http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/03/1636072.htm





(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) PRAGUE, Czech
Republic _ The Czech capital is cluttered with churches. From humble
parish chapels to the Gothic grandeur of St. Vitus Cathedral, the
wonderment of Christian faith seems to ooze out of the city's every
pore.

But the churches are mostly empty, and the only wonder to most Czechs
is why anyone at all bothers to go.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people.

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/03/1636072.htm





(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) PRAGUE, Czech
Republic _ The Czech capital is cluttered with churches. From humble
parish chapels to the Gothic grandeur of St. Vitus Cathedral, the
wonderment of Christian faith seems to ooze out of the city's every
pore.

But the churches are mostly empty, and the only wonder to most Czechs
is why anyone at all bothers to go.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people. According to a
European Union survey published last year, only 19 percent of Czechs
said they believed in God; most of the rest proclaim themselves
atheists. Only the former Soviet republic of Estonia had a lower
percentage of believers.

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/03/1636072.htm

Jan Kittrich, a 30-year-old Prague lawyer, is typical. He described
himself as an atheist but quickly added that he had nothing against
churches.

"I love to visit them," he said. "But I see them as historical objects,
not as religious places."

The Czechs are not alone. From Ireland to Italy, church attendance
across Europe is down drastically, and apart from Western Europe's
rapidly growing Muslim communities and the staunch piety of Poles in
the east, religion as a moral force in public life continues to wane.

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/03/1636072.htm

(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) PRAGUE, Czech
Republic _ The Czech capital is cluttered with churches. From humble
parish chapels to the Gothic grandeur of St. Vitus Cathedral, the
wonderment of Christian faith seems to ooze out of the city's every
pore.

But the churches are mostly empty, and the only wonder to most Czechs
is why anyone at all bothers to go.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people. According to a
European Union survey published last year, only 19 percent of Czechs
said they believed in God; most of the rest proclaim themselves
atheists. Only the former Soviet republic of Estonia had a lower
percentage of believers.

Jan Kittrich, a 30-year-old Prague lawyer, is typical. He described
himself as an atheist but quickly added that he had nothing against
churches.

"I love to visit them," he said. "But I see them as historical objects,
not as religious places."

The Czechs are not alone. From Ireland to Italy, church attendance
across Europe is down drastically, and apart from Western Europe's
rapidly growing Muslim communities and the staunch piety of Poles in
the east, religion as a moral force in public life continues to wane.

By all accounts, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a devout
Christian. But when Blair recently told a TV interviewer that his
religious faith informed his world view, he was lampooned and lambasted
from the left and right. The message for British politicians was clear:
If you happen to have a religious urge, keep it in the closet.

Mark Lilla, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago,
has described present-day Europe as "the closest thing to a godless
civilization the world has ever known."

Europeans and Americans share a common civilization and many common
values. But in matters of faith and religion, Europe and the United
States appear to be headed in opposite directions.

Especially since the 2004 U.S. elections, Europeans have expressed
surprise and alarm at the increasing intensity of American religiosity.
Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, has spoken
of a widening "values gap" between Europe and the United States that
could strain future relations.

But religion has long played an important role in American civic life.
God's name is invoked in the Declaration of Independence and on U.S.
currency. More recently, "God Bless America" has become the standard
sign-off of politicians across the political spectrum.

President Bush is hardly the first president to proclaim America to be
God's instrument on Earth. John Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address,
declared with certainty that "here on Earth, God's work must truly be
our own."

Europeans are more diffident about God, and the Czechs more so than
most Europeans.

Lori Gregory grew up in Philadelphia and is a Christian missionary in
the Czech Republic. She and her husband, Bill, an ordained Southern
Baptist minister, came to Prague 13 years ago to work for Young Life, a
Colorado-based organization that focuses on teenagers. It has not been
an easy path.

"When we bring up the subject (of faith), it's like asking if you
believe in UFOs. That's what we're up against here," Gregory said. "In
the States, you can assume most kids know why Christmas is celebrated.
In the Czech Republic kids think Baby Jesus is like Cinderella or
Shrek. ... They think it's all a fairy tale."

Given four decades of communist rule, perhaps that is not surprising.
Kittrich, the lawyer, grew up in a small town in Moravia. He had one
grandmother who told him stories from the Bible, and another, a police
colonel, whose home was filled with statues of Lenin and Stalin. "That
was her religion," he said.

His mother, he said, was a member of the "hippie generation" that
rejected all religions and ideologies. Kittrich's first encounter with
a church group came while he was a teenage exchange student in Elkin,
N.C. He began attending services at the local Methodist church.

"Three times a week there were church activities _ suppers for homeless
people, youth groups. I joined the soccer team. The people were really
nice and it opened my eyes," he said.

"But it always seemed more of a social community than a religious
community, so when I got back here, I didn't follow up."

Kittrich acknowledges he often thinks about religion. "But I don't
think I'm missing anything," he said with a shrug.

Tomas Halik, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of philosophy at
Prague's Charles University, is not surprised at this spiritual
indifference. He believes Czechoslovakia's communist rulers and their
masters in Moscow deliberately targeted the country for "an experiment
in the total atheization of society."

The crackdown on the church and clergy was much harsher than in
neighboring Poland, Hungary or even the Soviet Union, and the decades
of repression did serious harm to the Czech religious identity, Halik
said.

"Czech society is not really atheistic _ it's worse. Czechs today
hardly know anything about religion," he said.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Halik, who likes to joke that he "converted from agnosticism," was
secretly ordained in East Germany in 1978.

During the communist era, he became well known as a spokesman for the
Charter 77 group, which later would play a key role in the 1989 Velvet
Revolution that ended communism. Throughout those years, he kept his
ordination a secret from everyone, including his mother.

