A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
June 11, 2000
We don't have a lot of Unitarian martyrs. There is Michael Servetus, a Unitarian Spaniard burned at the stake in the midst of the reformation of the sixteenth century for writing his book On the Errors of the Trinity. There is Francis David, Unitarian Bishop of Transylvania, who perished in prison after the Unitarian King John Sigismund died and orthodox views regained power, this also in the sixteenth century. Then, though there has been much persecution toward Unitarians, we don't hold any more martyrs in popular Unitarian history until we come to the twentieth century and the Czechoslovakian Unitarian, the Rev. Norbert Fabian Capek. Capek was imprisoned by the Nazis for listening to foreign radio broadcasts and preaching freedom. He eventually was sent to Dachau and was gassed at Hartheim Castle in 1942.
Seven of his letters from prison survived. Ten of his eleven children, I believe, survived. He is remembered by his grandchildren, and by the Unitarian congregation he founded, The Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship, which numbered in the thousands of members. He is also remembered here in the United States, because every year Unitarian Universalists celebrate the Flower Communion Service, a service Capek created and which, like the flaming chalice symbol of the Unitarian Service Committee, has taken hold in the hearts of our congregations.
Capek's life is worth knowing about. His life is an example of the liberal religious spirit come to flower amidst orthodoxy and intolerance. He brought a message of hope and freedom and joy to a people disillusioned by established faiths. His was a dream of a new religion founded not on dogmas, but on the divine spark which is in each person's own soul.
Capek was born in 1870 in South Bohemia, in a little village which looks almost the same even today. He was apprenticed to his uncle in Vienna and worked as a tailor until he was eighteen, when his relatives discovered he was no longer practicing the Catholic faith and had been secretly baptized. Outraged, they kicked him out, but instead of going home, Capek became a missionary for the Baptists. His unresolved question of what he called his evangelical period, was this:
How can people who believe that salvation is assured to all those who accept that Jesus died for their sins also claim that those who do not so believe are damned to eternal hell, and yet simultaneously be indifferent toward the suffering of thousands of people without trying to bring them the good news of the love and mercy they claim could redeem such suffering?
Capek traveled to Bratislava in Upper Hungary. There he met much persecution as a Baptist missionary in a thoroughly Roman Catholic province. According to Richard Henry, whose newly published book, Norbert Fabian Capek: A Spiritual Journey, I am drawing from, wrote that Hapsburg authorities kept tabs on such activities and "a weekly list of times and places of meetings was required to be provided to the local police, who would drop in without notice." (p. 32) This type of persecution would follow him periodically throughout his ministry as both a Baptist and, later, a Unitarian.
In these years, Capek wrote and published a history he called Fragments of the History of Persecuted Christians. Richard Henry believes it was largely this study which led Capek to start leaning toward Unitarian thinking. Capek learned about the Czech heresy of the first reformation, those groups called apostolic Christians who, as Capek wrote, "considered the practice of the principles taught by Jesus, not the doctrinal views of him promoted by the Roman Catholic--or later the Evangelical--Church, to be the heart of religion...[, and who] were anathematized...as 'heretics' (i.e. 'free-thinkers')." (p.56)
Free-thinkers--that's what Capek became, though he worked for many years as a Baptist minister, founding churches, recruiting members, even becoming the Chair of the Baptist Churches of Moravia and Slovakia. In one of the many newsletters and journals he edited, he wrote of his unique group of Baptists, "Who are we? We are neither a club nor a church in the common meaning of that word. We are a spiritual family, brothers and sisters, and we have One Father, One God and only one leader, our oldest and most perfect brother, Jesus Christ." (p. 53) He was accused, naturally, by his superior in Prague of openly denying the doctrine of the Trinity. At this turn of the century in Czech history, a movement was evolving which was called "modernism." Scholars were exploring the new techniques in Biblical Criticism and revealing such things as the multiple authorship of Genesis and other books of the Bible and well as drawing a distinction between the "Christ of faith and the Jesus of history." (p. 64) This led to such turmoil among the Catholics that the Pope issued an encyclical in 1907 condemning modernism as leading to "the annihilation of all religion." As a result, priests considered leaving their ministries and Capek was very aware that his country was ready for something new: a faith without dogma, a free Christianity. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he wanted to be ready. He contacted Professor Tomas Masaryk whose work on the religious foundations of Czech culture and identity had interested him, and asked to meet, hoping to get some idea of what this new religious movement his country was so ripe for might be. It is a legend among Unitarian Universalists, so writes Richard Henry, that upon meeting Masaryk in 1910 that Masaryk told Capek, "Why, Capek, you're not really a Baptist, you're a Unitarian." (p. 71)
Masaryk agreed with Capek that what humanity needed was a new kind of religion, but he also cautioned that the people were not yet ready for it. He urged Capek to attend the International Congress of Religious Liberals, which we now know as the International Association for Religious Freedom of which we Unitarian Universalists are members, which was to meet in Berlin. There, Capek was among three thousand attendees from all over the world: Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Taoists, Tibetan followers of the Dalai Lama, Jews, and representatives of every shade of Christian belief. Capek copied down these words from a speech by a Professor Vaswani of India: "We dream of the day when the nations of the West, discerning the nature of God's New Dispensation of Grace, shall be ready to accept this message--the message of One Religion in all religions, the One Logos in all prophets, the One Word in all churches, the One Soul in all scriptures, the One Father immanent and operant in Universal Humanity."
