c. 1999 Religion News Service
PRAGUE, Czech Republic _ Frantisek Holecek is dealing with a troubled conscience these days. He is wrestling with guilt for wrongs that date back many years.
But it is not his own guilt weighing on Holecek’s mind. Rather, it is that of his fellow church members from centuries past. Holecek, a Roman Catholic priest, has become the point man for reconciling the Catholic church with its troubled past here. No less than three commissions are at work in the Czech Republic, working to atone for centuries of bloody religious conflict and persecution.”The church feels responsibility for the actions of its members from a long time ago,”said Holecek.”It’s important to be able to say we made a mistake.” Holecek is executive secretary of two commissions _ one on the heresy trial of reformer Jan Hus, a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation who was burned at the stake in 1415, and another on a 17th century witch hunt in the region of Moravia that claimed around 100 lives, including that of a Catholic priest who spoke out against the carnage. A third commission is studying the violence that accompanied the 16th Catholic Counter Reformation that resulted in the 17th century expulsion of Protestants from the country.
These studies form part of a wider mea culpa movement sweeping Catholicism as the church prepares for the year 2000. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the church’s role in the Holocaust, the persecution of Italian Renaissance mavericks Savonarola and Galileo _ all have come under review as part of Pope John Paul II’s goal of leading the church to what he has proclaimed as a Jubilee with a clean conscience.”As the second millennium of Christianity draws to a close, the church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of its children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his gospel,”the pope wrote in a 1994 apostolic letter on the Jubilee.
The breast-beating may seem especially loud in this small Central European country, but a quick glance at its history explains why. Czech territory was ravaged for centuries with religious conflict, most famously the pan-European Thirty Years’ War, which was ignited in Prague when a Protestant mob threw three Catholic officials out a castle window in 1618. Religious history is also political history in a country that reveres Jan Hus with a national holiday and invoked his warlike followers in its 1918 declaration of independence. Czech nationalists viewed the Catholic hierarchy as complicit with Austrian emperors who dominated this territory for 300 years.”I don’t think the Catholic Church has such an open account with any other country as with the Czech Republic,”said Tomas Halik, a Catholic priest and professor of religion at Charles University in Prague.”In the subconscious of our people are all these historical, open questions.” The most celebrated case under review is that of the fiery preacher Hus, who condemned the corruption rampant in the church during the early 15th century. He alienated church leaders with his praises of the English reformer John Wycliffe, whose teachings had been declared heretical, and his denunciation of the sale of indulgences, which promised to shorten buyers’ stay in Purgatory.
A church council in Constance, Germany, summoned Hus to testify and promptly jailed him. When Hus refused to recant an inaccurate summary of his teachings, the council convicted him of heresy on July 6, 1415. They turned him over to the secular authorities, who immediately burned him at the stake.
During the reforming Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the late Prague Archbishop Josef Beran called for a posthumous apology for the wrongs of Constance. This bid failed, but it did influence Vatican II’s ringing assertion of religious liberty,”Dignitatis Humanae,”which stated that”no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.” The Rev. Daniel Herman, spokesman for the Czech Bishops Conference, added that Hus’ goal of returning the church to its roots was shared by the Second Vatican Council. But the church can’t reclaim Hus as its own, he added, because he opposed the primacy of the pope.
Holecek said the study commission on Hus, on which Catholic and non-Catholic scholars have been laboring for seven years, would forward a report to Pope John Paul II for a statement by the year 2000.
Formal rehabilitation is technically impossible after an excommunicated person’s death. But commission member Jan Lasek, a church history professor at Charles University’s Hussite seminary, said he hoped the study would bring a”healing of memories.” After Hus’ death, his militant followers fended off numerous invasions and secured two centuries of grudging co-existence with Catholics. That lasted until Catholic armies defeated Protestant nobles in the Battle of White Mountain outside Prague in 1620. The Austrian victors executed Protestant nobles, presided over a re-Catholicization of the Czech lands, and forced tens of thousands of Protestants into exile (many eventually to America, where their legacy endures in such church groups as the Moravian Brethren).
The Counter-Reformation hostility to Protestants was”not in accordance with the gospel,”acknowledged church spokesman Herman.
Protestant historian Martin Wernisch, who heads the joint Catholic-Protestant commission studying the Counter-Reformation, noted that Protestants also need to take lessons from this history.”The original goal of the (Protestant) Reformation was not tolerance but renewal of the faith,”he said, adding that Protestants only later developed notions of tolerance when they had to co-exist with people of other confessions. He noted, as have many Catholics, that had the Protestants won the Battle of White Mountain,”they would have acted with the same violence.” Violence of a different sort broke out in North Moravia in the late 17th century. There, a notorious inquisitor named Jindrich Frantisek Boblig was sending accused witches by the dozens to the stake. Boblig, wrote historian Josef Koci, was an”extraordinarily cruel and arrogant lawyer”who had financial as well as sadistic motives: Boblig and his cohorts would get a share of the accused’s property.
Krystof Alois Lautner, an unusually well-educated Moravian village priest, protested against Boblig’s capricious tribunal and became one of its victims. After nine days of torture, Lautner confessed to partaking in a”witches’ sabbath”and was excommunicated and defrocked, Holecek said. Later, in a vain appeal to church superiors, Lautner maintained his only regret was his false confession. He was executed in 1685, and citizen protests prompted an end to the witch trials. A monument in North Moravia preserves his memory.
Holecek said some form of rehabilitation for Lautner is likely.”We are aiming to return to Lautner his priestly dignity, but this is only a symbolic action,”he said.”We cannot give him his life, but we have to take a stand.” Spokesman Herman said he hoped the studies would enable the church to confront its past honestly.”I don’t think the history of the church was only black. It was not only white,”he said.”It must be carefully studied. These three commissions are the first step.”
DEA END SMITH
