The twenty-three priests of the Zagreb diocese who were in favour of a
married clergy and of several other reforms could not stand up against
their ecclesiastical superiors. The movement has made no open progress
and their leader has been constrained to abandon Holy Orders and
become a timber merchant. Nevertheless the idea of a national Church
has not vanished; a good deal depends for other countries on the
degree of success which attends the newly established national Church
in Czecho-Slovakia. It already possesses over half a million adherents
out of a population of 13 millions. We may be going to witness the
rise of a series of national Churches, a consummation which--a Roman
Catholic might observe--will very likely be no more successful in
bringing nearer the brotherhood of man than the wide-flung Catholic
Church. The enthusiastic nationalism of such new Churches may, in
fact, help to postpone that happy state of things. In any case, and
whatever be the results, we shall do well not to ignore the beginnings
of what may be a mighty Reformation.
Ever since 1848 the Czech clergy have been anxious to obtain reforms,
not so much in dogma as in discipline. They assert that it is more in
accordance with the democratic spirit of the age if a priest is
selected not by some magnate but by his prospective parishioners; they
desire to have their mother-tongue employed for the liturgy--in this
respect they are in advance of most Catholic countries--and they wish
to allow their priests to marry or not to marry, as each man prefers.
This, one need hardly say, is the point which, almost to the exclusion
of all others, is taken up by the hostile compatriots of the new
believers. "It is nothing more nor less than this," said a portly
Benedictine abbot to me one day in Prague, "there are priests who live
in concubinage and they actually want to have it legalized!" But in
Czecho-Slovakia, with her vivid memories of the Hussites in the
fifteenth century--magnificent new monuments to John Huss decorate the
principal towns--in Czecho-Slovakia the old regime has not the same
power as in Croatia. At first the new Church was sneered at, being
called a Churchlet, then they called it a sect, and now they say it
may persist for fifty years. While its critics occupy themselves so
largely with the topic of clerical celibacy, the founders of the
Church themselves are much more interested in other questions. They do
not greatly concern themselves with their priests' apparel, holding
that this need not trouble them more than a little, since they are
striving for something more weighty--the freedom of conscience. In
this, as they say, they are carrying on the doctrines of Huss, which
were so bloodily repressed by the dominant party. Under Charles IV.
the Roman Catholic Church possessed about one-third of all the land in
Bohemia, while in Prague alone there were some three thousand priests.
And if the doctrines of Huss had not sunk deeply into the minds of the
Bohemians this new Church would have found her task very much more
difficult. The first three bishops were ordained last year by the
Serbian Bishop of Ni[vs]. It was at one time thought that the Orthodox
religion would be adopted, but this was found to be impossible, and
after a year of negotiations it was settled that the Serbian Church
should be regarded as a sister Church.
The significance of Czecho-Slovakia's new Church is to be found in the
national idea. So much is it a thing of the people and not of the
priests that several schoolmasters have had to be ordained, the clergy
being otherwise too scanty. In June 1919 a delegation from 3000
dissatisfied priests went to Rome. The Pope rejected what he called
their foolish novelties. In January 1920 a secret meeting of 200
priests was held in Prague and 144 of them declared themselves for a
new national Church. But few of them possessed the necessary
resolution, such as was displayed by Dr. Farsky, a very intelligent
and earnest young man who was Professor of Religion in the University
and has now been appointed the Head of this new Church, as Bishop of
Prague and Patriarch. His opponent, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of
Prague, has the reputation of being one of the cleverest of Czech
politicians, and it will be interesting to see how the position
develops. Since the War the Roman Catholic Church has lost 25 per
cent. of its members--during the War it was, in the opinion of many,
though perhaps it had no option, very much the servant of the
Habsburgs. And one imagines that the Archbishop is handicapped by the
demands of his party that the State should unquestionably continue to
pay the yearly interests of the large number of monasteries that were
dissolved more than a century ago by Joseph II. "All England's
troubles," said the Coadjutor-Archbishop to me, "emanate from the fact
that she nowadays pays nothing to the Church for those monasteries
that were suppressed by Henry VIII." It is doubtful whether the
Czechs, exulting in their regained liberty, will for the most part
take the side of Rome when the matter has been fully ventilated and
discussed. "We are not monarchist at all," said the Abbot Zavoral, "we
are true to the Republic, we are democratic. And discussion is
democratic, but," said he, "it should not be unlimited."