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Updated: June 24, 2025
John Nepomuk was a pious soul, as a priest should be, modest and seemly in his ways. He just comes in, as it were, in the background, of the squabbles that Wenceslaus and his Archbishop, John of Jenstein, constantly indulged in. Wenceslaus was all for reforming the Church before reforming himself. As to John Nepomuk, I am rather puzzled about him.
The final result of the emperor's cruelty was one which he could not have foreseen. He had made a saint of Nepomuk. The church, appreciating the courageous devotion of the murdered ecclesiastic to his duty in keeping inviolate the secrets of the confessional, canonized him as a martyr, and made him the patron saint of Bohemia. Puchnik escaped with his life, and eventually with more than his life.
Between these two bridgeheads passes a good deal of the historic pageant of Old Prague. Wenceslaus IV played about here a good deal, it would appear. First of all we have that little affair with Susanna of the bathing-place. Then there was a story about one John Nepomuk which seems to have made less stir at the time of the event narrated than its echo did some centuries later.
As sequel to the martyrdom of John Hus came the wars waged by his Bohemian followers against all the might of the Church of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. It is, therefore, no wonder that his memory held popular sentiment for centuries, holds it still, though there are signs that John Nepomuk is creeping up again; and in this lie endless possibilities.
Then the Bohemians have a special religious festival, when one is astonished to see, in out-of-the-way niches and corners, a perhaps hitherto-unobserved figure of an amiable-looking priest, with a star on his forehead, now hung about and conspicuous with wreaths and festoons of flowers, and bright with the glittering of tiny lamps. This is the Holy St. John of Nepomuk.
That was the way the old Germans did their work, and they made a structure which will last a thousand years longer. Every pier is surmounted with groups of saints and martyrs, all so worn and timebeaten that there is little left of their beauty, if they ever had any. The most important of them at least to Bohemians is that of St. John Nepomuk, now considered as the patron-saint of the land.
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