14 monks killed in 1611 beatified in Prague

Fourteen monks of the Order of Friars Minor, lynched by an angry crowd in 1611 after coming to then-Protestant Prague to preach Catholicism, were beatified in Prague on Saturday. Vicar Frederic Bachstein and his 13 companions were given the honorific of "blessed" in St Vitus Cathedral at Prague Castle by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints. In a letter, local clerics described the killing as "a memento which, even after four centuries, can help understand more deeply certain historic rifts between the Catholics and Protestants and heal them." Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree to beatify the Italian, German, Czech, Spanish, French and Dutch monks on May 10 in the first such ceremony to be held in the Prague archdicese. The 14 friars came to the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows in Prague, where nine in ten people were Protestants, in 1604. They were killed on February 15, 1611, when a crowd invaded the monastery at a time of religious clashes in the run-up to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Before the ceremony, their bones were lifted from their graves in Our Lady of the Snows church in Prague to be analysed by scientists. The beatification process was launched soon after their deaths but was only finished four centuries later, largely for political reasons including the totalitarian Communist rule in former Czechoslovakia from 1948-1989, which banned all churches. "Our brothers came to a destroyed and desecrated place" in 1604, Jeronym Jurka, minister provincial of the order, told reporters this week, adding his order had found the monastery in a similar state after Communism had been toppled 20 years ago. "Like four centuries ago, we live in an environment where we are a minority... and which is no longer hostile but rather indifferent," he said, referring to the fact that the Czech Republic ranks among Europe's least religious countries. A 2011 census showed Roman Catholics were the strongest religious group in the Czech Republic with more than a million believers. But almost five million Czechs or half of the population left the religion column empty, while 3.6 million said they were non-believers.