These days he leads a small but robust congregation in Prague made up
mostly of university students. He has baptized about 800 adults over
the last dozen or so years.

"After 1989, there was a great expectation that the church would be an
important force for the renewal of the nation," Halik said.

When Pope John Paul II visited Czechoslovakia in 1990, huge crowds
turned out to greet him. But when he returned for a third, and final,
visit in 1997, the crowds were embarrassingly thin. (Among Czechs who
claim some religious affiliation, 83 percent are Catholic, 10 percent
are Protestant and 6.4 percent are Orthodox, according to EU figures.)

Halik said the Czech Catholic Church wasted a golden opportunity in the
early 1990s, mainly because it had no experience in public life and
most of its priests "only knew how to operate in the old communist
style _ the liturgy and nothing more."

Dusan Trestik, a historian at the Center for Medieval Studies in
Prague, agreed. "I think you have to say the church failed in the needs
of modernization," he said. "The church was offering traditional
Christianity for grannies. You had 18- to 20-year-olds, and the church
didn't know how to speak to them."

But Trestik noted that the Czechs' standoffishness toward religion
predates the communists by centuries. Christianity arrived in the Czech
lands in 865, but its defining moment came in the early 1400s when Jan
Hus, rector at the University of Prague, challenged the authority and
teachings of Rome. For this, he was burned at the stake.

"In all aspects, it was a Protestant Reformation a century before
Protestantism," Trestik said. "But the Hussite revolution ended like
all revolutions_badly. The Hussites mutually defeated each other."

The Czech lands fell under the control of the German-speaking
Habsburgs. Catholic authority was restored, but Czechs henceforth
regarded the church as something imposed from the outside.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

When ordinary Czechs identify themselves as atheist, they usually don't
mean it in the strict sense. When pressed, most Czechs acknowledge they
believe in "something."

"Even rational people need to believe in something, something bigger
than themselves to make sense of their lives," said Dana Hamplova, a
Prague sociologist whose research has found that while Czechs mistrust
organized religion, they rank very high among Europeans who believe in
the power of fortunetellers, amulets and other non-traditional forms of
spirituality.

"They are looking for something, for guidance, and in the pure sense,
it's religious," she said.

Pavel Rican, a religion professor at Charles University, refers to this
as "somethingism" and describes it as a "degenerated religiosity" that
has become the norm in much of Europe.

"Superstitions, cults, interest in herbs _ there are so many people now
to whom salvation means good health," he said.

What caused the demise of traditional religion among Czechs and other
Europeans? Is it the fault of the church, or did the faithful change in
some fundamental way?

"I go to church infrequently. It's boring. It gives me nothing," Rican
said. "The songs are 400 years old, and what is said there, it doesn't
address what people need, and I'm afraid the churches don't even try.

"Yes, it's a failure of the churches. But this is something that is
characteristic for the whole of Europe," he said. "I saw statistics for
Spain (which in 1975 emerged from 36 years of "Catholic nationalism"
under the dictator Gen. Francisco Franco) and they seem to be going in
the same direction as us."

Grace Davie, a British expert on the sociology of religion, says the
church already has "lost its role as the keystone in the arch of
European culture."

George Weigel, a leading American Catholic intellectual, goes further,
arguing that Europe is becoming a "post-Christian society" with a
ruling elite that is openly hostile to religion.

"It would be too simple to say that the reason Americans and Europeans
see the world so differently is that the former go to church on Sundays
and the latter don't," Weigel wrote in his 2005 book, "The Cube and the
Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God."

"But it would also be a grave mistake to think that the dramatic
differences in religious belief and practice in the United States and
Europe don't have something important to do with those different
perceptions of the world _ and the different policies to which those
perceptions eventually lead," he wrote.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Pope John Paul II believed Europe's poverty of spirit was linked to its
postwar affluence, or, in the specific case of Eastern Europe, to its
post-communist embrace of American-style consumerism. That may be a
harsh judgment _ if anything, the American experience seems to suggest
that spirituality and consumerism need not be mutually exclusive.

Europeans, including many who are religiously inclined, tend to be
openly disdainful of this American-style religiosity.

"This kind of do-it-yourself Christianity _ people like Billy Graham
and Jesse Jackson and all the TV preachers _ would be impossible in
Europe," said historian Trestik. "Christianity like some kind of
supermarket is completely impossible in Europe."

But European religious leaders are at a loss for ways to stanch the
loss of faith among their flocks. While some are trying to make the
institutional church more accessible and user-friendly, the Catholic
Church, by far the continent's largest denomination, seems to be
consoling itself with a "less is more" approach, arguing that the
numbers in the pews matter less than the depth and quality of faith of
those who do believe.

"We know we can't go back to the Catholic Europe of the Middle Ages, so
we will have to find some compatibility between Christianity and
secular humanism," said Halik, the secretly ordained priest.

But can Christianity and secular humanism ever be compatible?

"Faith and doubt are like two sisters," Halik said with a mysterious
smile. "They need each other."

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people. According to a
European Union survey published last year, only 19 percent of Czechs
said they believed in God; most of the rest proclaim themselves
atheists.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people.

(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) PRAGUE, Czech
Republic _ The Czech capital is cluttered with churches. From humble
parish chapels to the Gothic grandeur of St. Vitus Cathedral, the
wonderment of Christian faith seems to ooze out of the city's every
pore.

But the churches are mostly empty, and the only wonder to most Czechs
is why anyone at all bothers to go.

Czechs are among Europe's most fervently secular people. According to a
European Union survey published last year, only 19 percent of Czechs
said they believed in God; most of the rest proclaim themselves
atheists. Only the former Soviet republic of Estonia had a lower
percentage of believers.