PRAGUE LETTER:The appointment of John Paul II as pope steeled the Catholic Church across central and eastern Europe for the struggle which lay ahead, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLIN
BORN INTO a Catholic family in communist Czechoslovakia, Terezie Hradilkova seemed destined to become a dissident.
When the Velvet Revolution swept away the communist regime in 1989, Hradilkova was part of a hidden army who organised secret “samizdat” publications, covert meetings and peaceful marches, and nurtured grassroots support for people like Vaclav Havel, the banned playwright who was swept into the presidency by a wave of protests that began 20 years ago tomorrow.
The roots of Hradilkova’s resistance were buried deep in her childhood.
“My parents were never in the Communist Party, and were active Catholics. Twice a year a secret Mass would be held here, and Catholics from East Germany would meet up,” recalled Hradilkova, sitting in the kitchen where those Masses were held in defiance of a ban on unlicensed church services.
“I remember being five or six years old and listening to priests telling stories about their time in prison, and about how they made communion wine from bread or raisins,” she said, in her home in a leafy suburb in Prague.
“My dad’s best friend was arrested along with hundreds of Czechoslovak priests and nuns in 1951. He was first sentenced to death, and eventually served 10 years in jail for his beliefs.” Thousands of religious believers were jailed and deported during the purges of the 1950s, when monasteries and convents were seized, all but two of the country’s seminaries were closed and religious education was banned.
The Stalinist government controlled church finances, publications and appointments, and secret police approval was required for a priest or bishop to take up his post. Figures who were seen as politically suspect were banned from preaching, under threat of a two-year jail term.
The regime also sought to undermine the church from within, through state-sponsored religious organisations such as Pacem in Terris, which offered priests the opportunity to perform their clerical duties as long as they refrained from any comment on political or civic life.
Of the scores of Czechoslovak priests who refused to make that compromise, the most prominent is Vaclav Maly.
Sitting in a rumpled T-shirt and slacks, Maly, the auxiliary bishop of Prague, is as open, optimistic and unpretentious as the priest who worked as a boiler-room stoker, toilet cleaner and builder after he was banned from preaching in the late 1970s.
He was black-listed for denouncing Czechoslovakia’s communist rulers, calling for the release of political prisoners and for signing Charter 77, the 1977 demand for human and civil rights that grew into a reform movement of the same name, led by Havel and other dissidents.
Maly was arrested hundreds of times, but continued to speak out, to associate with “undesirables” like Havel, and to perform his priestly duties in secret – hearing confession, preparing people for marriage, and holding clandestine Masses in houses like Hradilkova’s.
Initially, even some believers and priests who had not been co-opted by the state criticised Maly for his support of Charter 77, which included members of the oppressive communist apparatus of the 1950s who had only left or been expelled from it after 1968, when Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops crushed the reformist hopes of the “Prague Spring”.
Seeking to win concessions from the government and escape further repression, the Czechoslovak church avoided conflict with the regime in the 1970s, to the frustration of dissidents and men like Maly.
That reticence changed after the appointment of the Polish pope John Paul II in 1978, an event that steeled the church across central and eastern Europe and emboldened Frantisek Tomasek, Czech primate and Prague archbishop.
Confidence began to surge back through the Czechoslovak church: in 1988, hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition demanding more religious and civic rights and, five days before the start of the November 1989 protests, believers were heartened by John Paul’s canonisation of 13th century Agnes of Bohemia.
“Catholics were very involved in the events of 1989 and, alongside Havel, Archbishop Tomasek was the great symbol of the Velvet Revolution,” said Maly. “During that week of protests in November 1989, he made a statement that was met with great excitement – it said that the church was on the side of the people.”
It was Maly, the most outspoken opposition figure in the church, who stood with Havel on a balcony overlooking Prague’s Wenceslas square to read that statement to 200,000 protesters on behalf of the 90-year-old Tomasek. Six weeks later, communism was gone and Havel was president.
“We hoped only to be mediators between the government and the people,” said Maly. “In the event, things changed so quickly. But in those first November protests, no one could have believed that power would pass freely into our hands.”