Religion in Czechoslovakia - 1950s and 1960s

1950s and 1960s

During the Stalinist trials of the 1950s, more than 6,000 religious people (some old and sick) received prison sentences averaging more than five years apiece. Between 1948 and 1968, the number of priests declined by half, and half the remaining clergy were over sixty years of age. The Catholic Church had already lost a substantial number of clergy with the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans; it faced significant problems with understaffed parishes and an aging clergy. Protestant sects, less dependent on a centralized hierarchy in the running of ecclesiastical affairs and less prominent because of their minority status, fared better.

Between 1950 and 1968, the Uniate Church was prohibited. Uniates had close historic ties to both the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. The communist regime sought to Russify whatever it could and followed a longstanding Russian policy of opposing the Uniate Church. Soon after coming to power, the party forcibly repressed the Uniate Church (following the earlier example of the Soviet Union) in favor of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox had been a distinct minority in Czechoslovakia, but Orthodox priests took over parishes as the Uniate clergy were imprisoned or sent to work on farms in the Czech lands. The shortage of priests was so extreme that the party gave a crash course in Orthodox doctrine to "politically mature" teachers in the region and sent them into Uniate churches as replacements. Uniates responded with various forms of resistance, ranging from simply leaving church whenever an Orthodox priest arrived to holding services among themselves.