The Sounds of...
Every environment has its typical background noise. Every country has its own language. Check-out the atmosphere in a number of selected sites in the Czech Republic and compare it to similar sites in countries where Radio Prague has media partners.
Religion in the Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is one of the most atheistic countries in the world. The number of believers has consistently been dropping and has halved in the course of the last two decades. Only a fifth of Czech citizens claim to belong to a faith. Only a tenth of believers go to church regularly, at least once a month. The Roman Catholic Church has the largest number of followers.
Switzerland
The majority of Swiss people are Christians, most of them Roman Catholics. A 2016 report showed that about 70% of Swiss visited a place of worship at most five times a year. The number of believers has dropped in the past few years. In October 2018, Arlesheim Cathedral community welcomed their new pastor Sylvester Ihuoma in a solemn mass. The cathedral was built in the 1680s and is known for its impressive late Baroque architecture.
Mass at the Shrine of Kateri Tekakwitha in Kahnawake ( Canada)
Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), a Mohawk woman from Kahnawake, an Indigenous community near Montreal, was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2012. On October 21, 2018, a special mass was celebrated for the 6th anniversary of her canonization at the St. Francis Xavier Mission, in Kahnawake, which also houses her shrine. The choir sings in Mohawk and some of the prayers are also in that language.
Romania
86.5% of the Romanians have declared themselves Orthodox Christians, in the latest census. What's the sound of an Orthodox mass in Romania, in a centuries-old monastery with World Heritage frescoes in the region of Bukovina, in a district church, in the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest or in a small wooden church in Maramures County?
Sunday mass in Warsaw (Poland)
About 93 percent of Poles declare themselves to be Catholics. But even in Poland is the number of church service attendees falling. By 2016, the figure had dropped to 36.7 percent. Despite the fall, the Sunday mass remains for many Poles a very important part of life.
