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State allowances to families with children include support for the children, pensions for orphans, and grants for education. Besides these benefits, the state also provides each child with textbooks and school meals and arranges for the care and training of children who are physically or mentally handicapped. Other concessions to families with children include deductions from the wage tax, rent and fare allowances, and clothing grants. However, the broad diffusion of state funds for children had resulted in a system that was not encouraging families to have additional children. Consequently, the government increased these allowances in 1968, particularly to families with many children. In addition, the monthly maternity leave allowance was raised to as high as 120 korunas a day for 26 weeks.
Apart from the national insurance program, public welfare services are very limited. National committees and a few charitable institutions—still managed by religious denominations but under state control—carry on a certain amount of charitable work and operate several homes for those few aged persons who are not covered by social security. The Czechoslovak Red Cross, theoretically independent, is controlled by the government. The Red Cross gives training in first aid and nursing, renders aid to victims of natural disasters, and carries out other tasks assigned by the state.
E. Religion (U/OU)
In contrast to other East European nations, such as Hungary and Poland, where there are large Catholic populations, the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia has maintained intense internal pressure on all religious denominations. Because of its ties with the Vatican, its position as the country's largest religious group, and because of its sudden resurgence under the Dubcek government, the Catholic Church has been repeatedly accused of playing a counterrevolutionary role. Despite the limited accord reached between the Czechoslovak Government and the Vatican in early 1973, the Church is still kept under tight control through the Secretariat for Church Affairs.
Although the Communist regime's intensive antireligious campaign may have increased the proportion of atheists and nonbelievers among the population to as many as 10%, most evidence indicates that Christian churches are continuing to grow. Complaints are regularly voiced in the press about officials who are exemplary Communists on the job but publicly participate in church activities because they wish to "avoid ostracism in a strongly religious village."
Whereas the deep religious involvement of the past among the Czechs has been widely commuted into a strong ideological consciousness, whether of the Marxist, National Democratic, or Masarykite tradition, religious attachment among the Slovaks to the Catholic Church remains strong and, as in Poland, has merged somewhat with nationalist feelings. In recognition of the strength of religious ties in Slovakia, the Institute for Scientific Atheism, based on the Soviet model, was established in 1971 at the Slovak Academy of Sciences to combat religion and propagate atheism primarily through the periodical Ateizmus. Although the periodical selects Catholicism as its chief target, sharp attacks are also made on Judaism, the other Christian churches, and on various sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses.
Christianity has been in the forefront of Czechoslovakia's cultural history and political development. First introduced into Bohemia and Moravia and a part of Slovakia by German missionaries in the ninth century in conjunction with German political expansion. Christianity had become firmly implanted by 973 when a bishopric was established in Prague. The Eastern rite and Slavonic liturgy were introduced in the present Czech Lands by the Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius, who proselytized after 863 upon the invitation of Moravian princes who sought to counteract French and German influences. The Slovaks, cut off from the Czechs by the Magyar invasion of 896-906, received the Roman Catholic faith from the first Christian ruler of Hungary about a century later.
Having become a center of learning in central Europe by the 15th century, the city of Prague provided the setting for the rise to prominence of Jan Hus, one of the more notably religious reformers preceding Luther. The burning of Hus at the stake for heresy in 1415 rallied Czech nobility and commoners against the Church hierarchy, the Holy Roman Emperor, and particularly the German element in Bohemia whose leaders had denounced Hus. Although a Hussite party led by the Czechs was successful for a time in protecting the Hussite Church against Catholic forces bent upon its destruction, the forces supporting the Counter-Reformation decisively defeated Protestant elements at the battle of White Mountain in 1620. As a result, Protestant religious activities were practically eliminated from Bohemia and Moravia for about 150 years. The Age of Enlightenment in the latter 18th century led to the passage in 1781 of an Edict of Toleration, thereby bestowing upon Protestant and Greek Orthodox believers the legal right to worship. A subsequent series of Austrian laws, enacted from 1864 to 1890, further
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110015-7
