Saints and Comrades: Catholicism and Communist Nation-Building in Czechoslovakia

• In Event: Remains of the Past: The Catholic Church in the Communist Regimes of East Central Europe I

Abstract

Communists in Central and Eastern Europe were no strangers to turning saints and religious figures into forerunners of the movements’ ideology, politics and projects including its nation-building strategies. The fifteenth-century reformer Jan Hus, Martin Luther, or even Catholic saints such as St. Stephen were adjusted to fit the Communist narrative of national and supranational histories. Still Catholicism and its culture had always been a bit of a moot.
As I will argue in my paper, in Communist nation-building Catholicism appeared in two different, interrelated, seemingly contradictory, yet complimentary guises —on one hand, as an integral part of progressive Communist national culture and identity and, on the other, as the negative other against which Communist nationalists imagined their own nation-building. Indeed, as I will argue throughout this paper symbolic and structural construction of on one hand a “progressive” national “people Catholicism” and on the other “reactionary political clericalism” was an important part of Communist nation-building in post-war Czechoslovakia. Structurally, people Catholicism was represented by groups of progressive Catholics, i.e. groups loyal to the party and its ideology, whilst political clericalism was, according to Communists, nurtured amongst hierarchy and non-Communist Christian political parties and activists. On symbolic level, “progressive” Catholics were represented by histories of small clergy and common Catholic people fighting, for the nation, and thus often against corrupted “reactionary” high clergy and hierarchy, conspiring with the rulers.

Author

• Agata Sustova Drelova, ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary)