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.However, as in Western Europe, other factors were eating away at theopenness of Czech political Catholicism.Women had always constituted asignificant proportion of party membership and played much the same roleas in the development of Western European Catholic politics.Further, al-though there could be no rebirth of the Catholic trade unions, other organi-zations were reestablished on a confessional basis and met with some suc-cess.While Church-sponsored youth organizations had difficulties inattracting a large following, the Congress of Young People s Party Support-ers drew 110,000 followers to Prague in May 1947.Although participationlevels for organizations, celebrations, and meetings cannot be establishedwith certainty, the sheer number of events testifies to the richness of Catholicassociational life.7 Finally, as in Western Europe, the clergy and especially ac-ademic theologians played an increasing role in political debate.This heldtrue for all facets of the nation s political reconstruction, but  above all con-cerned Church schools and property. 8 All these factors bear considerableresemblance to those operating on Catholic political actors in the West.The crucial final two the Cold War and the consolidation of Catholic socialdoctrine were played out in the development of the party s political posi-tion.Heightened East-West tensions were reflected in the increasing sharp-ness of the stance Catholic activists and People s Party leaders adopted.Sim-ilarly, over the course of its three years of relatively free operation, the partyelaborated a reformist but resolutely nonsocialist doctrine that relied heavilyon papal encyclicals, as was the case in the West.The shift from the open to the closed variant of Catholic politics appearsmore pronounced in the People s Party than in its analogues in the West,however.Czech Catholicism emerged from the war with both the rejectionof Munich and a solid record of resistance service standing to its credit, butChapter 11: Socialism and Roman Catholic Intellectuals 237the People s Party emerged rather disorganized and politically marginalized.Catholic rhetoric was neither strong nor united enough to be considered thatof a closed Catholicism, and the enthusiasm throughout the land for socialchange demanded from the party a stance that did not lie too far to the right,since its moderation already isolated it on the right of the Czech politicalspectrum.After the 1946 parliamentary elections and the partial reorganiza-tion of the People s Party, the political, intellectual, and clerical leadershipsof Czech political Catholicism drew closer, presenting a more united front.This can be seen as the Czech variant of closed Catholicism, and relied onthe intertwining of Whyte s final two criteria.The Communist Party s victoryin those elections, and the extent of the public sympathy for socialism gen-erally, forced politically moderate Catholic believers to close ranks.Thispressure only heightened after the initial Cominform meeting labeled theChurch a reactionary force in the fall of 1947.Further, the party, which in1946 could campaign only on a platform of being the sole non-socialist partyin the Czech lands, thereafter developed a coherent anti-Marxist messagethat presented a distinctly Catholic social-reformism.In terms of the twowings of the movement, this message was spread both by the more  politi-cal wing and lay leaders like Pavel Tigrid and Bohdan Chudoba, as well asby the more  Catholic wing led by theologians like Adolf Kajpr, DominikPecka, and S.S.Ghelfand.While it impossible to predict how Czech Catholi-cism would have developed had the communists not risen to total power, el-ements heralding the rise of closed Catholicism are evident.These wouldlikely have continued to gain strength, particularly following the Pope s anti-communist pronouncement of 1949, resulting in the coalescence of a Chris-tian Democratic movement similar to that familiar to Western observers.Roman Catholic political and intellectual leaders took seriously the threatof socialism, by which they almost exclusively meant the Marxist variant.Ac-tivists like S.S.Ghelfand saw the Marxists endeavor to transform Czech so-ciety as part of a  fateful struggle between the theistic forces of the spirit andthe materialist soldiers of atheism.Therefore, the nation must choose:  EitherChristianity or Marxism.In this lies the meaning of today s struggle over thespiritual and material content of human life. 9 For Catholics, no synthesis ofMarxist theory and Christian principles, such as the one for which we shallsee the Czechoslovak Church yearned, was possible.They conceived of theirstruggle as one to the death: as one commentator noted, only the futurewould tell whether communism would be written about in the history booksof the Church or vice versa.10 As the general secretary of the People s Partyobserved, the struggle against materialism had been carried on for nearly2000 years, but the threat of communism made it  necessary today to adopta militant position in this truly dramatic struggle for the victory of the spirit. 11In this battle, his party considered itself the  spokesperson of those whocharacterized themselves as defenders of the primacy of the spirit.12238 Part III: The Meaning of SocialismIn contrast, communist intellectuals adopted a decidedly soft rhetoricalposition toward religion through the first year after liberation, and onlyshowed a harsher face after the Communist Party s victory in the 1946 elec-tions.As this was directed at Roman Catholics, it contributed to the sharpnessof the shift between open and closed Catholicism in Czechoslovakia, whileother Christian sects could still bask in the glow of communist tolerance andeven praise.13 In 1946, the Communist Party s Eighth Congress proclaimed itsrespect for the freedom of conscience and religious affiliation.As Karel Ka-plan has noted:The Communists tried to maintain good relations with the Church and not comeinto conflict with it.In their own ranks, they silenced and condemned the voicesof their prewar members activists of the Union of Agnostics in the majoritywho wanted to launch atheistic propaganda with attacks against the Church.Many of these.proclaimed the incompatibility of membership in the Com-munist Party with religious affiliation.14For example, the Communist minister of education and culture, Zden%1Å‚k Ne-jedlý, spoke before 380 priests at a meeting in November 1945.He praisedthe clergy for its conduct during the war and declared his opposition to thecomplete separation of church and state.This statement from one of thefounders of the Union of Progressive Freethinkers was received  unexpect-edly enthusiastically. 15 Although it seems apparent that the binding of theChurch to the state made the control of the former by the latter easier, at thattime Catholics did not consider a Communist Party s electoral victory and itsdomination of the government likely.On the theoretical plane, however, this  soft line was maintained longerthan it was in the sphere of practical politics [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]