On this day in 1942, the German authorities banned the Orthodox Church in the Czech Republic. I wrote on September 23 about the role of Archbishop Serafim (Lade) of Berlin (1883–1950) regarding the local Church in Poland (in 1939; following the partition of the country by the Nazis and the Soviets, the church in the east of the country came under the Moscow Patriarchate and in the west under the ROCOR). After the foundation of Czechoslovakia with the Pact of Versailles in 1919, there were dioceses of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the country. Bishop St. Gorazd (Pavlik) of Moravia and Silesia was a hierarch of the Serbian Church. He was a former Roman Catholic priest who had initially belonged to a Czech Catholic reform movement (they argued for services in the vernacular and abolishing clerical celibacy, among other things). In 1921, Archimandrite Gorazd was consecrated bishop in Belgrade. The Serbian Patriarch Dimitrije presided over the consecration, and Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitskii) participated. Liturgical services in Bishop Gorazd’s diocese contained elements of the Western Rite. Continuing with their policy of dividing and conquering, the Nazis did not permit the Czech diocese to remain under the jurisdiction of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In this situation, Bishop Gorazd asked Archbishop Seraphim (Lade) of Berlin of the Russian Church Abroad to accept the diocese under his omophorion. On June 14, 1942, in Berlin, Bishop Gorazd participated in the consecration of Archimandrite Philip (Johann von Gardner) as Bishop of Postdam, a vicar of the German Diocese. While he was in Berlin, Bishop Gorazd learned that one of his priests had given refuge to the British paratroopers who, on May 27, 1942, killed Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Protector in Bohemia and Moravia and Hitler’s close Parteigenosse. On June 18, Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Prague was surrounded by the Gestapo, and the commandos killed themselves. In September 1942, Bishop Gorazd, two of his priests, and the cathedral warden were executed. On September 27 (or 26, according to Shkarovskii), the Czech Church was banned outright, and its property was confiscated. In 1987, the Orthodox Church in the Czech and Slovak Lands canonized Bishop Gorazd. Sources: Vladimir V. Bureha, “Gorazd,” Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopedia. M. V. Shkarovskii, Natsistskaia Germaniia I Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ [Nazis’ Germany and the Orthodox Church] (Moscow, 2002). |
