The Hussites Are Back, but Did They Bring Cookies?

The seventeenth century, that chilly, famished, war-wracked saeculum, became for many an age of extinction. The Pequot Indians, the Ming Dynasty, and the Hussite Protestants of Bohemia all succumbed to violence, enslavement, or exile in the 1600s. For human ethnic and religious groups, however, extinction need not remain permanent. The Pequots' descendants made a comeback in the twentieth century, and opened one of the most profitable casinos in the world. Ming loyalists established secret societies that survived, in the case of the Triads, into the modern era. And Czech Protestants, as I learned on a recent trip to Prague, have enjoyed a modest comeback in the past century. During the Thirty Years War the Habsburgs made a mighty effort to crush Protestantism in Bohemia, forcing the adherents of Jan Hus to convert or leave the kingdom. Some rural Protestants preserved their faith in secret, and in the eighteenth century emigrated to Germany, where they became the co-founders of the Moravian Church. Otherwise the Czech homeland remained staunchly and, it seemed, permanently Catholic.

When Czechoslovakia became independent, however, the government decided to shore up their new country's national identity by creating a national church, one independent of the Roman Church hierarchy and evocative of the old Hussite tradition. Their religious project, the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, debuted in January 1920. While the Czechoslovak Church never became a serious competitor with Catholicism – or secularism – it now has about 300,000 adherents, and runs an array of schools, senior centers, and children's homes. Like the Roman Church, the CHC recognizes seven sacraments; I assume that, at communion, both the laity and priesthood partake of the wine (as this was the original Hussites' cause celebre). It has an ordained priesthood and episcopate, though the religious head of the church is a patriarch rather than a pope, and women have been accepted as priests since 1947. Church governance follows a hybrid episcopal/presbyterian model, with decision-making power jointly vested in the bishops and local councils of lay elders. How well this works in practice I know not, but hybrid institutions always function a little awkwardly. They are no weaker for it.

(Photo of the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel, one of the Hussite Church's parishes, in Prague.)