Where Nothing Is Sacred

Saints peek out from alleys. Angels fleck the skyline. In stone and marble, blackened and grizzled, God’s mysteries reside in this city’s baroque architecture. But try finding him in the skeptical Czech soul.

“People don’t know about God anymore,” said Olga Kopecka-Valeska, a writer and former religious radio broadcaster. “They don’t know what Christmas is about. They are lost in art galleries when they see paintings of Jesus Christ.

“One girl looked at a picture of the Crucifixion and asked, ‘Who did that to him?’ Her friend responded, ‘The Communists.’ ”

Recalcitrant and suspicious, Czechs are not entirely godless. They just don’t much care for organized religion. Unlike its neighbor Poland, where Roman Catholicism and nationalism are inseparable, the Czech Republic never forged its identity around a church. Czechs are aloof when it comes to matters of the divine and many view Catholicism -- the predominant religion -- as a centuries-old oppressor that was muffled by communism and then further diminished by the baubles of capitalism.

Stir in a little anti-authority surrealism from novelist Franz Kafka. Add a bit of musing by absurdist playwright and former President Vaclav Havel. Count the budding Buddhists on Wenceslas Square, or visit the sun worshipers of Bohemia. And it becomes even more apparent that the spiritual landscape in this castled nation of 10.2 million is not rooted in stained-glass sanctity.

“There’s a hostility toward what religion did to them in the past,” said Lawrence Cada, a Marianist brother from Cleveland who is on a scouting mission to determine whether the Catholic order should expand here. “The Czechs say they’re the most atheist country in Europe, and they say it with some pride.... This is how Western civilization may look in 50 years, because people here believe they live a full life without any religion.”

A poll done by the European Values Study, a Netherlands-based organization that tracks religious and moral attitudes, found that fewer Czechs claim allegiance to organized religion than any other people in Europe, except Estonians, who are still trying to move beyond their Soviet past. Only 33.6% of Czechs belong to a religious denomination and only 11.7% attend services once a month or more.

The Czech Roman Catholic Church has about 3 million followers and the next largest, the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, has about 200,000.

The countries bordering the Czech Republic are more attentive to their deity. Nearly 96% of Poles belong to a religion and 78% attend services regularly. The numbers for Germany are 77% and 30%; for Austria, 88% and 42.5%. For Slovakia, which with the Czech Republic once formed Czechoslovakia, the statistics are 76.8% and 50%.

“I don’t have confidence in the church. What can it do for me?” said Daniel Petrzilka, an Internet programmer wearing a T-shirt that read, “One Man Army.”

“I don’t need a church for God,” he added. “I believe in bits and pieces of different religions. I believe in reincarnation, Christmas and nature. It’s more liberalized.”

The Catholic Church is not reaching hundreds of thousands of young people like Petrzilka. The average age of priests is 67, and only 50% of the country’s 3,000 parishes have clergy in residence. It is not uncommon on weekends for one pastor to travel to nine different churches to celebrate Mass. The appeal of Pope John Paul II also has declined: In 1990, 300,000 Czechs attended the pope’s Mass; fewer than 100,000 turned out seven years later.

“The churches don’t know how to get closer to the daily lives of the people,” said Msgr. Daniel Herman, spokesman for the nation’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference. “After so long of being separated from the people, the church became a kind of ghetto. After the persecution and brainwashing of communism ... they live a horizontal life. There’s no vertical dimension of spirituality.”

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Blame it in part on a bloody religious history that reflects the Czech disdain for authority. In the early 1400s, Jan Hus, rector at Prague University, challenged the Vatican by suggesting that lay Catholics be given wine as well as bread during Communion. The practice is common today but was considered heresy at the time.

Hus was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415. His followers were enraged, and under the banner of the Hussite movement, whose church today has 100,000 members, Czechs went to war with the Catholic Church. Hus’ challenge to the church predates the Europe-wide Protestant reformation inspired a century later by Martin Luther. The Czechs -- paying homage to Hus’ defiance -- built a monument to him in Prague’s Old Town Square, not far from markers commemorating the Protestant noblemen hanged during the Hussite war.

Spiritual tumult raged generation after generation, and Czechs came to regard the Catholic Church as a proxy for the Austrian Hapsburgs who crushed their rebellions. When the Hapsburg Empire collapsed after World War I, an anti-Catholic backlash again swept the nation. This became overshadowed by World War II and 40 years of Soviet domination.

Czechs remain divided on the Catholic Church’s role during communism: Some say the church resisted Communist attempts to weaken it; others say they allowed it to be manipulated by Communist leaders.

