At the beginning of the Communist era, Czechoslovakia had a varied religious tradition, with Roman Catholicism as the dominant faith alongside Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, and Uniate communities.
The communist regime sought to suppress religion, promoting "scientific atheism" through policies that restricted clergy, closed monasteries, and controlled religious education.
The 1968 reforms briefly eased restrictions, but normalisation in the 1970s brought renewed persecution, targeting Catholic and Uniate communities while favouring state-controlled churches.
By the 1980s, the state maintained strict control over religious practice, yet underground movements and youth interest in religion grew.
At the time of the communist takeover, more than two out of every three citizens were Roman Catholics, but within each major ethnic group there was a small minority of Protestants: Bohemian Brethren in the Czech lands, Lutherans in Slovakia, and Calvinists among the Hungarians.
Protestant sects, less dependent on a centralized hierarchy in the running of ecclesiastical affairs and less prominent because of their minority status, fared better.
The shortage of priests was so extreme that the party gave a crash course in Orthodox doctrine to "politically mature" teachers in the region and sent them into Uniate churches to replace the Catholic clergy.
Religious sentiment reflected social background: nine-tenths of all farmers were believers, as were three-fourths of all blue-collar workers and slightly more than one-half of all white-collar employees .
The regime of Alexander Dubček allowed the most closely controlled of the government-sponsored religious organizations (the Peace Movement of the Catholic Clergy and its Protestant counterpart) to lapse into inactivity.
The Roman Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of Cardinal František Tomášek, archbishop of Prague, was once more the principal target.
In an effort to ensure a group of compliant and loyal clergy, the regime of Gustáv Husák organized a number of state-controlled associations, including the Ecumenical Council of the Churches of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Czechoslovak Association of Catholic Clergy (more commonly known as Pacem in Terris), with Czech and Slovak branches.
[7] The regime showed a willingness to permit religious groups to practice their creeds as long as the clergy and the faithful did not bring religion into public life.
The complication was that the regime counted almost anything as public life and so, for example, disallowed sermons on the high divorce rate or neglected children.
Although methods differed, religious persecution in Slovakia equaled that suffered by the Charter 77 human rights activists and proscribed writers in the Czech lands.
[9] Official policy toward religious groups in the 1980s was consistent with that of the early socialist era, when a series of measures sought to bring organized religion to heel.
In October a number of students at the Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Divinity in Bratislava began a hunger strike in protest against Pacem in Terris.
In an apparent reply to the incident, Bratislava's Pravda took the opportunity to denounce the resurgence of "clerico-fascist ideology," which, given the growth of socialism (commentators were quick to note), lacked a constituency in Czechoslovakia.