Two weekends ago I was not with you, except in spirit. I was in Moravia. And where is that? It is part of what is now called the Czech Republic, and I was on my way to that many accented place which I teased you with in the Newsletter before My departure (and which was not a piece of fake information).

It all seemed very different; certainly not an English voice to be heard anywhere as I struggled with my Czech phrase book. Czech is a language which rations vowels; so the word for "ice cream" is zmrzlina, which should be enough to put anyone off frying to order a cornetto in Prague.

Czechoslovakia was once the world's tenth industrial power, but things seemed less zippy as I made my way about by extremely slow (but virtually free) trains; the record was held by one to a place called Slavonice which took 2 hours and 3 minutes to go 53 km., i.e. at about 15 mph. Much of the time was spent admiring duckponds.

The Czech church was bitterly persecuted during the Communist era. The Czechs are not 'intensely' Catholic in the same strongly nationalist sense that the Poles are (or the Slovaks, who now form a separate country). As a result persecution was easier, and publicity less prominent. Providing priests became a major problem; indeed in the critical conditions there were several cases of (illicit) ordinations of married men and allegedly one of a woman, which have proved something of a problem to sort out now that 'normality' has returned

Now things are up and running again, though there is a great backlog of building repair work, especially in town churches. "Aid to the Church in Need" has offered much help.

What struck me about Czech worshippers at Mass was that it was all taken intensely seriously (which is not the same thing as 'boring' or 'pompous'). One could sense the attitude: "all this was denied us, now we can claim it again". Although the Church has to try to reclaim a lost generation, it seemed determined not to do so by frippery methods, by just appealing to people's sense of 'fun'.

We Catholics have not been persecuted of late and we can worship at our ease. Sometimes one senses that we have to be striving after effect in order to keep everybody interested. It makes one wonder: if it was all to be taken from us by a hostile regime, what would we really want back first? DS