Yesterday, November 17, marked an anniversary: 35 years ago the Lord freed the Czech and Slovak peoples from Communist oppression through the Velvet Revolution. Let us not forget that great moment in human freedom in 1989.

Five years ago, I walked across Charles Bridge, that famous span in Prague, going to and coming from Mass. Fr. Tomas Halik, one of the principal architects of the resistance to communism, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving. I was blessed to join in that celebration and, afterwards, to meet Fr. Halik. While we may not agree theologically (Halik certainly has far more sympathy for a liberal vision of the Church), nevertheless I cannot deny that his faith contributed to the freedom of then-Czechoslovakia. Halik paid for his faith. Religious repression in Czechoslovakia was intense because political repression, especially after the 1968 Russian re-invasion, was acute. There used to be a joke that captured the relatively better freedom of speech in communist-ruled Poland versus the “feed-them-and-keep-them-quiet” approach in Czechoslovakia: Two dogs would meet on our common border. The Polish dog would go to Czechoslovakia to eat meat, the Czech dog would come to Poland to bark. (Ronald Reagan had a variation to the joke: When it was told to a Russian dog, the mutt said, “I have just two questions. What is ‘eat’ and what is ‘bark’?”)

As I walked back to my hotel that evening five years ago, I was struck — as I crossed the Charles Bridge — by one thing: its religious elements. The bridge is dotted with many sculptures, most of Bohemian saints, like St. John Nepomuk, drowned in the 14th century in the Vltava River that the Bridge crosses because he would not break the seal of Confession, something little dictators (including in “democratic” places like France, Australia, and some U.S. states) still hope to do. The bridge is dominated by a Calvary scene with the cross of Christ crucified prominent.

Those religious elements are significant because, today, the Czech Republic is probably one of the most irreligious societies in Europe. Vigorous Communist repression has been replaced by religious indifference. There are many reasons for this; the whole blame can’t be laid at Red feet. The religious wars that rent Bohemia and Moravia are one. The heresies of Jan Hus — whom some Czechs turned into a symbol of national identity — is another. (Czechia suffers the same split personality as England, as is apparent on Charles Bridge: the Protestantism of the 16th century has always wanted to pretend that it “embodies” the nation, even though the nation lived quite well in its identity for 600-900 years without it. But it’s the same revisionism that has always pretended that somehow Christ’s “true Christianity” got misplaced for 15 centuries, only to be recovered by a scrupulous German ex-monk.) Finally, a last factor for Czechia’s religious state was the Freemasonry of founding President Tomas Masaryk who, like the French Revolutionaries, also did everything to conflate national identity with his political option — in no small part to keep the Slovaks in (and second-class parts of) his Czechoslovakia.

It’s a skewed history. I do not deny the roles of Charter 77 and of Vaclav Havel in the Velvet Revolution. But nobody should forget the Catholic contribution to that freedom movement: Frs. Tomas Halik, Josef Zverina, and Miroslav Vlk in Czechia; Catholic intellectuals like Frantisek Miklosko and the 1988 “Candle Demonstration” in Slovakia; and Slovak Cardinal Jan Korec, whose “Library of Faith” — dozens of books on Catholicism — remains largely unknown in the West.

We rejoice today that in the years since World War II, the Czech Republic and Slovakia both have been free almost as long as unfree. But that’s not to deny the religious apathy that marks the Bohemian, Moravian, and even Slovak lands. Francis need not roam the “peripheries” to find fields in need of evangelization. He’d do a better job focusing on the territory within a two-hour flight radius of Fiumicino Airport.

These European lands — despite the ideology of some tribunes of “European values” — cannot deny that their heritage comes from Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. It’s the Church’s task to rediscover for them that treasure locked in the storage room. A walk across Charles Bridge reminds you it’s there.