Masaryk also arranged for Capek to meet the newly appointed Secretary of the American Unitarian Association's Department of Foreign Relations, the Rev. Charles W. Wendte. Nothing apparently came of this meeting, and records indicate that Capek had requested funds to start a new religious movement in Moravia, but that no action was recorded. Masaryk later said that "The Unitarian church is like a mother unwilling to nurse her own children." Capek became disillusioned about missionary work and went into the literary field, though he continued to serve Baptist congregations. He wrote in one journal about the struggle and task of Czechs:
We do not favor dogmas, they are but lifeless formulas. We love reality, whatever moves the mind, the heart and the muscles. Let us do away with all numbness, all dying ideals. We seek new ideas and new kinds of mental effort. Freedom: that's something we get enthusiastic about! Let's free ourselves from superstition and prejudice and then truth in its full beauty will appear.... Let us inscribe on our banner: "Freedom of Conscience" and let us win battles with it everywhere. (p. 75)
In 1911, Capek was forced to leave his congregation. His writings on the Principles of the Unity of Brethren, which were more frequently being cut by the censors, were under suspicion of the Austrian authorities, smacking of treason, and Catholics smelled heresy. In 1913, war broke out. In 1914, a friendly police commissioner told Capek that he was on the Austrian blacklist and advised him to leave the country. Capek took his family and fled to the United States where he served a Baptist congregation in New York and later in Newark, New Jersey.
His years in the United States involved two heresy trials, wherein certain Slovak Baptist ministers tried to accuse Capek of not being a Baptist. He was exonerated in both, but it hurt him deeply. He worked with Czechs in New Jersey to advocate for an independent Czechoslovakia, even as his old friend Tomas Masaryk, the man who had introduced him to the Unitarians, worked in exile in Switzerland for the same thing. Capek was appointed by the office of Military Intelligence to serve in gathering information from the various racial groups in Newark to help with the problem of foreign-speaking soldiers in the army. And Capek became chair of the Newark Red Cross chapter.
At the end of the war, as his friend Masaryk was appointed President of the new Czech republic, Capek had a crisis of faith. In 1919 he broke with his Baptist Denomination and resigned, even as nearly a million Czechs left the Roman Catholic faith in the aftermath of the war with the dissolution of the age-old alliance between church and state. Capek and his third wife decided to go home. It was time for a new religion.
In the meanwhile, as they waited to sell their home, Capek's children were exploring Sunday schools with their friends. Capek would ask them each Sunday what they learned, and disappointed each time, would encourage them to seek some more. One day, they came home and what they had to say impressed him so much that he and his wife went to church again, to the Unitarian Church of Essex County, New Jersey. They joined in 1921. It was there that Capek, inspired by the minister and members of the congregation, tried again to elicit the help of the Unitarian Association to found a congregation in his homeland. This time, he was successful. He was fifty-one years old with a proven ability to found churches.
With a promised stipend of $200 a month for ten months from the AUA, Capek sailed home to Prague and began the task of starting something new. It wouldn't be called "Unitarian" at first; the word "Unitari" in Czechoslovakia meant the united Roman and Greek Catholic church under the supremacy of the pope. Instead, they called the new congregation "The Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship." In April, 1922, they had their inaugural service, and a year later, to celebrate the first anniversary of the new fellowship, Capek wrote the Flower Communion Service as "a new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and brotherhood." Each member was to bring a flower to symbolize the individual character of each member. The flowers in the vase were a symbol of belonging together as one spiritual community. Then, Capek wrote, "When they go home, each is to take one flower just as it comes without making any distinction where it came from and whom it represents, to confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who is a human and wants to be good." (p. 144)
Capek's message was well received. His congregation drew thousands, and though over the years they had financial difficulties due to depression and state laws regarding their building and its use, they eventually survived those trials. But there was one trial Capek wasn't to survive and that was the holocaust of German invasion and occupation of World War II. Though invited to come to the United States as a minister-at-large for the AUA, Capek declined, choosing instead to minister to his people in those terrible times. He learned to preach in subtleties which the two Gestapo officers who attended every service couldn't follow. He helped start the work of the Sharps who founded the Unitarian Service Committee through their relief efforts for the Czechoslovakian refugees. He kept his message of optimism alive in the darkest times and his congregation flourished.
On his seventieth birthday, his congregation gave him a radio. It was against the law to listen to foreign broadcasts, but Capek did anyway. Every morning in secret, he would tune into the BBC, and what he learned, he would share with his congregation in subtle ways during their meetings. His youngest daughter innocently let slip this information to her doctor and friend. On March 28, 1941, the Gestapo raided his apartment as he was listening to the BBC. He and his daughter were arrested and taken to Dresden prison. In spite of two trials, both of which ended in minimal sentences, Capek was caught up in Hitler's retaliation against the Czechs after they assassinated their brutal overseer, Heydrich. Between 40- and 50,000 deaths resulted from that backlash. Capek's trial papers were ignored and he was sent to Dachau, spent fourteen weeks there, wrote seven letters and numerous hymns, and was sent to Hartheim Castle to be gassed on October 12, 1942. He wrote this hymn while in Dresden prison:
In the depths of my soul
There where lies the source of my strength,
Where the divine and the human meet,
There, quiet your mind, quiet, quiet.Outside let lightning reign,
Horrible darkness frighten the world.
But from the depths of your own soul
From that silence will rise again
God's flower.Return to yourself,
Rest in yourself,
Live in the depths of your soul
Where the divine and the human meet.
Tune your heart to the eternal
And in the depths of your own soul
Your panting quiets down.
Where the divine and the human meet,
There is your refuge. (pp. 301-2)
In memory of Nobert Capek and of every expression where the divine and human meet, we celebrate this morning's Flower Communion Service, grateful for Capek's gift of community and love.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson