By John Paul Royal
On December 10, 1989, at the confluence of the Danube and Morava rivers, under the shadow of Devín Castle, tens of thousands of Slovaks marched from Bratislava to Hainburg, Austria, piercing the Iron Curtain. Large crowds also gathered at the castle to protest peacefully under the slogan “Hello, Europe!”. The protesters cut the barbed wire that separated Czechoslovakia from the Free World. The next day, the communist government began dismantling the barriers in this border area, effectively tearing down the Iron Curtain in Central Europe.
These events were the culmination of the Velvet Revolution, the national protest movement that ended more than forty years of communist rule, paving the way for the restoration of democracy and freedom. Slovakia and the Czech Republic, today independent countries, celebrate these miraculous events on November 17, the day when student protests were brutally repressed in 1989, becoming the trigger for the chain of events that led to December 10.
Astonishingly, this year the holiday—called the Day of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy—was canceled by Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. A former member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and in office since 2023, Fico cited austerity measures as justification. Instead, the ruling party marked the anniversary with a congress where one of its closest advisors greeted participants with the Marxist salute: “Honor to labor, comrades.” To top it off, Fico has declared that he does not celebrate November 17 because he does not consider it a fundamental turning point in the country’s life.
While Fico and his cronies in Slovakia attempt to erase from memory those who were brutalized by the Communist Party during the Cold War and the courage of those who challenged it, Thomas Albert Howard admirably documents the enormous vileness inflicted on Czechoslovakia and many other regions of the world throughout the 20th century in his new book Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History.
Among the hundreds of atrocities chronicled in the book, two began in 1950, launched by the communist leadership of Czechoslovakia.
Operation K (for kláštéry, literally “monasteries”) employed the State Security services to arrest the vast majority of the country’s religious orders, especially Salesians, Jesuits, Redemptorists, Benedictines, and Franciscans.
Operation R (for the Slovak term for nun, rehoľníčka) devastated convents and female religious houses. Both operations resulted in “the sudden liquidation of religious institutions, some of which had existed for more than a thousand years.” Works of art, libraries, and other assets were looted or destroyed while the religious were sent to labor camps in prison-like conditions.
Despite these and other persecutions that continued into the 1980s—described with moving detail in Broken Altars—an underground Church flourished with bishops secretly appointed by the Vatican. This underground Church “contributed through samizdat literature to the streams of thought that flowed into the Velvet Revolution.”
Broken Altars counters the Enlightenment cliché that violence is inherent to religion while secularism would be an intrinsically peaceful force. Without denying or minimizing violence committed in the name of religion, Howard underscores the incalculable human cost of secular violence in the 20th century, with estimates of between 85 and 100 million deaths attributed solely to communism.
Howard, professor of humanities and history at Valparaiso University, classifies secularism into three categories: passive, combative, and eliminative. Passive secularism “allows individuals and religious institutions broad freedom to articulate and live the convictions of their faith traditions in a democratic society that neither endorses nor promotes its own religion.”
In contrast, combative secularism is a derivative of the “Jacobin stages of the French Revolution,” and gives rise to often violent anticlericalism, exemplified in Voltaire’s famous cry: écrasez l’infâme. It later moderated into the French notion of laïcité. Howard skillfully traces the philosophical currents and resulting brutalities in Mexico, Spain, and Turkey.
The experience of religious orders in Czechoslovakia is an example of eliminative secularism, developed by European far-left philosophers like Marx, Engels, Proudhon, and Bakunin. Completely anti-religious, this ideology seeks the eradication of religion and the total politicization of institutions.
Howard’s panoramic tour offers a broad and global view of these militant secular ideologies. Although the main target was Christianity—specifically Catholicism—Howard records the effects on other religions such as Islam, Judaism, and even Buddhism, Taoism, and shamanism in the East.
In a reflective conclusion, he warns that secularism alone does not fully explain militant violence. It is difficult to disentangle the interaction between religion, ethnicity, political dissent, nationalism, and separatism. However, “secularist ideologies often provided a modern and seemingly sophisticated ideological stance, appealing to ‘progress’ and ‘science,’” so that “the decline (and eventual extinction) of belief served as an indicator of revolutionary progress.”
And although Howard does not mention it, today in the West an increasingly combative secularism has emerged, which demands vigilance from the faithful. A report on discrimination against Christians in Europe has found “growing restrictions on their religious freedom and, in some cases, even criminal prosecution for the peaceful expression of their religious beliefs.” In the United States, a House of Representatives committee recently investigated the FBI’s categorization of Catholics as potential “domestic terrorists” in an internal memorandum that portrayed “radical traditionalist Catholics” (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities to infiltrate Catholic churches as a “threat mitigation” measure.
Eliminative secularism (communism) continues to exist prominently in North Korea, Cuba, and China. As Chinese President Xi Jinping told party members in 2022, Sinicization involves recognizing a “Marxist view of religion.” Therefore, “religion will disappear from human history” through “prolonged suffocation.”
As in 1989, we owe our moral, political, and spiritual support to the current victims of aggressive secularism, so that they too can benefit from their own Velvet Revolution.
Broken Altars is an important reminder of the unparalleled human suffering caused by secularist ideologies. Fortunately, many Slovaks have not forgotten the past. Tens of thousands attended the November 17 event “They Won’t Take November from Us” in Bratislava’s Freedom Square to protest the government’s cancellation of the national holiday by Fico. As one protester said: “We value freedom and will not allow it to be taken from us.”
About the author
John Paul Royal, husband and father, is president of the investment firm Royal Global Strategies, based in the Washington, D.C. area. He was a senior official in the U.S. Department of Defense, dedicated to national security strategy and policy.