“After all that history,” said Jirina Siklova, a sociologist and former dissident, “the Czechs are now in the midst of a spiritual and moral hangover.”

Pavel R. Rican, a religion professor at Prague’s Charles University, believes such torpor permeates all of Europe.

“I see empty churches in Germany and the Netherlands,” he said. “This is a European trend. I’m interested in what comes after. The French philosopher Voltaire was in search of the ‘new sacred.’ The ‘old sacred’ has vanished.”

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Up in the hills across the Vlata River, Milos Rejchrt, a Protestant minister, sat in his kitchen, sipping white wine at dusk. A balding man with a round face, Rejchrt enjoys theological conundrums. Sometimes, he said, he senses a rejuvenation of spirituality among Czechs. At other moments, he sees political corruption and inklings of a society with a diminishing moral code. Like many former dissidents, he wonders where things are headed more than 13 years after the fall of communism.

“There’s religious promiscuity in the widest sense,” he said. “People will be Catholic one day, Protestant the next and then a Buddhist. Tradition is gone. Religion is living on the reserves of the past. We have inertia. When faith is separated from its religious sources, it dries up.... But what happens on the judgment day when the final judge demands account?”

Rejchrt doesn’t answer.

“In my case,” he said, “I need to be a minister. I know it’s important to the future.”

Moored neither to religious fervor nor national pride, the Czech present, according to many here, is adrift. There is a sense of emptiness, but not despair. Brooding is leavened with keen satirical humor. One minister, with a fondness for metaphor, said the Czechs have pedestals, but they’re searching for the ideals to place upon them.

“Society has gotten to the point where it believes in nothing,” said Siklova, the sociologist. “The Czechs even stopped identifying with their government and their army. The invisible hand of the capitalist market has taken over. There’s an aggressive drive for the accumulation of capital and not a lot of ethics.”

On the Charles Bridge, one of Prague’s architectural splendors, huge blackened statues, twisting in torment and ecstasy, rise like sentinels in the morning light and fog. Saints, angels, the Crucifixion, all reminders of how Christianity swept across a continent. Choral hymns drift out of the city’s churches; their facades carved with apostles and bishops, whose golden staffs glint in the afternoon sun. The tourists may be inspired.

Libor Growsky is not.

“I’m a nonbeliever,” said the bearded psychiatrist, wandering amid outdoor sculptures beyond the Vlata River. “It’s connected to our history. Religion limited the freedom of the people. I don’t see a difference between the Communists and the Catholics. They each want people to comply with their ideals.... My sense of morality comes from literature and my family.”

Suspicion of the church’s intentions is a pastime here. In a bid to reclaim properties stripped from it over the generations, the Catholic Church is attempting to win control of St. Vitus Cathedral, the Gothic centerpiece of Hradcany Castle, which towers over the city. This has aroused even more Czech cynicism and some off-the-wall, cloak-and-dagger conjecture over the fate of the crown jewels that are housed -- along with the bones of King Wenceslas -- in the cathedral.

“The church wants it back, but the state views the cathedral as a museum,” said Kopecka-Valeska, who lost her job as a religious programmer with Radio Free Europe when the U.S. government cut funding last year. “Some people believe if the church gets all the keys, they’ll take the crown jewels and bring them to the Vatican, where they’ll be sold.”

More than most Czechs, Kopecka-Valeska is perplexed and troubled by the spiritual state of things.

“What’s lacking here is the aura of Christian morals,” she said, stirring a cappuccino and waiting out a rainstorm in a cafe. “People have forgotten that right and wrong stem from Christianity. These days, if you’re caught being naughty, there’s no one to answer to. People cheat on their employers. They cheat on each other. The egoism is unbelievable. It’s me, me, me.”

Painted white, the Futura art gallery sits in a courtyard not far from a house where Mozart once lived. The gallery’s director, Marisa Prihodova -- a Los Angeles artist who 10 years ago moved to Prague with her Czech husband -- said she did not regard Czechs as godless people. “They’re just skeptical and weary about religion,” she said.

Prihodova walked downstairs to a basement and into the glow of TVs arranged like dominoes in a video art exhibition. On one screen, titled “Placebo,” blurry gray words scrolled down a white background. Prihodova stopped at another screen featuring a man’s stomach. The artist, she said, has a rare disease. When his skin is rubbed or scratched, an imprint stays on it like a temporary tattoo.

The man uses his skin like paper.

The first word to appear is “Home.”

The second is “God.”

The letters fade after 15 minutes.