Pope visits Czech Republic with many nonbelievers

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI is going to the heart of central Europe 20 years after the fall of communism ended restrictions on religion. But what he will find is a Czech Republic where nearly half the population professes to be nonbelievers.

Like an ancient missionary on his three-day pilgrimage starting Saturday, Benedict will try to reinvigorate the faith with a series of religious services, make a side trip to the traditional Catholic heartland in Moravia and repeat reminders of the country’s Christian roots as he pays tribute to the nation’s patron saint, Wenceslas.

The Czech Republic “like the entire continent, needs to refind faith and hope,” Benedict told a crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday as he asked for prayers to make his pilgrimage a success.

“The pope is traveling to the heart of Europe, where Christianity has made a central contribution,’” said Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi. But he said that secularism is so widespread “that the practice of religion is reduced to a minority.”

Even after communism fell in 1989, the Catholic church is still battling for the return of St. Vitus Cathedral, the Gothic centerpiece of Prague’s Hradcany Castle that the Communists gave to the state along with other church property. It is used for religious services but ownership remains with the state.

The 82-year-old pope is making the 13th foreign trip of his papacy, many of them centered around the warning that modern culture is pushing God out of people’s lives and making religion irrelevant in public life.

It will be Benedict’s first foreign journey since he broke his right wrist in a fall in his bedroom while vacationing in the Italian Alps in July. Doctors said the fall was not related to any underlying medical condition and that his overall health is good.

Decades of communism dented religious faith in many countries — but the Czech Republic has been unusual in showing a particularly steep fall in the numbers of church members since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

According to the 2001 census, some 3.3 million people in the nation of 10 million said they belonged to a church — down from 4.5 million in 1991.

A poll on the issue conducted by the STEM agency showed some 48 percent of Czechs saying they do not believe in God, while 28 percent are believers and 24 percent don’t know. The margin of error of the poll was 2.5 percentage points.

The Rev. Tomas Halik, who was secretly ordained under communism and now teaches at Prague’s Charles University, said the roots of non-belief date to Czech nationalism in the 19th century, when Czech lands were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the church was seen as the empire’s ally.

The Communists took anti-church policies to a new level of repression.

“The Czech part of Czechoslovakia witnessed an attempt to establish a totally atheistic society,” Halik said. “The church here was suppressed more than in any other communist country.”

The Communist regime, which seized power in 1948 in what was then Czechoslovakia, confiscated all the property owned by the churches and persecuted many of the priests. Churches were then allowed to function only under the state’s control and supervision.

In 2008, the government drafted a bill that would compensate all religious organizations, including the Catholic Church, for property seized by the former Communist regime, but the bill has never been approved by parliament.

The Catholic Church and the Czech government had long fought over rights to the 14th century St. Vitus Gothic cathedral, but the Supreme Court ended the dispute in March after some 17 years by ruling that it belongs to the state.

Pope John Paul II made three trips to the Czech Republic starting in 1990 in a push for religious revival after the persecutions of the communist years. Benedict visited Prague as a cardinal in 1992.

This week, workmen have been busy preparing for what is expected to be the best attended event of Benedict’s trip, an open-air Mass beside the airport in Brno on a field that can accommodate as many as 200,000 people.

The Vatican estimates the number of Catholics as 3.2 million; the government puts the figure at below 3 million.

“I don’t think that Czechs are less religious than other Europeans,” Lenka Studena told Associated Press Television in Brno. “It’s more that they lost trust in institutions.”

In that they are not alone in Europe among lands emerging from communism.

While about 78 percent of Germans say they believe in God, a 2007 survey showed, the number drops to 36 percent in the former communist east.

Contributions from Karel Janicek and Aleksandar Furtula in the Czech Republic and Kirsten Grieshaber in Germany.