Pope Benedict XVI starts his three-day visit to the Czech Republic on Saturday with the hope of restoring faith in the largely secular ex-communist nation where religion was stifled for 40 years.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church arrives in Prague shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful coup that toppled Communist rule in former Czechoslovakia in 1989.
Religious belief was suppressed throughout the communist regime, which labelled the Church the people's enemy, put priests under secret police surveillance and banned the Catholic press and Catholic associations.
But the fall of communism failed to bring a religious revival, and in 2001 almost six in ten Czechs said in a census they did not identify with any religion, up from 39 percent a decade earlier.
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