Our Lady of Victory is just one of thousands of churches that have been robbed in recent years.

Thieves have broken into nearly 90 percent of the country’s churches in recent years and stolen countless valuable works of art.

By Michelle Lee

For years, Lucia Suchá visited Prague’s Church of Our Lady of Victory weekly to pray. But on one visit four years ago, she noticed that a small, blue, stained-glass window in the church’s door was missing. Instead, a small piece of cardboard covered the four-square-inch opening.

Thieves had broken into the church’s main entrance, smashed through the glass of the second door and opened it from the other side. They stole a three-and-a-half-foot tall wooden statue of St. John the Baptist. Prague’s National Heritage Institute classified the 17th-century sculpture as priceless.

On a fall day last year, the area where the statue stood is roped off with signs reading “Do not enter.” A small, wooden table stands atop a larger table covered with black linen where the statue once was.

Suchá shows a visitor the display and walks back to the door. “Look at this,” Suchá says, pointing at the traces of the window’s broken glass. “Look how easy it was for them to take such a treasure.”

Church theft was unheard of in the Czech Republic before 1989. Since the fall of communism, nearly 1 million such cases have been reported. As of January 2010, thieves had raided almost 90 percent of the country’s 5,500 churches and religious sites, making off with artifacts up to six centuries old — altar paintings, Baroque sculptures, and even holy-water stoups.

Among the countries of the former Eastern bloc, the Czech Republic ranks first in incidence of church theft, according to experts from the National Heritage Institute in Prague. “It’s not possible to say there are no thefts in churches in Poland, Slovakia or Germany,” says Zdeňka Kalová, the institute’s spokeswoman. “But generally, it can’t be called a phenomenon in those countries. For the Czech Republic, this phenomenon is the most important disaster for churches in the last 600 years.”

Experts in Slovakia and Poland agree. “Churches here do not possess many valuable things now because they were mostly already robbed by the Russians and Germans before 1989,” says Jarosław Mrówczyński, vice secretary of the Polish Episcopal Conference. “There is really nothing much to steal.”

Church theft is a relatively recent development in Czech history. “In communist times, nobody was able to take things from the church. The doors were shut,” says journalist Marek Kerles, who has researched the topic. “But now, the black market is open for such items.”

According to Monument Preservation Journal, a one-meter statue of a saint from the 18th century can draw up to CZK 22,000 — just over $1,000 — on the black market. A 1.5-square-meter, 18th-century painting of St. John of Nepomuk can be worth up to CZK 200,000.

Church theft is a small fraction of all robberies and burglaries in the Czech Republic. Of the approximately 445,000 crimes committed in 2009, 33% were thefts, according to the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice.
Though the general crime rate in the Czech Republic is typically lower than in Western Europe, the country has continuously ranked first in theft in Central and Eastern Europe. Police reported 2,045 offenses per 100,000 persons in 2007. Church theft was among the most prevalent.

Some have suggested attitudes in the predominantly-atheist Czech Republic are to blame. In Slovakia, 84 percent of the population claims some religious affiliation; in Poland, 90 percent.

Jiří Gračka, spokesman for the Czech Bishops’ Conference, says the numbers make sense. “The Czech Republic has few believers,” Gračka says. “So it is not possible to find enough people to take real care of every single church to the degree it deserves. People are less sensitive about spiritual dimensions here. They do not heed the importance of what is so special about these artifacts.”

Not everyone agrees. “Church theft is more of a social problem rather than a religious one,” say Petr Mucha, NYU professor of religious studies. Mucha personally witnessed the theft of two Baroque statues from St. Apollinaris nearly two decades ago. He says church theft is more “significant to the heritage office than the church. I know many priests who sometimes say they’d be happy to have a church just for services and meetings instead of being responsible for this heritage stuff.”

Some churches in Prague and other large Czech cities have installed security systems. Doors are closed except during religious services. National authorities have implemented a program to photographically document every artifact in the urban churches

But many provincial churches remain unprotected, and the incidence of church theft in the countryside reflects it.

Czech authorities have identified stolen church artifacts that have made their way to Austria and Germany and have filed lawsuits to get them back. One of very few items that have been recovered was a statue of the Lady of Cholina, found again 10 years after thieves stole it from a church near Olomouc in 1996.

Police arrested three individuals in the case and held them more than two years while they underwent trial. Under Czech law, church thieves face up to five years in prison or thousands of dollars in fines if caught and convicted. In the Cholina case, the court eventually dropped the charges for lack of evidence.

Public awareness of the problem, better prevention and policing can help reduce the problem, but probably won’t eliminate it.

“There will always be theft,” said Monika Vývodová, a former spokeswoman of the Czech Bishop’s Conference. “It may decline if churches remain closed to the public in order to protect their relics, yet still, it is hard to predict.”