Churches in the Czech Republic, mainly the Roman Catholic Church, face an internal debate on how to justly divide and effectively manage the property the state plans to return to them, daily Lidove noviny (LN) states.At present the churches are different from what they were in the late 1940s when their property was confiscated by the Czechoslovak communist regime, the paper says.
After more than 20 years of discussions, the Chamber of Deputies has passed a bill returning the former property to 17 churches, of which the Roman Catholic Church is the largest.
Under the bill, which is yet to be debated by the Senate, the state is to gradually cease financing the churches. The transitional period is to last 17 years.
Churches are to be returned land and real estate worth 75 billion and given 59 billion crowns in financial compensation for unreturned property during the following 30 years, LN recalls.
The largest compensation, 47 billion crowns, is to go to the Roman Catholics, it says.
"Now the numbers of churchgoers in particular areas differ from the situation decades ago when the church lost the property. Now small parishes may gain large properties, while the parishes that have grown meanwhile may gain nothing," a Moravian priest told LN.
He requested anonymity, explaining that the clergy acts unitedly in the church restitution efforts.
Applications for property return must be filed by original owners. As a result, the original huge property may go to a parish in west Bohemia that used to be big but whose area has shrunk due to coal mining since, LN writes.
On the contrary, a new big church community in Moravia would gain nothing because it lost nothing after the communist coup. Such a community may have problem paying its priest, the paper adds.
Czech Bishops' Conference spokeswoman Veronika Vyvodova told LN that the church is yet to discuss how to handle the regained property.
"We are at the very beginning. It is clear that negotiations inside dioceses must be held in order to prevent discrepancies and to secure a certain level of solidarity," Vyvodova said.
It is fully up to churches to decide on the use of the property and the financial compensation, the paper continues.
The churches can let or sell the property or use it for business purposes, the daily writes.
For some time already, this has been done by some religious orders, to which the state returned property in the past. For example, a former monastery in Brno, returned to the Bohemian-Moravian branch of the Roman Union of the Order of St Ursula, hosts a shopping centre and earns money for the Order, the paper writes.
The Augustinian Abbey elsewhere in Brno hosts private companies' offices and a part of it has been hired by Masaryk University.
The Augustinians, of whom only a few inhabit the building, use the proceeds from the rent to gradually reconstruct the complex, the paper writes.
On the other hand, the north Bohemian Trmice parish's effort to run logging business ended in its bankruptcy and a loss of property, LN says.
The Roman Catholics probably will not create a single giant fund from the returned property, an idea proposed by some but rejected as ineffective by the Catholic Primate Cardinal Dominik Duka.
Decision how to divide the returned property is also ahead of the other smaller churches, the daily adds.