Enlightenment path of tolerance and religious freedom

18–19th Century A.D.

After a period of religious conflicts and wars, which increased the power position of the Catholic Church (especially the Jesuits) and the absolute rule of the monarch, in Europe there comes an age of enlightened reason, awareness of national identity, citizenship and the pursuit of freedom and equality for all people. The French revolution from 1789 gives all monarchs a warning that it is necessary to improve the lives of ordinary people, who often live in servitude as if it still was the era of the Middle Ages. There are efforts for the enlightenment reform of the state, institutions and society during the reign of Joseph II in our country. An educated, productive and honest citizen should be the most important thing in a society.

The dissolution of personality in a mystical knowledge of God is after a two hundred year “reign” of Baroque replaced by rationality, individuality, neoclassical austerity and enlightened reason – an era called the Enlightenment. This carries with it an air of resistance against the previous “Jesuit” era, as well as religious tolerance, which was above all for the economically strong and educated people who were involved in the construction of the state.

Tolerance, meaning Toleration

There were also occurrences of popular turmoil in the Czech territory requesting religious tolerance. These were often provoked by the recatholization efforts. Joseph II., therefore, issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781 with the intention of bringing the secret Protestantism to light and including it in society, in order to be able to confront it better. This document brought religious tolerance to the Lutheran, Reformed, Greek Orthodox and Jewish faith. It was not possible to subscribe to the tradition of Czech Reformation because of fears of excessive growth of national consciousness. The authorities initially did not expect such a strong wave of applications for non-Catholic faiths, so the spreading of the news of the patent was soon supplemented by many countermeasures which applications in some regions (for example in South-West Bohemia) stopped. The so called Tolerance Congregations with their churches, parishes and schools emerge in eastern Bohemia, in Vysočina, Wallachia and southern Moravia.

Appointed vicars could only come from the Austrian monarchy, therefore, interesting fates are known primarily from the Reformed churches where pastors came from Hungary, often initially without any knowledge of the Czech language (poor rural Protestant population did not know any foreign languages). On the other hand, many of them were of noble origin, and so were able to hold talks with the nobility and the authorities about a permission to establish evangelical congregations and to build churches.

Part of the Joseph’s reforms was the massive dissolution of monasteries, which (according to the enlightened concepts) do not benefit the society’s beneficial institutions (hospitals, schools) and are primarily focused on contemplation. The proceeds from those demolished monasteries were used for building thorough and sophisticated network of Catholic parishes.

About 1700 new parishes were built, especially in poor and remote areas, so that every village with at least 700 people had a parish office and nobody had to journey to church for more than an hour. Faith and the Church were supposed to become one of the tools for building society – they should no longer be outside of the events of the world. The clergy should no longer live in separate, and by state power uncontrolled monasteries, but above all among ordinary people to be able to manage parishes and registrars. The traditional image of a village with a church and a rectory, and a priest sharing all the joys and sorrows of ordinary people is mainly the result of the Joseph’s reforms.

Reformed pastors from Hungary were renowned for their ingenuity during circumventing the “Tolerance restrictions” regarding the style of the Protestant meeting houses (see the Feathers from Vanovice story), and in negotiations with the authorities and the nobles for an authorization to establish specific congregations. Equality for all non-Catholic faiths comes in 1861 when the Protestant patent practically allows non-Catholics to enter public life and even for the first time to officially declare themselves as agnostic citizens. The architecture after the classical period brings a romantic link-up to the old styles - Romanesque architecture, Gothic and Renaissance. The disturbing wave of revolutions of 1848 causes a person to search for roots, “carefree childhood” and national awareness of the society through the neo-Roman, neo-Gothic or neo-Renaissance style. Catholic (Josef Dobrovský) and Protestant (František Palacký) thinkers inspire national awakening through their work. The first Vatican Council comes in these turbulent times as a response to new schools of thought and socio-political systems in 1870. It responds to the efforts of modern human autonomy with two dogmas - about the possibility of intellectual knowledge of God (Dei Filius) and supreme apostolic authority and hence infallibility of the pope (Pastor Aeternus). The results of the Council, which had to be aborted because of the Franco-Prussian War, were understood by the supporters of Modernism as a reaction against their concept. Modernism-minded Catholics founded the so-called Old Catholic Church. The Council and the ensuing atmosphere in the Catholic Church have on our territory sparked the creation of a local branch of the Orthodox Church and later the Czechoslovak Hussite Church.