Posted on 10/25/2005 1:01:19 PM PDT by GOPGuide
Maternity hospitals around the Czech Republic are bursting at the seams. The annual birth rate in the Czech Republic has been slowly increasing over the last five years, but recent weeks have seen an unusually high number of births.
The number of babies born in the first six months of 2005 has increased by roughly ten percent compared to the same period last year. Staff at maternity hospitals say they are exhausted and are running short of necessary supplies. Professor Zdenek Hajek from Prague's maternity hospital U Apolinare says they are almost at full capacity.
"We have to find emergency beds in other departments of our clinic if our neonatal ward is full. And if those beds were not enough we would have to ask other maternity hospitals in Prague to admit the mothers from us."
In the long term, the Czech Republic's fertility rate has been described as one of the lowest in the world and various socio-economic factors have been blamed for it. Demographers have even warned that if the trend continued, in 300 years there would be only 60,000 Czechs left. The current increase in the number of births is likely to slightly improve the grim statistics. Professor Zdenek Hajek has an explanation for the trend.
"It is a repercussion of the baby-boom in the 1970s. Czech women no longer have their first child at 20 but much later, in line with the trends in the developed countries of Western Europe. So many of the baby-boomers who were born in 1974 and 1975 are just now having their first babies."
Currently Czech women have their first child at the average age of 26.3 years. In Prague the average age is 28 years.
I don't think the Protestants are doing much better.....
"Czech Republic
International Religious Freedom Report 2003
Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the Government generally respects this right in practice.
There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom during the period covered by this report, and government policy continued to contribute to the generally free practice of religion.
The generally amicable relationship among religions in society contributed to religious freedom.
The U.S. Government discusses religious freedom issues with the Government in the context of its overall dialog and policy of promoting human rights.
Section I. Religious Demography
The country has a total area of 30,379 square miles, and its population is an estimated 10.3 million. The country has a largely homogenous population with a dominant Christian tradition. However, primarily as a result of 40 years of Communist rule between 1948 and 1989, the vast majority of the citizens do not identify themselves as members of any organized religion. In a 2001 opinion poll, 38 percent of respondents claimed to believe in God, while 52 percent identified themselves as atheists. Nearly half of those responding agreed that churches were beneficial to society. There was a revival of interest in religion after the 1989 "Velvet Revolution;" however, the number of those professing religious beliefs or participating in organized religion has fallen steadily since then in almost every region of the country.
An estimated 5 percent of the population attend Catholic services weekly. Most live in the southern Moravian dioceses of Olomouc and Brno. The number of practicing Protestants is even lower (approximately 1 percent of the population). Leaders of the local Muslim community estimate that there are 20,000 to 30,000 Muslims, although Islam has not been registered as an officially recognized religion since the Communist takeover in 1948. There is a mosque in Brno and another in Prague. The Jewish community, which numbers only a few thousand persons, is an officially registered religion due to its recognition by the State before 1989.
Missionaries of various religious groups, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and members of Jehovah's Witnesses, are present in the country. Missionaries of various religions generally proselytize without hindrance."
Former Communist Countries in Eastern Europe have few muslims even today. These are Czechs
No, before the Soviet Atheisation, the Czechs were Catholics since the Counter-Reformation.
This means they're getting beautiful bouncing babies... or rather bouncing Czechs!
This sure beats cancelled Czechs.
No, just Russia.
There was a proto-Protestant movement in Bohemia in the 15th century (the Hussites). The Thirty Years' War began with the Defenestration of Prague but ended with the Habsburgs in control and trying to reimpose Catholicism on everyone. Later the Czechs reportedly included a larger proportion of "freethinkers" than the surrounding nationalities.
I have a 1929 Baedeker's which mentions a "Czechoslovakian Catholic Church (founded 1920)," evidently a group which broke away from Rome. I don't know if it still exists.
LOL! Czech men aren't bad, either. I was married to a full-blooded Czech for 30 years.
Note that I didn't say prosperity is correlated with family size in Europe. The 1970s and beyond have proven no such link.
In the little area of southern Minnesota where I lived with Mr. Redhead for about 15 years, all the residents of my generation (and, obviously, the ones before it) are 100% Czech. They didn't marry outside the towns known to be Czech. They spoke Czech as a first language. They had large families, five to ten children being common.
Nowadays, the kids (age 40 and under) are marrying not only outside the towns, and outside the Czech "culture," but outside the Church. It's sad in a way to see them so thoroughly assimilated, but a good sign for America. I learned to speak rudimentary Czech (sang with a Czech chorus), and guarantee you that it's a good thing it uses a Latin alphabet. Talk about DIFFICULT.
I wonder if Bohemia and Moravia would be more Protestant than it appears today had it not been for the Soviets. For one, The Soviets displaced most of the German minority back to "Germany", Im not sure what their Religion would have been. Also the Catholics in general seem to retain their populations better from sliding into Atheism than the Protestants do (at least in Europe), its possible that a lot of the Protestant Czechs became Atheists. However, in General it seems the Hapsburg Monarchs well converted the Protestants back to Catholicism in Bohemia and Moravia in the Counter Reformation/Thirty Years War.
It's pretty sad if a 10% increase in births caused all this bottlenecking. Doesn't say much for their capacity.
It looks like the Catholic Church's problems predate the Communist era and stem in part from the widespread view that the Vatican had supported Austria-Hungary.
At the time Czechoslovakia was created, the higher Catholic clergy were drawn from German Austrian and Hungarian nobility, and for several years after WWI the Catholic Church in the new country lacked bishops. During this time about 20% of the Catholics in the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) left the Church, either to join the new Czechoslovak Church (which had 750,000 members by 1930), join one of the Protestant churches, or abandon any religious affiliation (750,000 in that category by 1930). In Slovakia there were no mass defections and less anti-clericalism among the population.
The same article gives this figures from 1961: in a population of 13,745,000, the Latin rite Catholics were 73.5% of the population, the Byzantine rite Catholics were 4%, Protestants 7.7%. Czechoslovak Church 5.4%, Orthodox 1%, Old Catholics 0.16%, Jews 2.4%, no religious affiliation 5.8%.
For Protestant groups, the article gives these figures from 1930:
Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, 298,000 members
German Evangelical Church (Lutheran), 132,000 members
Slovak Evangelical Church (Lutheran), 450,000 members
Reformed Church in Slovakia (Calvinist), 200,000 members
Polish Lutheran Church, 47,000 members
Unity of Brethren or Herrenhuter, 5700 members
Czech Baptists, 6800 members
Methodists, 7300 members.
Presumably the German Lutherans left in 1945. The 1961 figures may overstate the numbers of those who were actively associated with any church, as opposed to have been baptized when young, if close to 10% of the Czechs were unaffiliated as early as 1930, and between 1945 and 1961 everyone was subjected to atheistic propaganda from the state.
The Old Catholic Church broke away from the Roman Catholic Church when the doctrine of papal infallibility was proclaimed in 1870.
It seems they have a history of Agnostic/Atheism, I love this sort of stuff, Thanks.
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