed lapsed Catholic who is deputy editor of Lidove Noviny, a leading daily newspaper here. “Add to that the fact that the pope is German and socially conservative and he might as well be an alien here.”
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia, the pope is visiting what many religious observers, unfairly or not, consider the ground zero of religious apathy in Europe. Vatican officials said that he had chosen the Czech Republic for a mission central to his papacy: fomenting a continentwide spiritual revolt against the secularism, hedonism and moral relativism that he has warned is plaguing modern European life.
The pope touched down in Prague after a send-off from Rome’s Ciampino Airport by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose popularity among Roman Catholics has dropped after a summer of sex scandals.
At a welcome ceremony at the Ruzyne Airport here, the pope lauded the fall of the Berlin Wall as a “watershed” in world history, while underlining the toll of 40 years of political repression. “A particular tragedy for this land was the ruthless attempt by the government of that time to silence the voice of the church,” he said.
On his first trip here as pope, Benedict faces inevitable comparisons with Pope John Paul II, who in 1990 made Prague his first stop in the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of Communism.
Yet while John Paul, who was Polish, is revered for his role in helping to overthrow Communism, many Czechs said they were skeptical of Benedict, 82, who is widely viewed as being out of touch with contemporary concerns.
According to the latest census, fewer than three million of the country’s 10.5 million people identify themselves as Roman Catholics.
Also casting a shadow over the visit is the issue of church property confiscated under Communism and given to the state, which Roman Catholic Church officials value at about $15 billion. In 2008, the government drafted a bill calling for one-third of that sum to be paid to the church, with the balance paid over 70 years. But the bill was never passed by Parliament.
The Rev. Tomas Halik, a Roman Catholic leader who was secretly ordained under Communism and now lectures at Charles University in Prague, noted that the repression of the Roman Catholic Church during the cold war had given the church a certain moral authority because religious adherence was viewed as a cultural rebellion against the government.
He added that while some traditionalists and religious intellectuals were energized by the pope’s visit, many Czechs inhabited a “spiritual desert.”
“A majority of people have no interest in the pope’s visit and are more concerned about traffic congestion,” he said.
On Saturday, Benedict is to visit the Infant of Prague, a popular religious icon in the city’s Church of Our Lady Victorious. President Vaclav Klaus greeted him at the airport, and Benedict will meet later with Vaclav Havel, the former president who led the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
The main event of the pope’s visit is an open-air Mass in Brno on Sunday in the country’s Roman Catholic heartland. During the trip, a group called Condom Positive said it planned to distribute condoms with a likeness of the pope and the question, “Papa said no! And You?”
Benedict is also scheduled to celebrate a Mass in Stara Boleslav, which is about 15 miles northeast of the capital, in honor of the country’s patron saint, St. Wenceslas. Throughout, he is expected to emphasize the moral imperative that the Continent rediscover its religious roots.
Religious experts have noted that the Czechs’ abiding religious skepticism stretches to the 15th century, when Jan Hus, a revolutionary preacher, preached against what he saw as the corrupted practices of the church at a time when indulgences absolving sins were up for sale. Hus, whose teachings anticipated the Protestant Reformation, was burned at the stake and is a hero to many Czechs. In 1999, John Paul called Hus’s violent death “a sorrowful page” in Czech history.
Czech antipathy for the Roman Catholic Church was fanned further during the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries, religious scholars say, when the church supported the emperor’s efforts to repress Czech nationalism.
After the Communists seized power in 1948, they persecuted many priests, who could fulfill their pastoral duties only with the approval of the government. Demonized by the state, many were forced to go underground.
Father Halik argued that Benedict’s fierce intelligence and moral resolve made him a worthy opponent of pervasive secularism. But he was philosophical about the chances of his success. “The reanimation of the Catholic Church is a long-term goal,” he said. “And even the pope can’t work miracles that quickly.”
Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Vatican City.
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