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It wasn't supposed to be this hard.

In November of 1989, half a million Czechs gathered in Prague's Wenceslas Square to shake their keys against a tired regime—and the regime collapsed. One month later, on December 29, the dissident playwright Václav Havel was elected president and inaugurated in Prague Castle.

His first act was a symbolic one: He crossed the castle courtyard and entered St. Vitus's Cathedral, where 90-year-old Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek celebrated Mass to thank God for "the great hope" of this new era. Then, as the most powerful politicians in the country sat in silence, the Czech Philharmonic began to play Antonin Dvorak's setting of the ancient hymn of praise to God, the Te Deum. The church could speak with a public voice once more.

When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe, the churches of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania looked at such events with an optimistic eye. After four decades of withering repression, it seemed religious life could bloom again—and everyone expected that it would.

In those first years of freedom, evangelical Christianity seemed "Western" and intriguing because it had been so long forbidden. At the same time, every country had traditional churches—Reformed, Catholic, or Orthodox—that made Christianity seem patriotic.

This was the case especially in Poland. In 1989, opinion polls pegged confidence in the Catholic Church at 92 percent, and church attendance was also high. In 1994, the wave had crested and attendance fell for the first time. By the following year, the number of young men entering the priesthood had fallen by a third from its peak a decade earlier, and confidence in the church had dropped to 62 percent. Slowly, like with so many church buildings in Eastern Europe, cracks in the plaster became visible and began to spread.

James Krikava, a Lutheran missionary who has worked in the region for 15 years, calls the mid-'90s a time of leveling. "You saw a lot of these new people who came into the church leave the church again," he says. "Like the parable of the soils."

Why didn't they stay? Well, the church had a problem; or rather, many problems, varying by country. Most churches were rooted in national history, and they created disillusionment among those who came to see what the church could uniquely offer.

In the Czech Republic, one of the most secular nations on earth, the Catholic Church's attempt to reclaim more than 3,000 buildings and 225,000 hectares of property taken under communism made people deeply suspicious of the church's motives. In Ukraine, the influx of evangelical missionaries preaching a "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ caused great confusion among local Orthodox believers, to whom such vocabulary is foreign, and anger among Orthodox priests, who consider themselves Christians already. In Poland, the Catholic Church began to throw its weight around in politics—with some priests saying in sermons that it was a sin to vote for a non-Catholic presidential candidate.

And all of this says nothing of the great problem that hangs over every established church like a gray cloud: collaboration with the communists. The ruling parties did all they could to co-opt priests into serving as informants. Andrzej Grajewski, a Polish journalist, alleges in his book The Judas Complex that one out of ten priests in his country aided the secret police, and this perception is widespread elsewhere. Early this year, a Slovak government commission alleged that the Catholic archbishop of their country was a former secret police collaborator.

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October 2005, Vol. 49, No. 10