Abstract
Although our contemporary times are considered to be extremely critical and sensitive with regard to various religious issues, there was an even more tumultuous religious debate in a region that has not yet received much attention from the international research of the 18th century. Prague, as well as the realms of the Bohemian crown, although a rather remote place for enlightened scholars, produced (encouraged by its own history) the most controversial discussions in Central Europe. Also emboldened by the spirit of Emperor Joseph II's policy of reform and tolerance, numerous pamphlets, journals, novels, and poems began to question traditional religious structures and to link their social, polemical, or intellectual criticism to local multicultural affairs.
In the early 1780s, a group of young multilingual Prague writers led by playwright and investigative journalist Karl Franz Guolfinger von Steinsberg launched a daring project. Inspired by the very popular theatre reviews and English magazines such as "The Tatler," they published critical reviews of sermons delivered in the various Prague churches. The hitherto privileged clerical establishment was not at all amused by this and launched its own campaign against the critics, accusing them of atheism and of trying to drag the sacred ministry into secular affairs such as the theatre. For several months, the weekly magazine "The Scourge of the Preachers" enjoyed great popularity among the people and especially among young monks and seminarians in Prague. In 1782, the magazine project even appeared in Vienna ("Weekly Truths for and about the Preachers in Vienna") and sparked another discourse on the purpose of religion. Conservative and modern Catholics wrote pamphlet after pamphlet for and against sermon critiques, giving us a more vivid and controversial picture of religious views and thoughts.
This presentation serves to better acquaint us with a lesser-noticed part of the enlightened texts, authors, and (local) discourses. I discussed how intellectual sermon critiques both provoked a whole generation of clergy and inspired young priests and theology students to begin a literary and theological discourse on secularism and religion. Exemplary texts (with English translation) were used to show how religion was defined through critiques of sermons and clerical hierarchy in a multicultural historical context that has lost none of its accuracy and rhetoric to this day.