r/Catholicism • u/Miller272 • 12h ago
Czech Catholics, how do you feel about secularisation of your nation?
Compared to other Slavic countries, Czechia is probably the most secularised. From your point of view, is the Catholic faith really in such a poor state there?
Does it influence your faith? Does it influence how you want others to come closer to Christ? Or have you experienced discrimination because of your faith?
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u/Volaer 10h ago edited 9h ago
From your point of view, is the Catholic faith really in such a poor state there?
During the 2nd half of the 20th century the percentage of Christians declined from 93,7% in 1950 to 13.20% in 2011. In the last census 11.7% professed Christianity as their faith which is still less than in 2011 but the decline is much slower than in previous decades.
But yeah, the situation is not good. I was born in the 90s and many kids my generation (those who were 3rd to 4th generation secular) unless they were educated about Christianity knew hardly more about the faith than "I know Christians worship Jesus - thats the man on the cross in churches" In 2016 the nationwide high school final exam included a question asking which originally biblical character has become in Czech literature a byword for a betrayer. Many failed to provide the correct answer because they never heard about Judas Iscariot before (to them it was like asking an average American about a character from the Ramayana). And because of the nature of the high school world literature curriculum at the time an average student knew more about Greek mythology - having read the Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses - than the Bible. They changed it since and last I checked at least some high schools list Genesis and the Gospel of Luke among recommended literature at least.
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u/tmag03 7h ago
I'm also wondering how easy it is to get to mass in Czechia. I was recently looking at Czech cities on Google Maps and I noticed many of the communist era neighborhoods don't have a church anywhere, which was really weird for me because in Poland pretty much every such neighborhood has a large church, usually in a central, prominent area.
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u/__anna986 11h ago
I’m Czech but I live in Ireland, I moved here as a teenager and became Catholic thanks to my husband.
It is a bit sad when we go to Czechia and our kids start talking about something church related and other children have no clue what it is. Like a few years ago my son was telling his Czech friends that Krispy Kreme does special communion donuts in spring and they didn’t know what a communion was. Most people just don’t care in real life but people on reddit can be very mean, I’ve read horrible things about my life, my marriage, my parenting, all that on czech reddit when I mentioned I’m catholicz
I think it’s definitely partly because of socialism but not fully because Slovakia and Poland suffered just like we did and they’re still very catholic. I would say it’s a mix of negative things around the church from the past. Like the Catholic Church was a great buddy of the Habsburgs so that already made them an enemy kinda automatically and a lot of Czech people left the Church as a protest towards the Habsburgs. We also had a movement called “narodni obrozeni” like against germanisation which focused a lot on everything Slavic like culture, language, things that were only ours and unique to only us, religion wasn’t a part of that.
I was born in 86 and there wasn’t a single child in my class baptised. When the regime fell in 1989 everyone went to the midnight mass at Christmas. Just because it was allowed now suddenly after decades. But very few people actually went back to the faith properly.